A Commonplace Blog

Sunday was the fifth anniversary of this Commonplace Blog . My very first post, appropriately enough given my sworn allegiance to him, was a...

Yesterday the Powerline blog—a politically conservative blog out of the Twin Cities—linked to my essay on Mario Puzo’s novel The Godfather...

The reshaping of American literary culture from the early 1950’s to the early 1970’s might be captured in one historical image. James Jones’...

Alice Munro became the first writer whose reputation derives almost exclusively from short stories—and the first Canadian—to win the Nobel P...

“He most honors my style,” Whitman wrote in Song of Myself , “who learns under it to destroy the teacher.” The best thing about teaching is ...

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...