ArtsFuse editor Bill Marx speaks with Gail Pool, the author of Faint Praise: The Plight of Book Reviewing in America, about the slow decline of literary criticism in the United States.

book reviewing, book reviews, Books, faint praise: the plight of book reviewing in America, fiction, Gail Pool, literature, non fiction, podcast

By Harvey Blume
Zugzwang,by Ronan Bennett
(Bloomsbury USA, 288 pages)
It’s an understatement to say chess has been good for literature; the game has even inspired people not known for the written word to produce memorable prose. Consider the following, for […]

By Bill Marx and Harvey Blume
I was asked by National Public Radio’s Morning Edition to write an appreciation of the late Norman Mailer. I have posted an unabridged version of this necessarily short piece. After that, I have placed an interview Harvey Blume had with Mailer after the publication of his 1995 book Oswald’s Tale: […]

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