The Great American Novel
I first read Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita during my second semester of college, reading it furtively and fifty minutes at a time during an Old Testament class. (I would take another course from the same...
View ArticleBreaking Our Silence for Walker Percy
Walker Percy, the guy on the far right of our banner, died twenty years ago today. His death was in its way a victory. He’d contracted tuberculosis in the early 1940s and spent much of his young...
View ArticleMoral Equivalency, Sad Clowns, and World War II
In my last few years of college, when I knew I was headed toward graduate school but didn’t know what the experience would be like, I found myself groping, nearly blindly, for texts that would give me...
View ArticleBook Review: “Making Haste from Babylon”
Making Haste from Babylon: The Mayflower Pilgrims and Their World By Nick Bunker Illustrated. 489 pp. Alfred A. Knopf. $30.00. Two eras of American history seem to be of perpetual interest to readers:...
View ArticleBook Review: “Super Sad True Love Story”
Super Sad True Love Story By Gary Shteyngart 334 pp. Random House. $26. Gary Shteyngart’s third novel, the awkwardly if endearingly titled Super Sad True Love Story, is a dystopian vision of America’s...
View ArticleBowls of Milk
Something about nineteenth-century America made great novelists shoot for immense public success by eliminating what it was about their writing that made them great. The most obvious and egregious...
View ArticleTroy Maxson Goes to Heaven
I’ve enjoyed this semester, not least because, for the first time since 2004, I’ve been called on to teach a general survey of literature, in this case Emmanuel College’s English 200 class. The sort...
View ArticleChristian Suffering and Divine Alienation
I know of no book more convicting than Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s The Cost of Discipleship; read this book closely and seriously enough, and you will likely have to stop calling yourself a Christian....
View ArticleThe Death and Resurrection of the Author
He must have regretted it for the rest of his life, but J.D. Salinger perfectly encapsulated the deep affection a reader develops for an author. “What really knocks me out,” Holden Caulfield announces...
View ArticleAn entirely untested hypothesis
Here’s a thought I just had: what if Americans aren’t anti-intellectual per se but have an aversion to the Appeal to Authority? In my experience, actually taking the time to articulate the argument for...
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