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Countercultural Americana August 23, 2023

I don’t have much to add to the current state of America. 2023 has ushered in — depending on where you stand, swing, or lie down in despair — the best of times and the worst of times to quote an author not of an American breed. And yet it seems to be...

George Eliot’s Answer to ‘The Marriage Question’ August 23, 2023

We could all use a hype man like George Henry Lewes.George Henry Who’s?Well, exactly. A “littérateur, physiologist and metaphysician,” as an obituary in The New York Times called him in 1878, Lewes is today most remembered as the longtime romantic pa...

Mina Loy’s Search for ‘An Alternative Order of Things’ August 22, 2023

The last time Mina Loy had a solo exhibition was in 1959, at the Bodley Gallery in New York, a show curated by her friend Marcel Duchamp. The near invisibility of her visual art since that distinguished event can be explained in part by her restlessn...

Yes to Life August 21, 2023

The Austrian psychiatrist, author, and Holocaust survivor Viktor Emil Frankl was a quintessential humanist. His memoir Man’s Search for Meaning, a psychological portrait of life inside the concentration camps, has become a go-to for seekers of every ...

How ‘Jaws' Became a Living Nightmare August 18, 2023

Jaws was Steven Spielberg’s second feature film, his first full-scale blockbuster, and one of the most backbreaking projects he ever directed. At times the 1975 film’s shoot in the Atlantic Ocean made the then 27-year-old filmmaker fear his own caree...

On Zadie Smith and the Gen X Novel August 18, 2023

In Elif Batuman’s 2022 novel Either/Or, the narrator, Selin, goes to her college library to look for Prozac Nation, the 1994 memoir by Elizabeth Wurtzel. Both of Harvard’s copies are checked out, so instead she reads reviews of the book, including Mi...

Afraid of the Novel August 17, 2023

The following review is part of RealClear Books & Culture's symposium on Joseph Epstein's 'The Novel, Who Needs It?'On the evidence of this slim book defending the novel in our age of its diminished relevance, there are whole libraries full of novels...

An Antidote to Our Disenchanted Age August 17, 2023

The following review is part of RealClear Books & Culture's symposium on Joseph Epstein's 'The Novel, Who Needs It?'Countless pundits have put forth theories of how to escape our current moment of social atomization and existential decay. For these p...

The Indispensable Novel August 17, 2023

The following review is part of RealClear Books & Culture's symposium on Joseph Epstein's 'The Novel, Who Needs It?'An odd characteristic of the novel, Joseph Epstein writes, is that it is perfectly possible to have read one thoroughly and to retain ...

August Beach Reads August 16, 2023

Saul Bellow, Henderson the Rain KingHow does Saul Bellow’s 1959 novel—part satire, part fable—about an all-American goy losing and finding himself in a mostly magical Africa hold up? Bellow’s tribal princes, queens, and advisers would not be out of p...

My Generation August 16, 2023

I recall having breakfast at a hotel in Brussels in 2017 and sitting across from Douglas Coupland, the author of Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture, the 1991 book that gave my generation a sort of name that was really only a placeholder f...

A Doll’s House August 16, 2023

At the time of her death in 2019, Rachel Ingalls was, according to loved ones, at last starting to delight in her embrace by the literary world. “She was so happy,” her sister, Sarah Daughn, told the New York Times; it was as if Ingalls finally “felt...

The Smear Campaign against JK Rowling August 15, 2023

Here we go again. Another institution, brimming with self-righteous faux outrage, is trying to airbrush JK Rowling’s name out of history. This time it’s the turn of the Museum of Pop Culture (MoPOP) in Seattle, Washington, which has removed the world...

Infinite Joyce: Prolific Oates Takes On Dead Wallace August 15, 2023

“The day of Vladimir Nabokov’s death — July 2, 1977 — is firmly fixed in my memory, for on the following day Donald Barthelme said casually to me, ‘Happy? Nabokov died yesterday, we all move up a notch.’” Now, 46 years and many deaths — including Bar...

"The Border Simulator" by Gabriel Dozal August 14, 2023

A world-bending, lyrically rich poetry collection that reimagines the U.S.-Mexico border as both a real place and a living simulation—and tells the story of a pair of siblings trapped between the two“Word coyote Gabriel Dozal is crossing borders with...

Why Did Tom Hanks Write a Novel? August 14, 2023

The title of Tom Hanks’s first novel, The Making of Another Motion Picture Masterpiece, certainly sounds sarcastic: The proximity of the words “another” and “masterpiece” suggests a pithy, dishy critique of the industry that he conquered. But Hanks, ...

Cormac McCarthy’s Art of War August 14, 2023

In April 1992, in one of the few interviews he gave during his life, Cormac McCarthy admitted what he tellingly considered an “ugly fact”: books, his included, are made out of other books. He cited William Faulkner and Herman Melville, authors whose ...

A Tragicomedy on the Making of 'Jaws' August 11, 2023

he central conflict of The Shark Is Broken, the tragicomedy about the making of Jaws, premiering at the Golden Theatre on Thursday, does not involve man and beast so much as beastly men. Co-authored by Joseph Nixon and Ian Shaw, the 53-year-old son o...

A Bottle of Château Maldon, Please August 11, 2023

Until I read this interesting book, I had no idea that the postcode in which I live in northeast Essex is the finest terroir for wine in the country. It was all I could do to resist ripping up the lawn and planting vines. Indeed, Henry Jeffreys quote...

Chelsea Hodson Wants to Publish Weird Writers August 11, 2023

It’s high noon on a Saturday when I meet Chelsea Hodson in New York City’s restless Washington Square Park. Hodson is the author of the alt-lit essay collection Tonight I’m Someone Else—though lately, you’d more likely know her as the founder of Rose...

For Poet Alex Dimitrov, Nothing Is Hopeless August 10, 2023

It is inarguable that in the years since Alex Dimitrov, the author of Love and Other Poems, first logged on, in 2009, to what he then considered “a new opening for writers,” much about Twitter has changed. At the time, Dimitrov said in a recent inter...

The Authors Helping ‘Sad Girl Lit’ Grow Up August 10, 2023

You’ve probably come across this woman: she is unfulfilled in her career, has been abandoned by at least one man, she is aimless and lamenting the obstacles in her life (of which, in reality, there don’t appear to be many). She is not just miserable,...

Aristotle and the Three Graces August 09, 2023

Adapted from "Aristotle's Discovery of the Human" by Mary P. Nichols, for RealClear Books & Culture. The Three Graces come from Greek myth, associated by Homer and Hesiod with joy, celebration, and beauty. They have been rendered in Greek and Roman s...

Booklash August 09, 2023

In the past few years, the literary community has seen waves of activism that have galvanized much-needed and overdue change in the industry. National movements like Black Lives Matter and #MeToo have pushed publishers to recommit to accountability, ...

Lorrie Moore Laughs Wild Amid Severest Woe August 09, 2023

I never had to learn how to love Lorrie Moore. She was always unrequired reading. I went to college in the ’90s, the decade of peak Moore—of her second and third collections, Like Life (1990) and Birds of America (1998)—when there were fewer distract...