A Commonplace Blog

On Thanksgiving morning, my 82-year-old father and I sat together to watch NFL football. Men love sports because we can lose ourselves in th...

On what he has meant to his readers, especially his Jewish readers: the daily feature this morning at Jewish Ideas Daily .

Louise Erdrich has won the National Book Award in fiction for The Round House , her thirteenth novel. (My Commentary review of it is here ...

The dream of “pure poetry” has beguiled those who would remove literature from the blaring disorderly world, and those who would emasculate ...

Amazon has released its choices for best books of the year (h/t: Jenny Che at Page Views ). Louise Erdrich’s The Round House , which I revi...

W. D. Howells, too, disliked them. “[I]t is asking a good deal of people in these busy, practical times,” he said, “to go back with you for ...

On Thursday afternoon I was fired from my position as literary blogger and book critic for Commentary magazine. The facts are these. At abo...

My post at Commentary ’s Contentions blog on Wednesday, calling upon Republicans to “drop their opposition to same-sex marriage,” occasione...

Jacques Barzun has a died at the age of 104. Over at Literary Commentary , I have written a short obituary of a man I greatly admired. A...

Originally published by Jewish Ideas Daily in May 2010. Revised and expanded. Ludwig Lewisohn is nearly forgotten today, but in his day h...

Originally published by Jewish Ideas Daily in May 2010. Revised and expanded. Books for women have been a distinct and popular variety of...

Originally published by Jewish Ideas Daily in May 2010. Revised and expanded. Popular Jewish fiction in America began to absorb other Jew...

Originally published by Jewish Ideas Daily in May 2010. Revised and expanded. When was American Jewish fiction born? The credit usually g...

Originally published by Jewish Ideas Daily in May 2010. Revised and expanded. In American literature, Leslie Fiedler once quipped, nothin...

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...