“One goes on living in the hopes of seeing another spring,” Daphne said with a rush of emotion.

March 30, 2023

When the London Review of Books called Barbara Pym “a brilliant comic writer,” they had scenes like this in mind. Here’s how Pym does it: First, emotion is expressed – not by someone beautiful and in love, but by Daphne, the lonely older sister of the … Read More

“His job wasn’t to recreate reality, but to immerse viewers in a kind of dream.”

March 26, 2023

When writing stories, the most important thing is to tell everything that happened, right? Well, maybe not. Hart argues that the author’s goal is not to describe the world in all its complexity.  Rather, consider the advice offered by David Lean, director of Lawrence of Arabia. He … Read More

“So I decided to fashion a special kind of collage.”

March 21, 2023

How would a dissident playwright, who spent five years in prison before becoming the first president of Czechoslovakia, construct a memoir? If you imagine a creative architecture not seen before, you are right. It’s an engaging mix of observations, flashbacks, interviews, commentary, and memos to his staff … Read More

“Kafka attended courses on the History of German Art, History of Architecture, History of Dutch Painting, and History of Christian Sculpture.”

February 26, 2023

Anne Tyler, John Updike, and Flannery O’Connor all made paintings and sketches in addition to writing fiction. As it turns out, so did Franz Kafka, who had a strong interest in art from his teens to his untimely death at age 40. What can you learn from … Read More

“Everything was pulled tight as a snare drum, so expertly smoothed that you could easily spot the century’s worth of patched holes and tears.”

February 16, 2023

Perhaps nobody is surprised that the British and the American reviewers of Spare by Prince Harry see things differently.  For example, the New Yorker describes Harry’s mended bedding in Balmoral Castle as “a metaphor for the constricting, and quite possibly threadbare, fabric of the institution of monarchy” … Read More

“There was the teasing and impossible desire to imitate the petty pride of sparrows wallowing and flouncing in the red dust of country roads.”

January 31, 2023

Richard Wright, who was born in 1908, describes the “brace of mountainlike, spotted, black-and-white horses clopping down a dusty road through clouds of powdered clay” in his memoir Black Boy. He finds beauty in the “green leaves rustling with a rainlike sound” and in identifying … Read More

“This is the story of a crisis in our lives . . . during a journey alone.”

January 19, 2023

With sequels, come skepticism, and when the first in the series won the Pulitzer Prize, it’s tempting to expect just a replay of what worked well before. One critic called for a better evaluation of American Life; others said it’s a mixed blessing of a book. … Read More

10 Best Books for College Teachers Update

December 31, 2022

Now that the year is coming to a close, it’s time to pick up where my previous recommendations for books for college teachers left off. In alphabetical order, we have:

  1. The Spark of Learning by Sarah Rose Cavanagh: I’ve written about this book five times because I
… Read More

“Mom, I don’t know who to trust!”

December 28, 2022

Elizabeth Strout’s new novel — a Christmas gift of the first order – is her most enigmatic. Reviewers have drawn wildly different conclusions about the book’s message. For me, the book explores what happens when you don’t know who you can trust. Lucy, the protagonist, finds that … Read More

“Lately I’ve found myself reaching for the books of certain familiar writers, whose own zest and energy offer some kindly remedy to my condition.”

December 22, 2022

Perhaps you can relate to this: while I enjoy the holidays, I also am running low on the “zest and energy” that Mary Oliver describes in this essay. Her solution to this problem is to reconnect with familiar writers. Her book, which has been in my hands … Read More

“Observe, observe perpetually.”

November 30, 2022

More than 400 years ago, Michel de Montaigne of France invented a new literary tradition of close inward observation. “It is a thorny undertaking,” he writes, “to follow a movement so wandering as that of our mind.” Scholars, such as Sarah Bakewell, credit him with being the … Read More

“For what could be more peculiar than a crowd of grown-up people . . . discussing scholarly niceties that meant nothing to most of the world?”

November 22, 2022

One of the things that I love about Barbara Pym’s novels is that her characters never set out to impress anyone. They acknowledge that their choices – for example, attending an academic conference as treatment for a broken heart – are eccentric. They’re vulnerable, interesting, and … Read More

“I felt there was a lot more I could say about the subject of danger.”

November 11, 2022

In Half Broke Horses, Lily Smith faces many dangers, from flash floods in rural Texas, to bankruptcy during the Great Depression, to medical emergencies that didn’t always end well. This convincing, unprettified narration doesn’t glorify “grit” – rather, it shows the unintended consequences that can come … Read More

“Judging by her publicity photos, the natural assumption would be that American novelist Edith Wharton wrote in a traditional manner, at the gold-tooled leather-topped desk in her extremely well-stocked library.”

October 31, 2022

But this was “in fact a deliberate illusion.” She wrote in bed. Why? Johnson suspects that it had something to do with the desire to delay getting dressed, which for women in the 1800s, meant getting tied into a corset. And there’s more: Proust lined the walls … Read More

“And you O my soul, where you stand, surrounded, detached, in measureless oceans of space . . .until the bridge you will need be form’d…”

October 24, 2022

And you, O my reader, where you sit, reading from a screen that holds more words than the mind can store, what do you do after reading Whitman’s poetry?  Some respond by “Whitmanizing” in bold statements or expressive art. The poet Czeslaw Milosz says that after reading … Read More