Can Whimsy Save the Small-Town Novel?

Can Whimsy Save the Small-Town Novel?

by | Oct 11, 2020

Virgil Wander by Leif Enger. Grove Press, 2018. Paperback, 320 pages, $17. Reviewed by Matt Miller Small towns in American fiction have a history as varied as the landscapes they inhabit. Often stifling or enervating, as in the work of Nathaniel Hawthorne, Sherwood...
Lines of Descent

Lines of Descent

by | Sep 6, 2020

Old House of Fear: A Novel by Russell Kirk, introduction by James Panero. Criterion Books, [1961] 2019. Paperback, 264 pages, $19. Reviewed by Jeremy Seaton Russell Kirk’s Old House of Fear recounts Hugh Logan’s trip from Michigan to Carnglass, a scarcely known island...
Ishmael’s Real Name Was Jonah

Ishmael’s Real Name Was Jonah

by | Aug 23, 2020

The Interpretive Key that Allows Us to See Melville’s Work as a Unified Whole By Will Hoyt Like any other card-carrying American I have long believed that Melville wrote only one great work. Moby-Dick is—unquestionably if improbably—the one American novel against...
A Virus and a Fall of Rome

A Virus and a Fall of Rome

by | Aug 9, 2020

Scarpia by Piers Paul Read. Bloomsbury, 2016. Hardcover, 364 pages, $27. Reviewed by Trevor C. Merrill You could enjoy this novel about a young Sicilian rising through the ranks of Roman society in the 1790s without knowing anything about Puccini’s Tosca. It’s a...