I used to have a reproduction of John Singer Sargent’s El Jaleo hanging on my wall. Its colors weren’t as vivid as those of the original. The dramatic lighting effects created on the canvas by Sargent were largely absent from the repro. And...
Some of William Faulkner’s remarks about his work are now almost as famous as some phrases in the work itself. He quoted Sherwood Anderson’s advice to him in New Orleans that he should go home and write about what he knew, that patch of...
The first full-dress, generally sympathetic biography of the 40th president of the United States is prefaced by the author’s declaration: “. . . I like and respect Ronald Reagan while remaining skeptical that his actions will achieve the...
This penultimate volume of the Virginia edition of Matthew Arnold’s letters covers the years 1879—1884.1879 was his 57th year and the 30th anniversary of the publication of The Strayed Reveller and Other Poems, his debut as a poet. Since...
PoMo petrifaction has entered into contemporary fiction in an interesting way. Those American writers associated with the postmodern—John Earth, Thomas Pynchon, Robert Coover, John Hawkes, William Gaddis, and so on—are all well over 40...
We like to think of the law as providing the comfort of fairness and certainty. This is a story about the uncomfortable way law is made in America and the resulting elusiveness of certainty and fairness in our law. The course this...
But disorderliness does not mean that the essays and the volume as a whole have no continuity or coherence. As an index would have shown (alas, there is none, but more on this absence later), names and topics recur throughout Melodies...
“I won a ticket for a dream house,” my mother tells me on the phone. “It cost a hundred dollars to buy. It’s a gorgeous house. Brand new and big big. If I win, I’ll give it to you. Then you and Allen can move here and live in it.”
