A Commonplace Blog

Allison Lynn, The Exiles (Boston: New Harvest/Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2013). 336 pages. Perhaps no famous quotation from literature is...

I’ve compiled so many list of best books—best Jewish books, best New York books, best baseball books, best Reagan books, best literary histo...

Donald Hamilton, Death of a Citizen (London: Titan Books, 2013). 227 pages. Charles McCarry, The Shanghai Factor (New York: Mysterious P...

Scott G. F. Bailey, The Astrologer (Moses Lake, Wash.: Rhemalda, 2013). 253 pages. Tycho Brahe , the Danish astronomer who was among the ...

With the sound of time’s wingèd chariot at my back, I have cautiously begun a memoir. I am no novelist. My peculiar talent, such as it is, i...

John Williams’s Stoner has been getting a lot of buzz lately, with stories in the Independent (a “slow-burn sensation,” at least “Until no...

Reading in bed with my wife this weekend, I was struck by the convention of the serial protagonist, a convention which is so common among my...

Early in 1990, I wrote a review of Michael Oakeshott ’s essays on education, edited by Timothy Fuller and published by Yale University Press...

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...