Literature

Alice B. Lloyd on parting words: After all, tomorrow is another day.

Christoph Irmscher reviews a new translation of Uwe Johnson’s massive, masterly year-in-the-life novel, ‘Anniversaries.’

Joseph Epstein on Marcel Proust among the grand women of the belle époque.

Carl Rollyson on the friends and fights of the author of ‘A Dance to the Music of Time.’

Alice B. Lloyd on the homespun magical realism of Haruki Murakami’s latest novel, ‘Killing Commendatore.’

Christoph Irmscher on the strange, lifelong discomfort of the author of ‘Siddhartha’ and ‘Steppenwolf.’

Alan Jacobs on the maps that guide writers and readers through fictional worlds.

Micah Mattix on how Robert Louis Stevenson came to live, die, and be buried in Samoa.

The Swedish Academy took the year off. Robert Messenger explains why we should be glad.

John Check explains how Willa Cather’s classic, now 100 years old, still sings and dances.

Christoph Irmscher reviews Benjamin Balint’s book on the international legal battle over the fate of Kafka’s manuscripts.

Cathy Young on looking at the passion and cruelty of the classic novel with contemporary eyes.

The death of Sir Vidia Naipaul on August 11 will generate plenty of retrospective monographs and essays, most of them rightly laudatory, some of them less so. Naipaul was born in Trinidad, the descendant of Indian immigrants. In his teens he won a government scholarship to study abroad, and he…

Cathy Young remembers the late Russian dissident whose mockery of communism earned him exile.

Gary Saul Morson on the rise and fall of the first Russian populists.

Sonny Bunch describes belatedly catching up on Wolfe, Roth, and Bourdain.

Readers of the Wall Street Journal’s Review section may remember an explosive essay that ran in its pages in 2011: “Darkness Too Visible,” by the paper’s children’s books columnist, Meghan Cox Gurdon. In that essay, Gurdon surveyed an array of popular books published in what’s called the YA…

Harper Lee’s inspiration in creating Atticus Finch.

Looking back at Philip Roth.

Tom Wolfe was death on intellectual pretension, and he mocked those who always sought out the worst in America.

In 2003, when J. M. Coetzee was announced the recipient of that year’s Nobel Prize in Literature, the news wasn’t met with outraged cries of “Who?” or “Why?” With nine brilliant novels under his belt, along with a haul of prestigious literary awards—including a hitherto unprecedented two Booker…

The Portrait of a Lady, one of the greatest novels in the English language, ends rather inconclusively. “I have not seen the heroine to the end of her situation,” wrote Henry James in his notebooks. On the other hand, he added, the work “is complete in itself—and the rest may be taken up or not,…

In 2016, during the 400th anniversary of William Shakespeare’s death, the Bard was feted by dozens of books, hundreds of magazine and newspaper articles, performances of his plays, lectures, and a Shakespeare Day gala attended by Prince Charles himself. The London Tube map replaced the names of its…

Zichron Ya'akov, Israel

In a career that spanned the first half of the 20th century, Henry Louis Mencken became not only one of America’s most memorable prose stylists, but also one of its most prolific ones.

Is it perverse to find ghost stories relaxing, even restful? Compared with the grim realities of the news and the appalling horrors of the last hundred years, even such outstanding classics as M. R. James’s “Count Magnus,” Sheridan Le Fanu’s “The Familiar,” and Algernon Blackwood’s “The Listener”…

In December 1943, Winston Churchill contracted pneumonia on a visit to North Africa and found himself banned from work and laid up in bed. While convalescing, he asked his daughter Sarah to read him Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice. It proved just the tonic. “What calm lives they had, those…

In a March 2016 speech before the American Israel Public Affairs Committee policy conference, Donald Trump declared that if he became president, he would “move the American embassy to the eternal capital of the Jewish people, Jerusalem.” His choice of phrase—“eternal capital”—perhaps bears some…

What role does the Bible play in Americans’ lives? A century ago the answer to that question would have been straightforward: It was the most important book in the home, perhaps read daily, and the place where major events in a family’s history (births, deaths, marriages) were recorded. It was…

In 1954, when I was a sophomore at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, I paid tribute in an editorial for the Daily Tar Heel to a distinguished predecessor at that illustrious student paper, William T. Polk, who had died unexpectedly. Jonathan W. Daniels, the journalist and editor who…

In 1954, when I was a sophomore at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, I paid tribute in an editorial for the Daily Tar Heel to a distinguished predecessor at that illustrious student paper, William T. Polk, who had died unexpectedly. Jonathan W. Daniels, the journalist and editor who…

In December 1943, Winston Churchill contracted pneumonia on a visit to North Africa and found himself banned from work and laid up in bed. While convalescing, he asked his daughter Sarah to read him Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice. It proved just the tonic. “What calm lives they had, those…

Jonathan Swift was a man of contradictions. He was born in Ireland yet was embarrassed by the fact and maintained that he was English. As a clergyman he held in contempt anyone who threatened the dogma and sanctity of his church, but as one of the sharpest satirists of his day he railed against…

Founded in 1947, the Hudson Review is one of America's most esteemed literary journals. Three young men started the magazine, William Arrowsmith, a poet and translator, Joseph Bennett, and Frederick Morgan, a poet and the longtime editor of the Hudson Review, from 1948-1998, when he was succeeded…

