on Mud and Stars: Travels in Russia with Pushkin, Tolstoy, and Other Geniuses of the Golden Age by Sara Wheeler
When characterizing the fiction of Ivan Turgenev in a review of Constance Garnett’s translation of The Two Friends and Other Stories for The Times Literary Supplement in December 1921, Virginia Woolf—as consummate a critic as she was a novelist—describes a scene in which people sit around “talking gently, sadly, charmingly,” but notes that Turgenev provides […]
Read MoreIN Summer 2020
on Lost Time: Lectures on Proust in a Soviet Prison Camp by Józef Czapski, translated from the French by Eric Karpeles
IN Spring 2019
Julian Barnes’s 1989 novel A History of the World in 10½ Chapters includes an essayistic meditation on love in which he brilliantly considers the meanings and ramifications of history and our tendency to turn life into a narrative: The history of the world? Just voices echoing in the dark; images that burn for a few […]
Read MoreIN Winter 2016
IN Fall 2014
Just Who Is This Oscar Wilde Person, Anyway? (on David M. Friedman’s Wilde in America: Oscar Wilde and the Invention of Modern Celebrity; Roy Morris Jr.’s Declaring His Genius: Oscar Wilde in North America; & Antony Edmonds’ Oscar Wilde’s Scandalous Summer: The 1894 Worthing Holiday and the Aftermath)
IN Summer 2015
When I studied abroad at Oxford as an undergraduate, I took a course on Ulysses. I ’d always wanted to read it, but I felt inadequate to its genius, for the act of reading Joyce’s novel brings with it heaps of intimidating baggage: the endless stream of critical appraisal; the stories concerning its publication; the well-known […]
Read MoreIN Spring 2015
