What Literature Makes Happen

What Literature Makes Happen

E. J. Hutchinson What is literature for? Any number of things, one supposes—pleasure, say, or escape. But does it do anything else? In a frequently used and even more frequently misunderstood phrase, Auden says that “poetry makes nothing happen.”[1] But what if...
Innovation Through Constraint

Innovation Through Constraint

How to Think Like Shakespeare by Scott Newstok. Princeton University Press, 2020. Hardback, xv + 185 pages, $19.95. Reviewed by Matthew Stewart Scott Newstok has written a delightful book about modern education in the guise of a Shakespearean analysis. He succeeds in...
Properly Dangerous Ideas

Properly Dangerous Ideas

Raised in Captivity: Fictional Nonfiction by Chuck Klosterman. Penguin Press, 2019. Hardcover, 320 pages, $26.00 Chris Butynskyi Ideas are dangerous. Most people would agree that a certain level of danger and harm can take root in ideas. Culture, too, is dangerous....
Bradbury in the Afternoon

Bradbury in the Afternoon

Bradbury Beyond Apollo by Jonathan R. Eller. University of Illinois Press, 2020. Hardcover, 336 pages. $35. Reviewed by James E. Person Jr. Anyone who considers the life and career of Ray Bradbury (1920–2012) is eventually struck by a remarkable fact: although the...
A Syrian Islamist Reads Arabic Literature for the First Time

A Syrian Islamist Reads Arabic Literature for the First Time

By Sam Sweeney On January 31, 2020 the French government arrested a Syrian known as Islam Alloush, real name Majdi Nema, which caused a bit of a stir among those who had paid close attention to Syria over the last decade. Alloush was previously the spokesman for Jaysh...