By Bill Marx
Part 1 here
Edmund Wilson’s Marxism, though leavened with a saving skepticism, could also push his evaluation of literature into a blind lockstep. For him, Willa Cather’s novels of the ‘20s, such as The Professor’s House, were not sufficiently aware of the effects of adverse social conditions to be of merit. “Yet in criticism,” […]

By Bill Marx
Back in the ’30s, Philip Rahv memorably divided American fiction writers into redskins and palefaces — Mark Twain epitomized the wild men, Henry James the civilized — a chasm that today may be outmoded or politically indelicate. But Lewis M. Dabney’s fine biography of Edmund Wilson suggests that when it comes to assessing […]

by Harvey Blume
That Doris Lessing, at the age of 88, has at last won the Nobel Prize for literature is a cause for celebration, and for allowing that some things, at least, however unexpectedly, can finally go right in this world. Why it took the Nobel Committee so long to come to a correct conclusion […]

The NY Times is running a series of articles about front-runners for the presidency. I’ve read the two about Hillary Clinton carefully, because I’m stuck about her. She’s someone I’d like to feel enthusiastic about but can’t. She always, to my mind, testifies strongly at first, then cancels herself out. She’s an enigma wrapped inside […]

When should a play be labeled dated and consigned to the junk heap of time? No playwright is safe from the charge of being called passé: one reviewer’s breath of fresh air from the past is another’s antiquated wheeze. Nicholas Hytner, Director of London’s National Theater, speculates that in fifty years or so the poetry […]

A few years ago, an adolescent boy with whom I liked to discuss books told me about a novel he had read called, The Traveler by John Twelve Hawks. The book, I found, was absorbing, a real page-turner.
China, FBI, Featured, fiction, John Twelve Hawks, literature, Short Fuse, The Dark River, The Traveler

The Hub Review features a perceptively waspish consideration of Pauline Kael’s unhealthy influence on film reviewers, taking scathing aim at a couple of her jittery heirs, A.O. Scott of the NYT and Ty Burr of the Boston Globe.
criticism, Featured, Film, film reviewing, literature, Pauline Kael, Persona Non Grata, Reviews

Given the shrinking amount of column inches for book reviews in mainstream newspapers and magazines, it is no surprise that book review editors are reluctant to print negative criticism. Why waste precious space in the paper to pan a book? Reviewers know this, and they calibrate their consumer guide judgments — upwards — accordingly. Of […]

Hot on the heels of critic Sven Birkerts’s lament last week in the Boston Globe’s Ideas section that the blogosphere threatens shared literary culture comes Globe book critic Gail Caldwell’s moan that “the scribes and priests no longer hold the keys to the holy word; the word itself has splintered into an infinite series of […]

Why are print book reviewers and litbloggers fighting over which group talks about literature better? On the one hand, the battle is less ferocious than we are led to believe: whenever they are given a chance a small number of online commentators scream about old media elitists stomping on the democratic virtues of the Web. […]