A Commonplace Blog

Yesterday I started my second round of cancer radiation—a “palliative” treatment, in this case, to relieve the pain in my right hip. Zell Mi...

The “religious-seeking novel,” as Ruth Franklin calls it, has been making a splash recently. Roland Merullo’s The Talk-Funny Girl , William...

A quick in-and-out visit to Houston yesterday to see my oncologist. Dr. Garrett R. Lynch has been treating me for nearly five years now, eve...

In Stone Arabia , Dana Spiotta’s narrator is worried about her older brother. As they both sink more deeply into their “morbid middle years,...

Yesterday Terry Teachout conducted a “ purely personal inventory ” of the ten American novels he “most wished” he had written, and this morn...

Another Yom Kippur, another difficult fast . It never seems to get any easier. Toward the end of Avinu Malkenu yesterday, during the Neilah ...

Last night, during the Republican presidential debate in Orlando, Florida, Governor Rick Perry defended his state’s decision to admit the ch...

This morning I heard from a longtime friend who, like me, has recently moved from Houston to another city. “Big community here and easy to g...

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...