Author Archive
May 12, 2025When I was first trying to write professionally, I had a very simple understanding of genre. I was writing science fiction and fantasy novels, and these books had their own section...
May 9, 2025I met Ross Barkan in the summer of 2024, when he quite unexpectedly came to my talk at the World Transsexual Forum. He had read my novel, The Default World, and he was a...
May 6, 2025One of the hot books of 2014 was a novel by Jenny Offill called Dept of Speculation. This was one of those wikipedia realism books that interspersed little factoids (in...
April 30, 2025Hawthorne is the 19th-century American writer that I like the most. I've always known this. When I read The Blithedale Romance twelve years ago, I absolutely adored...
April 23, 2025Closely allied to the question of taste is the question of genius. Taste is the ability to appreciate works of genius. But what is genius? Most people would agree that someone who...- April 1, 2025Naomi Kanakia and I discuss whether anti-woke is passé in a time of Trump unleashed
March 19, 2025There is a large contingent of people in America who occasionally read classic literature for fun. I debated a bit with my followers on Notes about the exact size of this contingent,...
March 12, 2025What if Uncle Tom's Cabin is a better novel than Huckleberry Finn? This might seem absurd, but surely it merits at least a little thought. Uncle Tom's...
February 26, 2025According to my records, I read Moby-Dick for the first time in April of 2010. My journey into the book started off quite well. Like most readers, I was surprised by the...
January 28, 2025On Percival Everett's James
January 15, 2025Since this is a Great Books blog, I assume you’re all extremely interested in my opinions about which publishers of reprinted classics are actually good. I’ve divided...
