Risking Literature in the Obama Era
Bearings and Distances by Glenn Arbery. Wiseblood Books, 2015. Paperback, 335 pages, $13.To those who desire to think the same way others think, who long to crush dissent and to be on the right side of history, real literature is an oddity, an affront, the relic of an...Fighting Cousins
Yanks and Limeys: Alliance Warfare in the Second World War. by Niall Barr. London: Jonathan Cape, 2015. Hardcover, 548 pages, $30. Reviewed by John P. Rossi It is generally agreed that World War II was a victory of Russian numbers and American industrial output. True...The Uncozy Christie
A reflection on the underestimated Dame Agatha Christie at 125. Eve Tushnet Agatha Christie’s name is practically synonymous with comfort reading. Her publishers used to promise readers “a Christie for Christmas,” and her works are the inspiration for the mystery...The Deauthorised Life of Ted Hughes
Ted Hughes: The Unauthorised Life by Jonathan Bate. Harper, 2015. Hardcover, 672 pages, $40.Every biography has a backstory involving how a biographer turns to a certain subject, what other biographies have been written, what sources are new or used differently....Bradbury the Realist
Ray Bradbury by David Seed. Illinois University Press (Modern Masters of Science Fiction), 2015. Paperback, 207 pages, $24.Anything Martian is currently newsworthy—made so by NASA’s announcement that liquid water exists on the surface of the Red Planet, by various...Are We a Nation of Heretics?
Bad Religion: How We Became a Nation of Heretics by Ross Douthat. The Free Press, 2012 (2013). Paperback, 352 pages, $17. A few years ago, Ross Douthat, who has assumed the mantle of the conservative columnist at The New York Times, published Bad Religion: How We...Permanence, Tradition, and Memory
Essays on Modernity: And the Permanent Things from Tradition by James A. Patrick, Introduced by Thomas Howard, Edited by B. R. Mullikin. Fort Worth: Tower Press Books, 2015. Hardcover, paperback, Kindle, 190 pages. If you’ve ever had the pleasure of attending one of...Writings after Empire
A conversation with Michael Hofmann about Joseph Roth.Throughout the 1920s and 1930s, the Austrian novelist Joseph Roth travelled extensively throughout Europe, leading a nomadic life in the various hotels he called home across the continent. Roth wrote in an...The Flowering of Legal Cynicism
More than one commentator has noted that the majority decision in Obergefell v. Hodges, requiring states to issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples, actually was decades in the making. No-fault divorce and our culture of sexual promiscuity, separating sex and even...
I couldn't help but to think of some figures on X when I read this:
"Moreover, it is possible that Somer was, as Shakespeare’s Hamlet himself, both mad and acting mad—both a (semi-) natural fool as well as someone who constructed the exterior personality of a fool.
Jesse Russell…