The Heritage of Ta-Nehisi Coates
Between the World and Me by Ta-Nehisi Coates. Spiegel & Grau, 2015. Hardcover, 176 pages, $24.Reviewed by Helen AndrewsWhen he set out to interview James Baldwin for his oral history of the civil rights movement, Who Speaks for the Negro? (1965), Robert Penn...An Old Tale, Retold
Grendel by John Gardner. Vintage, 1971, 1989. Paperback, 192 pages, $14. Reviewed by Pedro Blas González Importance is derived from the immanence of infinitude in the finite. Expression, however—listen closely now—expression is founded on the finite occasion. John...A Glimpse of Something Lost
America Moved: Booth Tarkington’s Memoirs of Time and Place, 1869–1928 by Booth Tarkington, edited by Jeremy Beer. Front Porch Republic Books, 2015. Paperback, 270 pages, $32. Just prior to this book’s arrival, I had acceded to a friend’s impassioned, insistent...A Certain Cold Grandeur
On His Own Terms: A Life of Nelson Rockefeller by Richard Norton Smith. Random House, 2014. Hardcover, 842 pages, $38.Looking back during his final years, Nelson Rockefeller declared his life a failure in that he had not become president of the United States. He had...Russell Kirk as a Midwestern Writer
Video of a seminar on “Russell Kirk as a Midwestern Writer” at the annual meeting of the Society for the Study of Midwestern Literature at Michigan State University, June 2, 2015.A panel on “Russell Kirk as a Midwestern Writer” took place at...Russell Kirk as a Midwestern Writer
A panel on “Russell Kirk as a Midwestern Writer” took place at the annual meeting of the Society for the Study of Midwestern Literature on June 2, 2015 at Michigan State University. Jon Lauck was the moderator and presentations were made by Gleaves...Terry Castle: The Anti-Paglia
Helen Andrews Camille Paglia burst onto the scene with Sexual Personae like Marlene Dietrich appearing at the top of the staircase. Who was this woman with the gloriously severe haircut who could put a 700-page book of literary criticism onto the bestseller lists? The...The Puritan Society: Toward Pluralism
The Last American Puritan: The Life of Increase Mather by Michael G. Hall. Wesleyan University Press, 1988. xv + 438 pp. $35.Michael G. Hall’s biography of Increase Mather goes far toward rehabilitating the Mather family of colonial Massachusetts. The Mathers have...The Geneaology of Decadence?
Soumission by Michel Houellebecq. Paris: Flammarion, 2015. Hardcover, 300 pages, $50.When Joris-Karl Huysmans published À rebours in 1884, a novel that would come to be known as “la bible de la décadence,” the writer and literary critic Barbey d’Aurevilly weighed in...
There are metaphorical hills on which I would be willing to die. The Oxford comma is one of them.
So easy to forget that the best way to educate yourself is to read great works of literature and philosophy, then talk about them. Bring back the salon!