A Commonplace Blog

It’s the question that everyone has an answer to. What is the most overrated book of all time? The three titles most often cited are Ulysses...

A couple of days ago Jonah Lehrer had a provocative squib in the Frontal Cortex, one of Wired ’s science blogs. Lehrer reported the outcome...

Several people have written—friends, readers, the morbidly curious—to ask when I am coming back, if A Commonplace Blog will resume normal o...

This evening marks the beginning of the two-day Jewish holiday of Shavuot, the “forgotten festival,” as Michael Carasik describes it at Jew...

Over at Contentions , I reflect upon Memorial Day by contrasting Allen Tate’s “ Ode to the Confederate Dead ” to Robert Lowell’s thirty-yea...

Cross-posted from Contentions . “[T]he end of the physical book may be coming hard upon us faster than anyone ever anticipated,” John Podhor...

Even my conservative friends are enamored of the argument that books are going the way of the vinyl LP. (True, the vinyl LP was introduced i...

Cross-posted from Contentions . The American novelist Philip Roth has won the Man Booker International Prize, a British award handed out ev...

Over at Contentions John Podhoretz warns that “the end of the physical book may be coming hard upon us faster than anyone ever anticipated...

Philip Roth has won the Man Booker International Prize, and a judge on the prize jury has quit in a huff. “Emperor’s clothes,” says Carmen...

Note: Blogger went down some time on Thursday, May 12th, taking down everything posted since the previous evening along with it. To date the...

The British novelist Linda Grant is in the States today to tout her new novel We Had It So Good , but with her royal-wedding tweets still ch...

Over at Contentions , I use a little literary criticism to compare President Obama’s speech last night reporting the death of Osama bin La...

They who behold you stare; They peer at you closely: “Is this the man Who shook the earth, Who made realms tremble, Who made the world like ...

Perfection, of a kind, was what he was after, And the poetry he invented was easy to understand; He knew human folly like the back of his ha...

Today is Yom Hashoah, or Holocaust Remembrance Day. Jean Améry once said that he would like to “introduce certain Auschwitz books into the ...

For a long time now, on this blog and elsewhere, I have been hawking the idea that literature is not a special class of human efforts (“Imag...