Counter-Tradition of the American Imagination
Geographies of Flight: Phillis Wheatley to Octavia Butler by William Merrill Decker. Northwestern University Press, 2020. Paper, 294 pages, $43. Reviewed by J. L. Wall Aboard the Arbella—or maybe in Southampton before the colonists departed for the New World—John...
Schlumping toward Altenburg
Schlump by Hans Herbert Grimm. NYRB Classics, 2016. Paperback, 288 pages, $16.95. Reviewed by Michael Shindler There are the great German books of the First World War that everyone knows: Erich Maria Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front, Ernst Jünger’s Storm of...
After Such Knowledge
Sergeant Salinger: A Novel by Jerome Charyn. Bellevue Literary Press, 2021. Hardcover, 288 pages, $28.50. Reviewed by Carl E. Rollyson Biographical novels trouble certain readers. What is true? What is made up? Why isn’t biography enough? Why not just read Salinger,...
Everything Stays the Same
Dostoevsky in Love: An Intimate Life by Alex Christofi. Bloomsbury Continuum, 2021. Hardcover, 236 pages. $35. Reviewed by Albert Wald In an article on André Gide’s Memories of the Assize Court in the May 2020 issue of The New Criterion, former prison doctor Anthony...
I have a review at the University Bookman (@KirkCenter) today of @AmitMajmudar's The Great Game: Essays on Poetics (@acre_books). Check it out 👇.
"No one...takes poetic hairpin turns at speed like Majmudar does. His poems are full of sonic swerves and surprises..."