A Memorial Wall of Words

Oblivion by Sergei Lebedev, translated by Antonina W. Bouis. New Vessel Press, 2016 Paper, 290 pages. $16. “This text is a memorial,” explains the first person narrator in Oblivion, the new and at times stunning novel by the young Russian writer Sergei Lebedev, “a...

At Long Last

The Poems of T. S. Eliot, edited by Christopher Ricks and Jim McCue. Johns Hopkins University Press, 2015. Hardcover, 2 volumes, 1344 + 688 pages, $45/$40. When T. S. Eliot died in 1965, his writings were left in the care of his young widow, Valerie Eliot. She proved...

Conservatism in Disarray

We are pleased to present a review of Brad Birzer’s important book, Russell Kirk: American Conservative, and we will have more to say on the book in the future. Conservatism is in disarray. I write this in the aftermath of the Iowa caucus which followed weeks of...

The Multifaceted Kirk

Russell Kirk: American Conservative by Bradley J. Birzer. University Press of Kentucky, 2015. Hardcover, 608 pp., $35.On August 14, 1945, Japan surrendered to Allied forces, officially ending World War II. While celebrations swept the United States, one strange young...

Too Much Reality?

Amends: A Novel by Eve Tushnet. CreateSpace, 2015. Paper, 330 pages, $14.Eve Tushnet’s self-published debut novel Amends is at full gallop out of the gate: J. Malachi MacCool was born in Berkeley, California, in the last decade of the Cold War, to parents who deserved...

A Circle of Instigators

The Fellowship: The Literary Lives of the Inklings by Philip and Carol Zaleski. Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2015. 644 pp., $35.00 cloth.Evelyn Waugh once complained that during the twentieth century, certain literary coteries had “ganged up and captured” an age’s...