Review: Ron Chernow's “Mark Twain” Biography
“Fry was impossible to work with, mentally troubled, locked in himself,” Caldwell wrote. “But let us not forget that he was a prophet, too, and put himself in harm’s way to prevent the future he saw unrolling before him. Not the ideal person, maybe. But certainly the kind that every generation has always had too few of.”
Dara Horn • People Love Dead Jews: Reports from a Haunted Present
You don’t silence the part of you that sees the problems with the book, its errors, its moral malformations; neither do you silence the part of you that responds so warmly to that “utopian moment.”
Alan Jacobs • Breaking Bread with the Dead: A Reader's Guide to a More Tranquil Mind
In some ways, book reviewers, critics, book club hosts, readers, and even the writers themselves, are engaged in a long war against the idea of fiction itself, involving the reverse-engineering and geolocation of various hurts and harms in the psychology of the writer. We are, at least in America, a nation trained in the arts of literary analysis, ... See more