Book Reviews

What Makes a Life

This is a story that begins with the end of the world. As a young man named Sam Waxworth arrives from “the provinces” to start his new up-and-coming job in New York City, he watches a long-bearded, seemingly fanatical Herman Nash proclaim that the world…
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August 16, 2020
Articles & Essays

O’Connor and Race

In 1974, ten years after Flannery O’Connor died, Alice Walker visited O’Connor’s farm in Georgia. It was located minutes from the sharecropper shack where Walker had once lived. ­Walker had read O’Connor voraciously but put her stories away when she discovered other writers, whom she…
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August 7, 2020
Articles & Essays

Prophets for Our Age of Suicide

To read or not to read literary criticism, that is the question for the twenty-first century reader who prefers to process 42 characters instead of 42 minutes of reading a substantial argument. I draw the either-or dilemma from Hamlet’s famous speech on suicide, whether or…
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May 31, 2020