Good Neighbors (on Wolfram Eilenberger’s Time of the Magicians: Wittgenstein, Benjamin, Cassirer, Heidegger, and the Decade That Reinvented Philosophy, translated from the German by Shaun Whiteside, and Claire Messud’s Kant’s Little Prussian Head and Other Reasons Why I Write: An Autobiography in Essays)
Wolfram Eilenberger’s Time of the Magicians features a library that seems like an academic’s version of Borges’s Babel or Zafron’s Cemetery of Forgotten Books. In the Warburg Library in Hamburg, philosopher Ernst Cassirer found his ideal domain. Although the collection contained “several tens of thousands of rare studies in intellectual and scientific history,” what made […]
Read MoreIN Summer 2021
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
