Book Review: History of a Pleasure Seeker
/In Richard Mason's latest novel, a handsome, articulate young man takes a job with a wealthy family as tutor for their troubled son
Read MoreCato of the Antipodes
/Of his 60+ books, one in particular, The United States, is best representative of his work as a whole and, by readers, best loved. On the Collected Essays of Gore Vidal.
Read MoreAbandonment, Richness, Surprise
/Impressionistic, idiosyncratic, unsubstantiated: Virginia Woolf's literary essays challenge us to rethink, not just our experience of reading, but our expectations of criticism itself.
Read MoreShore to Shore
/For two generations, the great American critic and man of letters Edmund Wilson has been instructing and delighting his readers - and inspiring some of them to become critics themselves.
Read MoreQueen Elizabeth the First
/Elizabeth Hardwick joined the literary world of mid-20th century Manhattan with every intention of making her mark upon it - which she did, in review after inimitable review, taking American book-discourse to levels and places it had never reached before
Read MoreThe Tigers of Wrath
/Where would Lionel Trilling, godfather of the liberal imagination, fit into our contemporary culture of ideas? And how much of that culture is of his making?
Read MoreThe Knower and the Sayer
/Most criticism is reactive, but in his essay "The Poet," Ralph Waldo Emerson proved prophetic. He set a challenge and Walt Whitman took him up on it.
Read MoreActs of Rendition
/Richard Poirier was one of the great bridge-builders--his sorely neglected classic A World Elsewhere drew upon the writing of Emerson but presciently anticipated the postmodernist ideas that would soon enter the mainstream.
Read MoreHow Pleasant to Know Mr. Lane
/The best of Anthony Lane's many New Yorker reviews and essays were collected in Nobody's Perfect, a big volume that amply displays this writer's wit and subtlety.
Read MoreIt's a Mystery: A Talent for Deception
/Agatha Christie has received praise from wide and varied corners, and mystery columnist Irma Heldman adds to the chorus with this retrospective on the life and work of the Queen of Crime.
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