John Wilson

John Wilson on “the Short 68,” “the Long 68,” and what’s missing from a new account of the protests and their legacy.

John Wilson reviews ‘The Monarchy of Fear’: Are our lives and our politics really dominated by fear?

John Wilson reviews 'Christian Hospitality and Muslim Immigration in an Age of Fear' by Matthew Kaemingk

David Hollinger’s new book, Protestants Abroad: How Missionaries Tried to Change the World but Changed America, is a comedy of unintended consequences, the thesis of which is a joke—a serious joke, a very intellectual joke, but funny, with a sting. It goes like this: “The Protestant foreign…

“As a Catholic, Muriel believed in an afterlife,” Alan Taylor acknowledges in his splendid Appointment in Arezzo: A Friendship with Muriel Spark. “But even someone with her fertile imagination could not picture what it might actually be like. . . . She had often longed to go there, she said, as if…

At this very moment, I trust, a novelist somewhere is trying to weave Russia’s election-year meddling into the stuff of fiction. (I wish Keith Thomson would take it on.) Meanwhile, one of the most interesting literary stories of the last decade has gone mostly unnoticed—and this too, so it happens,…

The Time of Our Singing

Marinated in whiskey and cured in cigarette smoke, Beryl Bainbridge’s ravaged, masklike visage—the most memorable since Auden’s—was familiar to every literate Briton. Over there, she was a personality, holding court in her ramshackle London home, recounting her misadventures, lamenting and…

The Echo Maker

Europe Central

THE WRITER WIRT WILLIAMS HAD a theory that novelists--"like quarterbacks," he would add--were most likely to flourish if they were reasonably intelligent but not off-the-scale brainy. ("Look at Terry Bradshaw!") Too much intellection, Williams thought, tended to gum up the works in one way or…

K.

For Us, the Living

John Gardner

Quick Studies The Best of Lingua Franca edited by Alexander Star Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 384 pp., $18 "THERE IS NO METHOD," T.S. Eliot once proclaimed, "except to be very intelligent"--to which the editors of Lingua Franca, the late lamented "Review of Academic Life," added another requirement:…

Aiding and Abetting

The Eternal Pity

John Wilson on the KGB Bar and hoisting a few to the ghost of Stalin.

First-rate satiric novelists are rare, in part because their art is harrowing even to themselves. True satirists grow so used to seeing through pretense that after a while they begin to wonder whether anything besides pretense exists at all: Reveal the sham too many times, and pretty soon even…

Rick Moody and Darcey Steinke, eds.

Isaac Bashevis Singer

The science-fiction writer Philip K. Dick was a madman, an agoraphobic amphetamine addict periodically hospitalized for mental problems and profoundly psychotic for the last eight years before his death in 1982 at the age of 53. He was a clumsy prose stylist, whose disorganized, maniacal, and…