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Harper's Magazine (Free subscription) | 09/05/2008
At the Republican convention the city of New Orleans and the larger gulf coast received what was doubtless a salubrious and meaningful supply of fortifying lip service. One might suppose that with so much proffered, little more is needed. But the editors of a new magazine called Triple Canopy, surely to their discredit, seem to think otherwise. The new, third issue of their online-only endeavor is...
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Harper's Magazine (Free subscription) | 09/03/2008
“But can a novelist, or any writer for that matter, really notice too much or dwell too much on what he notices'” The question was posed a few weeks back by Sam Tanenhaus, on the New York Times Book Review’s Papercuts blog. The question served as a pivot in Tanenhaus’s presentation of rival readings of a passage that appears in John Updike’s novella “Of the Farm”: . . .
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Harper's Magazine (Free subscription) | 08/29/2008
Last week, Arthur Krystal suggested in our discussion that contemporary culture now suffers from a dearth of great art. Krystal quoted Eliot’s statement about Yeats—“He was one of those whose history is the history of their own time, who are part of the consciousness of an age which cannot be understood without them”—and said, in so many words, “show me a poet or a novelist of whom one can say the...
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Harper's Magazine (Free subscription) | 08/27/2008
“The westerly excrescence of the continent of Asia, which we call Europe, came to dominate the world during the course of the second millennium AD.” This sentence begins a book to be published next week, Europe Between the Oceans (Yale), by Barry Cunliffe. I suggest that all but the most ardent button-pusher should be seduced by a book that begins this way. . . .
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Harper's Magazine (Free subscription) | 08/25/2008
Last weekend, Die Zeit published scans of four notecard from the 138-notecard-manuscript of Vladimir Nabokov’s final, unfinished work, The Original of Laura. Composing on notecards allowed Nabokov to set down his books out of sequence; he said he could see in a flash the whole of a novel and its details, and as notecards accumulated in the shoeboxes where they were stored, Nabokov could shuffle them...
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Harper's Magazine (Free subscription) | 08/22/2008
This week on Sentences I’ve shared my enthusiasm for the essay generally and for those by Arthur Krystal specifically. Reading Krystal on on beauty, sin, typewriters, laziness, death, duelling or reading itself is to find oneself in unusually good mental company. . . .
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Harper's Magazine (Free subscription) | 08/18/2008
In its name is the essay’s difference: where other literary modes–novel, poem, play–succeed or fail, the essay, by definition, tries. Too short to be definitive on any topic, the essay can’t manage the comprehensive. It aspires to adequacy, fluency. An essay can argue well, to be sure, but usually argues best for itself and for it’s writer’s best self. “I am myself the matter of my own book,” the namer...
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Harper's Magazine (Free subscription) | 08/13/2008
I have been spending some time lately with the Michael A. Lofaro Edition of James Agee’s novel A Death in the Family. The Lofaro was published earlier this year by The University of Tennessee Press, and is one of the most interesting scholarly editions of a work of fiction that I can recall. Lofaro is a professor of American literature and American and cultural studies at the University of Tennessee,...
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Harper's Magazine (Free subscription) | 08/15/2008
In these pages, in 1947, Jacques Barzun reviewed Malcolm Lowry’s novel, Under the Volcano. Barzun’s review, a terse paragraph in a long essay that bundled many books together with the titular twine of “Moralists for Your Muddles,” was short and sour: he found the Lowry a waste of time. The paragraph in which he dispatched it ran as follows: . . .
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Harper's Magazine (Free subscription) | 08/11/2008
Here’s a sentence that stopped me this weekend: . . .
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Harper's Magazine (Free subscription) | 08/08/2008
Two months ago, I wrote about the news of Dmitri Nabokov having announced, after protracted hemming and internationally reported hawing, that he intended to publish his father Vladimir’s final, unfinished novel, The Original of Laura: Dying is Fun. At the time, and among other things, I mentioned that pieces of this mysterious novel had actually already unmysteriously appeared, nine years ago, in The...
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Harper's Magazine (Free subscription) | 08/06/2008
A book I read this past weekend, not John Haskell’s American Purgatorio about which I wrote in my previous post, but one that comes out in the fall, was a raging disappointment. The writer’s work to date, though uneven, is distinguished. I greet the prospect of new work from this writer as an occasion: perhaps this latest effort will banish my doubts and fulfill my hopes. Perhaps the writer will avoid...
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Harper's Magazine (Free subscription) | 08/04/2008
Enthusiasm is suspicious. Or so a critic sometimes feels. . . .
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Harper's Magazine (Free subscription) | 08/01/2008
In my previous post, I touched upon the habit of rereading, suggesting that it’s a central feature of all reading experience. To mint a crude means of measuring literary quality, “better books” might be called those that remain loved by us when we reread them decades—and many experiences (literary or not)—later. Anything loved at twenty (that terrific pair of yellow pants) may not suit the forty-year-old...
