October 15, 2018
Was Philip Roth a White Male Author?
It’s been four months now since Philip Roth died, long enough in our fast-paced media world that all the eloquent and moving obituaries have largely dissolved into a broader consensus […]
May 24, 2018
On “The Death of the Novel”
Declaring that the novel is dead sometimes feels like a pastime as old as the novel itself. Even men in the nineteenth century would lament how the novel was being […]
May 7, 2015
How the West Inverted its Literary Values
In a true missing-the-forest-for-the-trees phenomenon, modern literary criticism has left unremarked, to my knowledge at least, the totally anomalous body of “great literature” that has come out of Europe and […]
January 11, 2012
Short Takes: For Those About to Write
In a Letter to the Editor printed in a 1984 edition of Amherst College’s student newspaper, the Amherst Student, David Foster Wallace (then just “Dave Wallace ‘85”) takes on an […]