Beha’s Capacity for God: Sophie Wilder Revisited
What Happened to Sophie Wilder: A Novel by Christopher R. Beha. Tin House Books, 2012. Paperback, 253 pages, $16. Reviewed by Joshua Hren In his new novel The Index of Self-Destructive Acts, Harper’s editor Christopher Beha makes grace a noisome concern, not least...
Can Whimsy Save the Small-Town Novel?
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
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
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...
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!