newcritics

Is Ayn Rand the most influential female writer of the last fifty years? Lordy, I hope not, but in these days of race-to-the-bottom capitalism, I think she might be.
Atlas Shrugged, the most widely-read of her tracts, first appeared fifty years ago tomorrow. When the New York Times panned the book back in [...]

If you’ve never read Alan Bennett, the famed and very funny British actor, playwright, and novelist, I recommend starting with his delightful new novella, The Uncommon Reader. My review of the book ran in the weekend’s Los Angeles Times Book Review. Here’s an excerpt:
In the introduction to his 2004 play, “The History Boys,” Alan [...]

An hour ago I would have said my week couldn’t get any worse. I would have been sorely mistaken.
Terrible news: The great Grace Paley, feminist, activist, and until today one of our best living short story writers, has died. Leora Skolkin-Smith (whose fiction Paley created an imprint to publish) sent word in email. [...]

The first two chapters of Somerset Maugham’s Cakes and Ale are so bitchily insightful on the hypocrisies of literary culture that, if you’re a writer, your loved ones might want to hide out somewhere else while you’re reading it, lest you follow them around the house, cackling over and orating your favorite parts.
Scandal erupted in [...]

Absalom and Achitophel, John Dryden’s satirical allegory, disproves the idea that works of political propaganda can never be literature.
The year was 1681. England’s King Charles had sired children hither and yon but had no legitimate heir. His Catholic brother, James, stood next in line to the throne.
As fear of an alleged “Popish Plot” [...]

I saw Kurt Vonnegut speak only once, in the mid-1990s, at a packed auditorium in Gainesville, Florida. He must have delivered the speech — about the joys of trips to the post office and the human contact they bring — a hundred times before and a thousand times afterward, but he made it new [...]

The best of Steven Cloud’s Boy on a Stick & Slither (BOASAS) comics recall Calvin & Hobbes, and Linus’ existential philosophizing in the glory days of Peanuts.
The strip has reached new heights lately — “Champions of Winning” (at left) is a recent favorite — but it’s always been good.
“Conformity” has hung on my [...]

Tales of Iraqi translators being denied U.S. visas after endangering their lives to aid the American military remind me of a scene — and harrowing moment in history — from Tom Bissell’s The Father of All Things: A Marine, His Son, and the Legacy of Vietnam.
South Vietnam has fallen. North Vietnamese soldiers [...]

At fifteen, I was obsessed with East of Eden.
Like Ethan Frome, The Great Gatsby, and A Farewell to Arms, the book was a gift from my mom. I’m convinced she passed it along in part so we could pass our time stuck in traffic by identifying similarities between my father and Steinbeck’s feral sociopath, [...]

Lizzie invited me to last night’s screening of Jesus Camp. I went, with some trepidation. “It’s okay,” she told me, as the opening credits started. “You’re sitting next to a Jew.”
I tend to shrink from reimmersion in the whacked-out, storefront-church world of my childhood. Also, I worried that the tone of the film [...]