A Commonplace Blog

After listening to an eight-minute interview on NPR with a novelist who has a new book out (“She gamely answered the interviewer’s questions...

The most striking thing about Portnoy’s Complaint is its voice. Time has not softened its jolt: What is he doing to himself, this fool! thi...

Plenty of video gamers and moviegoers have come up with lists of the ten most villainous villains (see here , for example, or here or here ...

Philip K. Dick’s 1962 novel The Man in the High Castle is science fiction that “deals with alternate present,” as a character in the book p...

Another bad report from my oncologist, another “last resort” drug kicked. Whether the tumor has spread, or has simply increased its metaboli...

My seminar on evil in the American novel (from Philip K. Dick to Philip Roth) is also an “advanced writing course.” I am required to assign ...

One by one, the writers who came of literary age between the Second World War and the Sexual Revolution—the Glossy Age of American fiction, ...

Francesca Segal, The Innocents (New York: Hyperion Voice, 2012). 288 pages. No good word exists for what Francesca Segal accomplishes in ...

Am I the only one who commits far more errors when writing on the computer—stupid misspellings, extra words, left-out words, wrong words, in...

“It’s All Happening at the Zoo,” my review of Howard Jacobson’s Zoo Time , is this morning’s feature at Jewish Ideas Daily . I can’t claim ...

I make my resolutions in the fall, after reminding God that He will decide, in the words of the Yom Kippur liturgy, “who is to live and who...

For the third year in a row, I have chronicled the year in Jewish books for Jewish Ideas Daily . The great biblical scholar Jon D. Levens...

The commonplace is spelled out by William H. Gass: “Great character is the most obvious single mark of great literature,” he says. He means ...

Anne Bernays, The Man on the Third Floor (Sag Harbor, N.Y.: Permanent Press, 2012). 184 pages. Anne Bernays cannot decide whether her ten...

A friend of this blog throws one of my throwaway remarks back in my face: “Everyone who reads novels as if they were his morning prayers,” I...