Puppets and Portraits: Two Victorians
In “The Dreams of Mrs. Flintwinch thicken,” a short chapter of Charles Dickens’ Little Dorrit (1857), the kind-hearted Arthur Clennam visits his childhood home....
“Our Town” in The City
On the threshold between two unchosen ways of life - one of commitments, the other of choices. Both give rise to discontents, but ours today makes them a way of life.
Canon Fodder I: Uncle Remus
New Castle, Kentucky. We can't talk about the economy all the time, or anyway I can't. Today instead I want to sing a song of the...
Crolier Than Thou
Almost lost among the bicentennial celebrations of Lincoln’s and Darwin’s births is the centenary of Herbert Croly’s The Promise of American Life, a child...
Novel, Myth, Reality: An Anatomy of Make-Believe
For Maureen Drdak,
If she will accept it as part of our good conversation.
Devon, PA. I shall be returning to the following subject frequently in the next...
On a Sculpture by Herbert Adams
For Adams and his peers the trade of art must have itself seemed an imported thing: threatening, rarified, and set apart like thorned peaks of the Swiss Alps rupturing above the folded skin of clouds.
George A. Panichas, RIP
George A. Panichas, literary critic and longtime editor of Modern Age, has died at the age of 79.
Nowheresville
This post is dangerously close to turf already claimed by Bill Kaufman and Jason Peters. But the appeal of Richard Russo is so strong...
Going Home
The South, repatriated ex-slave Ned Douglass lectured his Louisiana neighbors in Ernest J. Gaines’s novel The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman, is “yours because...
Pondering St. Francisville, Gilead, and our Stories of Place
Jeremy Beer's recent review of The Little Way of Ruthie Leming leads me to once again reflect upon Rod Dreher's excellent book (about which...