Christine Schutt, the author of two short story collections and two novels, was one of the last writers Gordon Lish published before he left Knopf. Her early books bear the strong imprint of the Lish method; her later books tell a story of evolving from it. More…
In Richard Rorty: The Making of an American Philosopher, the young sociologist Neil Gross has tried to use Rorty’s intellectual biography—his transformation from a philosopher working primarily within the narrow Anglophone analytic tradition to a digressive, itinerant intellectual on the model of his pragmatist hero, John Dewey—as a case study in an argument against certain kinds of piety. More…
Enthusiastic photoshopping has aided a transformation: Gone are the freckles and downy arm hairs of the predecessors. Breasts are surgically standardized; gym routines and spray tans produce identically toned and tinted bodies. Girls of all ethnicities blend together into one latte-colored woman, and the result looks computer-generated. More…
You don’t have to be Christian to appreciate Robinson—her work, while close to theology, comes down on the side of poetry, aspiring only to assent, not ultimate truth—but a knowledge of the faith’s dying words and urgent messages may well be required to get her meaning. More…
You would be forgiven, upon reading the negative reviews of Tony Judt’s Reappraisals, for thinking that Judt’s latest book was a Kassam rocket of scorn and derision directed at the state of Israel. Imagine your surprise when on cracking the spine of Reappraisals you find all of three essays, out of twenty-four, dedicated to Israel and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. More…
In n+1, we never wanted to run book reviews. Our purpose was to print the long arguments—unexpected flashes—wild visions that mattered to us, but that no one else would publish, naked as they came. “You need a peg to hang that on. How about a new book on Daniel Bell?” A generation hid its real ideas in book reviews, the way previous generations, wary of the Inquisition, hid theirs in arcane tracts. More…
I tried to justify the contest and my participation in it. After all, I thought, the public voting at the end might encourage reading in a fun way. Though the contest may not encourage high literary culture, how can anyone be so snobbish as to argue that people shouldn’t be the arbiters of their own tastes? But I still felt queasy about participating. More…
