Archives for Lit Crit

I’ve just had the pleasure of writing about the work of Charles Robinson, a textual scholar at the University of Delaware. Working closely with Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein notebooks in the Bodleian Library at Oxford, Robinson has given us a new edition that strips out Percy Shelley’s edits, emendations, and “improvements.” And boy, are some of… Continue reading »

One of David Foster Wallace’s students has posted a copy of the syllabus Wallace used to teach an undergrad course on “Literary Interpretation.” The document makes more honest literary sense than most of the overbearing, over-reaching tributes we’ve had thrown at us since Wallace’s suicide: The goals of this section of E67 are to survey… Continue reading »

Surprise us sometime by not putting Philip Roth’s latest on the cover of the section. It would be okay. Really. (For yesterday’s section, I’d have gone with either the review of Asne Seierstad’s The Angel of Grozny or the review of Marilynne Robinson’s Home. Either would have been a more refreshing choice than Indigation.)

My former colleagues over at the Washington Post Book World are now blogging daily. Check it.

During my stint as a contributing editor at Book World, the phrase “minor novelist” used to get thrown around once in a while. I always hated it: It’s patronizing, and it’s almost always used by people who will never get around to writing a novel at all. (Though of course if they did it would… Continue reading »