A Commonplace Blog

In replying to my essay on the Los Angeles Review of Books policy to review first books positively or not at all, editor-in-chief Tom Lut...

The Los Angeles Review of Books has a policy, which the editor Evan Kindley divulged in a Twitter back-and-forth on Friday, of reviewing f...

After nearly three years in Ohio, I was able to take my academic books out of storage yesterday and move them into my new fourth-floor green...

With The Great Gatsby back in the news because of Baz Luhrmann’s new film version , so too is the special kind of narrator Fitzgerald enlis...

Vladimir Nabokov was wont to fall into a reverie over nail clippings, bitten-off cuticles, tufts of lint plucked off a sleeve, bits of food ...

Claire Messud’s impatience with an interviewer from Publishers Weekly who asked it she’d want to be friends with her own main character ca...

An autobiographical story about prayer on the National Day of Prayer . Those who know both of us, at least through our writing, know that th...

Last year about this time, when I was still being paid regularly by a national magazine for doing such work, I drew up a summer reading list...

“Why read old books?” That was the title of Victor Davis Hanson’s essay at his Works and Days blog yesterday. Turns out Hanson doesn’t mea...

When I was an undergraduate at UC Santa Cruz, I was the fine arts editor of City on a Hill Press , the student newspaper. As if eager to con...

So ends another semester, and the losing effort to teach books outside a literary vacuum. “I don't need a library to do what I do,” Stan...

Next week I return to Texas A&M University, where I started my academic career and spent twenty indifferent years of it, to deliver a le...

Masters of Atlantis was the fourth novel by Charles Portis, who is customarily identified as the author of True Grit . Familiar to American...