A Modern Dostoevsky–Almost
The Morning Star: A Novel By Karl Ove Knausgaard. Translated by Martin Aitken. Penguin Books, 2021. Paperback, 688 pages, $19. Reviewed by Jeffrey Wald. In “Feodor’s Guide,” David Foster Wallace’s 1996 review of Joseph Frank’s four-volume biography of Dostoevsky,...
Balzac: The Man for My Thirties?
By Jeffrey Wald I have come to realize that a writer has indelibly marked each decade of my life. In my first decade of life, that author was Franklin Dixon. All right, I understand that “Franklin W. Dixon,” the author of Hardy Boys, was a pen name used by multiple...
Theroux and the Pleasure of Reading
Alexander Theroux: A Fan’s Notes By Steven Moore. Zerogram Press, 2020. Paperback, 264 pages, $19.95. Reviewed by Jeffrey Wald Writing about a writer writing about another writer … Does this create the potential for an infinite regress? Perhaps. With such a risk in...
Death and the Catholic Imagination
Thirst: A Novel by A. G. Mojtabai. Slant, 2021. Hardcover, 141 pages, $25. Reviewed by Jeffrey Wald The reality of death, and what happens thereafter, has long captured the human imagination. One thinks of the Egyptian Book of the Dead, or Homer’s descriptions of...
"A more than occasional glutton for punishment, Field dips into and out of conservative conferences, the better to enable herself to assert herself into this story. No doubt those on the left will be mostly pleased by what they read in these pages, while those on the right will
[F]or all their handwringing about the red-state barbarians at the gates, Chemerinsky and Gillman cannot or will not see what their own argument and their own evidence of student, faculty, and administrator behavior show to even a mildly attentive reader: The greatest enemies of