In the next thrilling Modern Library installment, our intrepid reader reads Kipling’s major novel and is troubled by the sour and regressive taint.
In this latest Modern Library essay, we offer our hostile thoughts on Merchant Ivory films, contemplate how many Cecil Vyse types were killed off during the war, and investigate E.M. Forster’s humanity.
The latest Modern Library Reading Challenge essay responds to claims that Evelyn Waugh was “a bi-curious hipster boyfriend,” investigates the mysterious relationship between Charles and Sebastian, and gets into cultural dichotomies.
In this latest Modern Library Reading Challenge essay, our intrepid reader is awestruck by Saul Bellow’s masterpiece and what it says about stretching the soul.
A Thursday night report of a KGB bar reading featuring Jürgen Fauth, Tom Perrotta, and Mark Leyner.
In the latest Modern Library Reading Challenge installment, our intrepid reader dishes on his book club days, wrestles with Wallace Stegner’s plagiarism, and examines the relationship between history and personal mythology.
In the latest Modern Library Reading Challenge installment, Our Correspondent ponders whether VS Naipaul can ever overcome his monstrous tendencies.
In this latest Modern Library Reading Challenge Essay, our intrepid reader discovers how Elizabeth Bowen’s cruelty somehow affirms unanticipated pockets of sanguinity.
The above screenshot is from a Three’s Company episode called “The Lifesaver,” in which even the dimwitted Chrissy Snow could be seen reading a book….
Words, being silly little units of language reflecting emotional and synaptic activities, are subject to frequent bursts of growth which are known to frustrate the…
The Times‘s Ben Macintyre has mangled his mind in a senseless shower of his own hysteria. The Internet, he writes, is killing storytelling. I could…
A good book is one that we don’t actually read. And a good book is one that a writer doesn’t actually write. It’s what makes…
If you are a humorless books editor packing mundanities (while also resorting to the groundless Sven Birkerts-style grumbling about online interlopers who express more enthusiasm…
Over the weekend, the Chicago Sun-Times ran a summer reading preview in which it asked many of its contributors about books that they were looking…
The morning started off with Bob Stein, founder and co-director of The Institute for the Future of the Book. It’s worth pointing out that for…
Reports of the Web’s harmful effects upon reading habits have been greatly overstated. Two recent online projects sufficiently demonstrate that we’re only just beginning to…
The scholar and the world! The endless strife, The discord in the harmonies of life! The love of learning, the sequestered nooks, And all the…
Displaying the kind of literary hubris that David Markson once skewered in This is Not a Novel (“See Professor Bloom read the 1961 corrected and…
The Telegraph‘s Peter Robins has, to my great astonishment, followed up on my suggestion of asking book critics what they read for fun. Robins has…
He was a passionate devotee of David Foster Wallace, Rick Moody, and many others who he sensed were writing the Great American Novel. He made…
I hope to find more time to write at length about Charles Baxter’s extraordinary novel, The Soul Thief. Beyond Baxter nailing the relationship of “God…
So here’s a list on how to become a lifetime reader. But this series of suggestions doesn’t perform true justice for the truly hard-core. Because…
PW‘s Douglas Wolk reports on some of the successful efforts to turn average Joes and Janes into successful comic book regulars. Among one of the…
Many names, including George Bush (while Texas governor) and Jerry Lewis’s recommendation of The Fountainhead: “It’s a very profound book…Makes you think!” Somehow I’m not…
David Lodge featured the game “Humiliation” in his book, Changing Places, and it looks like James Tata is raising the stakes, bolding the NYT‘s “Best…
No, Mr. Brownlee, you are missing the point. The Book Mistress’s response on how to read Mark Z. Danielewski’s House of Leaves is a perfectly…
Washington Post: “‘You’re right. The book is long,’ I said. ‘But once you start this one, you won’t be able to put it down, right…
John Freeman: “The sentences run to typical Pynchonian length, and the typeface is alarmingly small. One can spend 20 hours of a weekend reading this…
Jessa Crispin opines that Peter Boxall’s list is well-balanced and makes efforts to get in touch with Boxall himself. For what it’s worth, I’ve only…
William Grimes: “Reading becomes information processing. The sheer bliss of the childhood reading experience comes to seem like a lost Eden, recaptured only in thrilling…