I read Kate Bolick’s book Spinster today. My initial, jerky instinct was to write a one sentence review: “In Spinster, Kate Bolick spends 300 pages on what she claims to not be hung up about.” But that’s rude, although I do think that tension animates the book. Bolick’s desire, it seems to me, is to scratch an itch […]

The internet, we are all expected to believe, is revolutionary, in several different meanings of the term. In the span of a decade or two, the digitally-connected technologies we refer to as the internet expanded from being populated by a few thousand academics, government officials, and cultish amateurs to a ubiquitous part of contemporary life. […]

Best Thing Having to do with Jonathan Franzen: that Ben Marcus Harper’s essay This essay by Ben Marcus in which he destroys Franzen’s weird, destructive, dumb war on experimental fiction and William Gaddis. So good, so richly deserved. Really Very Good: The Corrections  That was a good’un. Grown on me a lot. Seriously. You should […]

I really need to thank Alyssa Rosenberg for her sympathetic, helpful review of Kerry Howley’s new book. Because for weeks, I just did not know what to do with this book, guys. I guess I will give you the tl;dr version upfront: this is a project that I admire, in many ways, that I frequently hated reading. […]

Emily Gould is a talented young writer. Here are my thoughts on her first novel, Friendship. “What are your grandest aspirations?” That’s a question on a job application that stymies one of the main characters, Bev, near the very beginning of Gould’s book. If it challenges Bev, it animates Friendship. The question hangs around in the back […]

I apologize in advance, because I am going to talk about a piece that I have not yet read. To be clear, I do not intend to read Megan McArdle’s “Piketty’s Tax Hikes Won’t Help the Middle Class.” I’m afraid that I can’t wait to weigh in — not on the review itself, but on […]

I have a review of The Book of Matt, a reported investigation into the murder of Matthew Shepard and the legend that has grown in its aftermath, over at The New Inquiry today. Please check it out. I imagine it’ll provoke a fight, which I look forward to. My basic stance is simple. 1. Stephen Jimenez’s book, […]

Everyday Genres: Writing Assignments Across the Disciplines, by Mary Soliday, Southern Illinois University Press, 2011.  Writing Across the Curriculum and Writing in the Disciplines (WAC and WID) represent both opportunity and challenge to traditional writing programs. Opportunity, because they can demonstrate the value of our research and the expertise of our instructors to other parts […]