A Commonplace Blog

Anyone who has ever read The Adventures of Tom Sawyer , which used to be pretty much every boy in America, remembers the scene in which Tom,...

Baz Luhrmann substitutes a high-school English paper for F. Scott Fitzgerald’s novel in scripting his film version of The Great Gatsby , re...

The discussion of The Great Gatsby begins today in my course on it—an entire course devoted to a 180-page book—and in rereading it, I was s...

My review of Katherine A. Powers’s edition of her father’s letters, Suitable Accommodations , appeared yesterday—publication day for the bo...

A “warped ex-faculty member of Texas A&M that enables Johnny Manziel”— according to the Washington Post sportswriter Mike Wise, that’s...

Just recently, in homage to the late James Gandolfini , I watched all six seasons of HBO’s crime drama The Sopranos for the first time. Ori...

Over at Gawker this morning J. K. Trotter dishes the dirt on Philip Roth’s The Human Stain . Or, rather, its dust jacket. Trotter reports ...

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...