At the Daily Beast William Giraldi reviews Adam Kirsch’s Why Trilling Matters.
At a time when many American publications employ pedestrian reviewers to scribble personal-pronoun-obsessed book reports, Adam Kirsch remains a blesséd throwback to the great poet-critic-intellectuals of yore—T.S. Eliot, Robert Penn Warren, Randall Jarrell, Conrad Aiken, R.P Blackmur, Yvor Winters—who brought to bear in every essay what Hyman nicely dubbed “a fearful assumption of personal capacity.”
Stuart Jeffries’s obituary of Gilbert Adair appears in the Guardian.
For the New York Times, Alex Williams visits The New Inquiry.
Tim Barker, a junior at Columbia, said he was drawn to the salons for the chance to “discuss ideas at an extremely high level, without worrying about status or material support of traditional institutions: publishing houses or universities.” He added, though, that while he aspires to be a history professor, he was “extremely conscious of the contraction of job opportunities” in publishing and academia.
Inside the bookstore, however, the turmoil of the outside world seemed far away. The lights were low, the conversation crackling.
“This is my fantasy: a room full of books, people talking about books — it smells like books,” explained Ms. Chapman, the journal’s literary editor. “It’s the literary community that I had read about when I was younger. It’s Moveable Feast-type stuff.”
Spain’s El País declares a worldwide era of crisis in literary criticism.
In the Los Angeles Review of Books, Scott Esposito critiques Jesse Ball.
In the Guardian Hari Kunzru ponders the death of postmodernism.
At Salon Erin Keane examines the complications that arise when novelists double as book critics.
For writers who both produce and critique, danger lurks on both sides of the desk. A bad, or even lukewarm, review can cost an author sales, reputation, exposure. But panning a peer can hurt the reviewer, too.
At Slate Michael Agger reviews Are You Serious? by Lee Siegel.
What Siegel sees in Updike’s story is an anxiety about the state of the novel: Updikean seriousness stood in contrast to the decline of the novel’s seriousness—its loss of cultural importance. We are still serious about movies and music, in the sense that people are moved to discuss and debate them, but less so about literature. Siegel’s challenge: Name a novel that has moved you in the last year as a novel did in high school or college. The new generation’s disdain for Updike was given more fuel by his dimissal of the Internet, which he called an “electronic anthill.” The pounding that Updike took belied a deeper concern: It’s easier to criticize a fogey-ish stance than it is to reinvigorate the novel—to make it serious again.
