Willa Cather was a great novelist, whose greatness was unrecognized for a long time.
Samuel Beckett’s work was centrally concerned with a paradox: the impossibility of finding any meaning in the universe, but the simultaneous need to say something.
Assuming you aren’t a fetus, the Left’s most dangerous belief is their adoration of violent criminals.
Well, as I try to teach my students, if you write that “as a young man, my grandmother used to read to me”, you slightly insult your grandmother by stating that she used to be a young man. It’s not that hard to make the assumption Coulter demands here ??? that you are neither the Left nor a fetus ??? but the dangler is complemented in the same sentence by an inability to associate a singular Left with its supposed adoration of violent criminals. Some right-wingers has a marked tendency to make this mistake.
As with Charles Dickens, William Powell Frith has always been popular with the public, but critics have tended to belittle him as a glorified illustrator.
I think I am unmoved by this rhetoric of “Tom Waits as crushed Americana.” Whatever pathos may inhabit Waits’ songs, they’ve got more to say about being human than about being American. Unless you’re British, I suppose (via Books Inq).
Perhaps ???medical anthropology’ has not yet become a household term.
Western books have now been banned in Iran. The local publishing industry is in chaos, because under the strict new censorship rules, only textbooks can be imported from the West.
Greek and Latin may long since have lost their central place in Western education, but the influence of the classical world on our own culture remains very strong. It’s there in language and law, and far more vividly present in ideas and ways of thinking about the world.
The novel speeds along like an intellectual thriller, a journey to the center of human identity.
A Nobel-winning astrophysicist denounces the EPA’s unceremonious closing of the “strongest library for space science and engineering in the universe.” (via Maud Newton)
Attention, book reviewers: I am over Pynchon. Write about someone else.
In a Paris Review interview almost half a century ago, Ernest Hemingway offered a tip to the would-be writer in search of material: “Let’s say that he should go out and hang himself because he finds that writing well is impossibly difficult. Then he should be cut down with mercy … At least he will have the story of the hanging to go on with.” (via ArtsJournal)
The publication of the translation of WG Sebald’s remarkable essay on the Allied airwar on Germany coincided with the invasion of Iraq in 2003.