Looking at the language of critical response to the novel, there are parallels. This is not to say that David Foster Wallace cared for Hamlet. But he seemed to care for ontology. The question of what life means and how to bear it in a castle among kings and queens (even murderers) is one thing, but ...

We didn’t mind Maureen Dowd’s dismantling of (whatever remains of) the mythologizing of Dylan as a hero for/of protest. There was a moment in time when Dylan was hero for protest, but that time has passed mantle to a new moment, one with more lasting power: the one when he’s a hero for poetry. The ...

If you want to write like Shakespeare the first thing you can do is read Shakespeare. Once you have read it all, you will realize that, while you can never write like him, you are now infinitely better read. And you will have learned something about writing, as well as about your own aspirations to ...

  John Jeremiah Sullivan has written a beautiful, beautiful piece about David Foster Wallace in GQ . It isn’t easy to write about Wallace; how Sullivan chooses to do it is illuminating. One hard part is writing about a writer who is no longer with us. Another hard part is writing about a writer ...

Hertzberg wrote one of the simplest, and most elegant, blog posts (this form truly needs a new descriptive terminology) in response to President Obama’s speech on Libya. It was concise. It was humble. It was careful not to say too many things and so left readers remembering one thing clearly: that ...

Orr’s piece in the New York Times Book Review on an O magazine photo shoot with young poets is a perfect example of how to write about something you know a lot about, when confronted with someone who may know less. Plus, it’s unpretentious, a quality that automatically separates it from an entire ...

Janet Malcolm is a careful writer. The new Paris Review has an interview with her. The Review still publishes the best interviews on code-cracking the art of writing. This exchange—which interviewer Katie Roiphe notes in her introduction took place primarily via email—is a little Master class in ...

Thinking about revolutions is inextricable from thinking about grief. We cannot know how many lives will be lost, but we know that those left behind will engage in personal and communal, grief. The “memoir of loss” is a popular genre, but what teaches us more: personal experiences of others, or ...

While reading about the relationship between Thomas Aquinas and insider trading allegations, it occurred to us that the evolution of thinking about any classic crime has an almost-classic arc: deplore; examine; philosophize. Was what the Tiger Mother wrought a crime? She was richly deplored. And ...

There are poems that interpret a feeling or an idea, and there are poems that interpret an entire history. American poet Frederick Siedel is celebrated for many things, so we love celebrating him now, this week, simply since one of our favorite poems of his is here (and read by the author), on the ...

What do we think about when we hear the word “revolution” today? The Beatles? Tahrir Square? The word has a rich history in political rhetoric, and in particular in political speeches—primarily those given by the revolutionaries in the time of revolution. Yet as America watches events that ...

Joyce Carol Oates has written a beautiful book about grief following the loss of a spouse. As Oates is one of the most prolific American writers much has been written about it: comparing it to Joan Didion’s Year of Magical Thinking; praising its prose; considering the psychological split between ...

It was an elegant accident of editorial timing: two major articles on post-traumatic stress (and the attendant increase in prescription pill use among members of our military), and a beautiful, heart-breaking book review by Jay McInerney of J.D. Salinger : A Life . All of these addressed the stresses ...

If you only read one piece about Scientology, make it Lawrence Wright’s in this week’s New Yorker . Wright’s book The Looming Tower told the story of how we arrived at 9/11, and won the Pulitzer Prize. His writing is elegant and fast, and if there is one writer to lead us to the emotional center of ...

Now we are hearing about the memoir. Now, just as we stand shocked and awed before another chaotic call for revolutionary change in leadership, a moment some have claimed confirm George W. Bush’s vision. What do we remember about the language used by that Administration in the moments leading up to ...