In a 1996 Harper’s article, then-obscure novelist Jonathan Franzen made what has since become a much-publicized boast. He claimed that his next novel—his third—would combine social commentary with memorable characters,…
For several months after my friend Elizabeth died, when I was sixteen, I would be awakened in the middle of the night by the feeling of a nearby shape. Not…
While the title creature of Philip Roth’s The Dying Animal is drawn from a Yeats poem, a gimlet-eyed reader might attribute the reference to the dead horse that Roth continues…
At sixty-one years of age, the South African novelist J.M. Coetzee has crafted several treasures of contemporary fiction, including his most recent novel, Disgrace. The only author ever to win…
Something about Joan Didion’s writing makes me almost believe every word. She’s so acridly disarming, so apparently prescient in her observations on American political life that I found myself doubting…
Amitav Ghosh occupies a rather curious place in the landscape of contemporary English-language authors from the Indian subcontinent. At fifty-five years of age, he can’t be classed with the younger…
It is Martin Luther King, Jr. Day at Yale. I am attending one of the accompanying lectures when a graduate student comes up to me, an Asian American, and asks…
Everyone agrees that America’s cities are in trouble. The familiar complaints about “urban blight” and overcrowded slums now seem almost quaint compared to the actual problem of wholesale desertion: the…
Looking Backward A compendium of the early work of an American literary master In his 1986 introduction to a set of Paris Review interviews, John Updike quoted Philip Roth: “What…
Bipartisan Reading Incisive accounts of the Democratic and Republican parties When the tenor of politics is inflamed, partisan bickering precludes historical perspective. As attacks and recriminations pile up, politicians and…
Peter Ibbetson