Literature
Story Stream
A Full and Empty World April 14, 2025
In the New York Time’s list of “The 100 Best Books of the 21st Century,” the critics placed Elena Ferrante’s My Brilliant Friend, and by extension the next three books of her Neapolitan series, at the very top. In their estimation, these books repres...
The Invisible College of the Future April 11, 2025
When I began offering a series of literature courses for paid subscribers to my Substack last year, I chose, more out of whim than careful calculation, to name the initiative The Invisible College. The phrase refers historically to an unofficial grou...
Zora Neale Hurston’s Lost Epic April 11, 2025
The first time I felt betrayed was when I was 11. The culprit: my younger sister. The secret she had divulged: the unspeakable act of devouring sweets—part of a litany of processed foods my mother had forbidden us to eat....
Up Close With the Beauty of Gatsby April 10, 2025
The Great Gatsby: If you went to high school in the United States, your parents read it, you’ve read it, your friends have some vague memory of the green light and Daisy and Nick, and your kids probably will too. I read it in high school and college,...
Reservation Politics April 10, 2025
EARLY ON IN Jon Hickey’s Big Chief (2025), Mitch, the novel’s antihero, visits Waabizh, a medicine man whom his mentor, Joe Beck, respects and trusts. During their conversation, Waabizh refers to Mitch by his Anishinaabemowin name, Mishkigabo—a name ...
Contra Sartre: Proust and Other People April 09, 2025
Solipsism is the only strength. However mysterious to us is, and must remain, our own inner life, nonetheless we really live: were the world merely a perpetual dream, we could be sure at least of being the dreamer; or were it a hideously convincing s...
The Dangers of “Sensitivity Reading” April 07, 2025
The recent rise of sensitivity readers in publishing raises two fundamental questions: first, what kind of "sensitivity"? And second, what kind of "reader"? ...
On Roy Campbell April 07, 2025
As the acknowledged inspiration for Tolkien’s Aragorn, with a life as adventurous as Chesterton’s Innocent Smith, Roy Campbell is one of the most colorful and extraordinary men of the twentieth-century literary scene....
The Prehistoric Psychopath April 07, 2025
We are naturally a highly violent species with a thin veneer of civilization that masks a brutal proclivity for violence – or so many people think. In the seventeenth century, Thomas Hobbes said that human life without government is ‘solitary, poore,...
Dear, Drear Washington Irving April 04, 2025
In surveys of historically underestimated writers that appear occasionally in publications like the Time Literary Supplement and, now, The Republic of Letters, I don’t recall ever seeing the name Washington Irving. There’s a reason for that: he’s not...
William and Henry James April 04, 2025
When Henry James decided to come to America in 1904 and 1905, his elder brother, William James, was not immediately pleased. William said that while his wife, Alice, would welcome his visit (she and Henry had a firm bond), he felt “more keenly a good...
Ambassador of Dreams April 04, 2025
An important difference between the nineteenth and the twentieth centuries,” observed the Polish poet Czesław Miłosz, “probably derives from the crossing of a certain threshold: things too atrocious to think of did not seem possible” before World War...
Olivia The Spy April 03, 2025
Of all the characters in Olivia Manning’s Balkan Trilogy, her three-volume chronicle of the early moments of the Second World War, none are better named than Foxy Leverett. Alas, the name’s bearer does not deliver on its promise of cunning. Found in ...
Searching for Bigger April 02, 2025
A century ago, Claude McKay published Home to Harlem, a novel narrating Black working-class experiences in the eponymous Black Mecca in the aftermath of the First World War. Home to Harlem is considered to be one of the first successful Black novels ...
Shūsaku Endō, Christianity, and Japan April 02, 2025
Is Christianity an exclusively Western faith? In his most famous novel Silence, published in 1966 and adapted by Martin Scorsese in 2016, Japanese Catholic writer Shūsaku Endō (1932-1996) follows the stories of seventeenth century Jesuit missionaries...
Why AI Will Not Replace Creativity April 01, 2025
There has been much discussion lately concerning whether the creative industries risk being replaced by Artificial Intelligence. I recently posted the following thought:AI does not represent a threat to the creative industries. It will help with serv...
Loos Woman April 01, 2025
Acentury ago, a slender novel captivated casual readers and literary giants alike with its insightful skewering of Jazz Age consumerism and the American lust for class, wealth, sex, social acceptance, and, above all, a piece of the American Dream.Edi...
Becoming Nearer to Oneself March 28, 2025
Left alone, it’s only a matter of time before we start to know ourselves better. It’s something we’ve all gone through so recently – I can’t help but feel we should be better at it by now. Since the pandemic ended, most people have returned to their ...
Prize Inspires Students to Write Great American Novel March 27, 2025
A new novel-writing competition with the theme “America 2076” hopes to inspire new talent, particularly students, to write the next great American work of fiction....
Flannery O’Connor at 100 March 26, 2025
It’s jarring, maybe, to think of Flannery O’Connor as an old lady. Then again, to our eyes, in photographs from the last years of her life, maybe she looks already old. In our imagination, she stands forever on the front porch steps of Andalusia, the...
The Colossus of Brooklyn March 25, 2025
The retreat center was attached to a grand, turn-of-the-century hotel, straight out of The Shining, manned by a skeleton crew for the winter.Wandering the grounds, I poked my head into the old lobby. Past the worn armchairs and covered grand piano, I...
Living in the Future March 24, 2025
Let loose on an unprepared world in November 2022, ChatGPT quickly showed itself to be a stunning advance in the field of artificial intelligence. Indeed, the Large Language Model proved such a good conversationalist that many were left with the dist...
The Vanishing White Male Writer March 24, 2025
It’s easy enough to trace the decline of young white men in American letters—just browse The New York Times’s “Notable Fiction” list. In 2012 the Times included seven white American men under the age of 43 (the cut-off for a millennial today); in 201...
TCR Talks with Elizabeth Ellen March 24, 2025
Elizabeth Ellen’s dazzling and darkly funny novel, American Thighs, follows Tatum Grant, a former child actor who steals her daughter’s identity to start her life over as a high school cheerleader. Tatum’s troubled upbringing is the catalyst for her ...
The Unbearable Weight of the Literary Canon March 21, 2025
Nick Guest, from Alan Hollinghurst’s The Line of Beauty, is a consummate English protagonist: both an insider and an outsider, embarrassed by his provincial past, unsteady on his feet among the upper echelons of society, open in his distaste for the ...
