Literary Culture
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The Great American Malaise September 11, 2024
An observation. There are few interesting and new political ideas, and few innovative works of imaginative literature. Politics and literature are both on a decline; political and literary genius are increasingly rare. American politics and literatur...
Language and Leonard Michaels September 05, 2024
All that great writing, trapped in mediocre books! —Elif BatumanCatachresis leads to anthropophagy. —David Bentley HartOrdinary people have a right to feel harassed when their language is criticized. We have grammar school for that kind of thing afte...
The Test of the Institutions May 10, 2024
The center is not holding. Take a recent outrage that follows numbingly familiar dynamics. The writer-support organization PEN America comes under sustained assault from a more radical wing and, after multiple open letters and much back-and-forthing,...
The Arts Have Been Captured March 15, 2024
This week, a scandal rocked what’s left of the literary world. Guernica, a long-respected journal, bowed to pressure from its all-volunteer staff and on Monday retracted an essay it had published on March 4 (an archived version can be found here). “F...
On Lauren Oyler's 'No Judgement' March 07, 2024
Lauren Oyler, an American literary critic who writes for Harper’s Magazine and the New Yorker, believes her metier is under threat. “I am a professional, and I am in danger,” she declares in My Perfect Opinions, one of eight previously unpublished es...
Art and the Dinner Party November 27, 2023
Do you want to matter to the culture today? This was the question Andrew Wylie, the power agent who counts Sally Rooney and Karl Ove Knausgaard as clients—as well as the estates of Philip Roth, Jorge Luis Borges, and Italo Calvino—mulled recently. In...
Andrew Wylie Turned Serious Literature Into Big Business November 13, 2023
Andrew Wylie, the world’s most renowned – and for a long time its most reviled – literary agent, is 76 years old. Over the past four decades, he has reshaped the business of publishing in profound and, some say, insalubrious ways. He has been a champ...