Here's an excerpt from Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451:

Hot on the heels of 1984, Sinclair Lewis's speculative satire It Can't Happen Here is surging to the forefront of a suddenly very popular genre, prophetic dystopian lit. It Can't Happen Here will probably be the next novel to sell out on Amazon; right now, it's the number-two recommended read by…

Florence, Italy

The awarding of the Nobel Prize in Literature to Bob Dylan is not only merited. It is inspiring, thrilling, reassuring. It restores a bit of faith in the prize itself. In recent decades the Nobel committee had taken to honoring fashionable charlatans or, at best, writers of limited scope and only…

The Nobel Prize committee awarded Bob Dylan with the prize for literature Thursday, which will no doubt prove to be a controversial selection. The issue is not that Dylan is yet another obscure figure the committee named apparently to score political points, nor that he writes in a language little…

This is not another glowing review of the universally-praised Hillbilly Elegy, J.D. Vance's first-hand account of the problems facing the white working-class in Appalachia and the Rust Belt. Not because I don't like the memoir—along with apparently everyone else who has read it, I found the memoir…

In the latest episode of Conversations with Bill Kristol, University of Virginia professor Paul Cantor joins Kristol to talk about his recommended reading list. Cantor includes several writers through the ages, both well and lesser known, who might appeal to lovers of liberty and classical…

The undergraduate course "Men in Literature" was taught eight times from 2005 to 2015 at Springfield College in Massachusetts. It drew healthy enrollments and was reviewed favorably by a large majority of the students who took it. In 2010, the course was formally approved by the college curriculum…

French President François Hollande vowed to conduct a “pitiless” war against the people responsible for Friday’s atrocities, and over the weekend, the bombings of ISIS targets in Syria began. Le président also temporarily closed all of France’s borders, but only for those seeking to leave the…

President Obama’s hour-long conversation with the Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Marilynne Robinson, published in two parts in the New York Review of Books, inspired responses that were so hyperbolic and adoring, it felt like 2008 all over again.

A recent headline in the New York Times announced: “Metropolitan Opera Says Its ‘Otello’ Tenor Will Not Wear Blackface.” Peter Gelb, the general manager of the Met, made clear that the decision not to use any dark makeup on its white tenor Aleksandrs Antonenko in the Met’s new production of Verdi’s…

St. John’s College, one of the few remaining schools devoted to providing a liberal arts education through the careful study of the “Great Books,” is close to having uploaded all of the back issues of its famed academic journal, The St. John’s Review.

Early this week, PEN American Center named six new table hosts for its annual dinner on Tuesday, substituting for the six who opted out to protest the organization’s decision to present its “freedom of expression courage award” to the French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo. Nonetheless, an…

The latest episode of Coversations With Bill Kristol features Harvard professor Ruth Wisse:

For all of the just wars that have been fought over the cultural canon, one genuine benefit of the (still somewhat undulating) critical consensus is that it’s a pretty genuine aid for determining what you really needn’t bother reading right away. Or, as a professor once said while wielding Samuel…

Nathaniel Hawthorne is an enigma. 

My quest for Symons—A. J. A. Symons, that is—began when, many years ago, I first read that strange novel Hadrian the Seventh (1904). Written by the so-called Baron Corvo, and admired by D. H. Lawrence, among others, the book opens with a magnificent description of a hack writer suffering from…

Berlin

For those interested in things Jewish, the formidable literary critic D. G. Myers has provided a terrific guide to the 38 best Jewish books of 2011, ranging from Jewish history to thought to literature. I’ve long been an admirer of Myers, but I must admit I’m even more of one now, thanks to his…

Ladbrokes of London, the famous British bookmaker, lists the Syrian-born poet Adonis as a 4 to 1 favorite to win this year’s Nobel Prize, due to be announced in the next few days.  According to one Ladbrokes official, “I really think this is poetry’s year, and without a doubt, the politically…

I couldn’t help but notice that the New York Times obituary this past week for Norris Church Mailer, widow of Norman Mailer, failed to mention the occasion that first brought their love affair to public attention. If the institutional memory of the Times has failed in this instance—which I doubt,…

A few months ago the Wall Street Journal ran a splendid essay by Allen Barra that could only be described as therapeutic. Entitled “What ‘To Kill a Mockingbird’ Isn’t,” it was a calm, clear-headed, even humorous, evisceration of a novel that seems to be universally admired, required reading in…

An announcement of the Nobel Prize for literature is almost necessarily accompanied by columns listing those distinguished writers who were passed over, as well as more than a few clunkers who were not. As for the roster of the omitted, since the Russians Anton Chekhov (1860-1904) and Leo Tolstoy…

This morning the Swedish academy awarded the 2010 Nobel Prize for Literature to Mario Vargas Llosa “for his cartography of the structures of power and his trenchant images of the individual’s resistance, revolt and defeat.” With benefactors like the ones who authored this overwrought passage, who…

Tomorrow the Swedish Academy will announce the winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature and various sportsbooks, like Ladbroke’s, are laying odds. But since the Swedish academy’s methods for selecting the prize-winner are a mystery to all but its members, those odds reflect almost exclusively the…