I was down at the Friends of the Library sale again. A big literature anthology called to me from the shelf, “Hey you. Six hundred pages of Kazakh poetry here, hardbound, commissioned by the Ministry of Culture and Sport of the Republic of Kazakhstan, by the dictate of Elbasy Nursultan Nazarbayev, […]
It was a good day for The Common Reader on December 10, 2024, when the inaugural Gerald Early Distinguished Professor in Arts & Sciences, Dwight McBride, was installed in a ceremony on campus at Washington University in St. Louis. Chancellor Martin called the ceremony “a profound testament to friendship, scholarship, and the […]
Rory came over again from the old place. His wife had been gone three weeks this time, and he would drive to the airport to get her after we ate pork nachos. We have known each other for twenty-five years. To kill time, we talked about writing for a platform on […]
Capitalizing on Christmas lost its shame so long ago that we often feel almost duty-bound to return the holiday to its Christian roots in search of what we nebulously acknowledge as meaning. This narrow pursuit denies Christmas’s celebrants in two ways: first, by blinding us to the holiday’s pagan origins and customs; […]
Spoilers throughout. Deserved spoilers, maybe even a tad vengeful, because Playground humbled me on so many levels at once. First and most happily, Richard Powers’s descriptions of the strange, almost unfathomable beauty beneath the sea are the most lyrical and engaging I have ever read. As a boy, he wanted to be an […]
In the 2024 presidential race run-up, Kamala Harris supporters took solace in the prediction of Allan Lichtman and his famous election forecasting system built around thirteen “keys” to the White House. A historian and professor emeritus at American University, Lichtman had correctly predicted all but one presidential race since 1984. Lichtman […]
I, you, he, she, it, we, they, them, us, him, her, his, hers, its, theirs, ours, yours. Strike them from your (this is hard already) vocabulary. A radical suggestion, but it came to me with some urgency when I pieced together all the harm they do. First, my Jewish husband said, “I support […]
Climbing to the fourth floor of Saint Louis University’s Verhaegen Hall, we dragged chairs into a tight circle in Belden Lane’s dusty, book-lined office and unpacked wine, cheese, crackers, apples. Then we spent an hour or two talking about what we were writing, wanting to write, thinking about, wondering. Three men, two women, […]
“A respected novelist while alive, in death Bolaño has soared to cult status.” Whoever wrote that for Newsweek was not exaggerating. Though Roberto Bolaño’s name does not glide off most Midwestern tongues, those who know his work are fervent in their praise. Now Picador intends to expand that cult by reissuing Bolaño’s books, […]
Bill Gass would have turned 100 this year, and colleagues, family, friends, and admirers held a centenary celebration of his life and work last week here at Washington University, where Gass was a professor of philosophy for 30 years. (He died at 93.) He was, as everyone notes, known more widely as […]
