Links:

Reviews:

• In our sister publication on the Hudson, Clare Bucknell reviews a book about pedantry (On Pedantry: A Cultural History of the Know-It-All, by Arnoud S. Q. Visser, 2025) [An Upcoming book in WRB—Nov. 1, 2025; we linked to an earlier review in WRB—Dec. 3, 2025.]:

  The essay is full of subtle connections between the “base” concerns of those who profess learning and the shape that learning has begun to take. “The care and fees of our parents,” Montaigne observes, “aim only at furnishing our heads with knowledge”—maximally, such that it “is passed from hand to hand with only one end in view: to show it off, to put into our accounts to entertain others with it, as though it were merely counters, useful for totting up and producing statements.” Students are taught to quote for quotation’s sake, parading intellectual wares that aren’t theirs: “Do I wish to fortify myself against fear of death? Then I do it at Seneca’s expense. Do I want to console myself or somebody else? Then I borrow from Cicero.” The sting here is in the metaphors. Noblemen, it’s suggested, don’t typically worry over their accounts, tot things up, or borrow from others. The impression is of a vulgar intellectual culture, presided over by vulgar men, in which more is more and you can never have enough knowledge to wave in people’s faces. Aretino’s pedantic tutor, incapable of using one word where many are possible, falls into the same trap: to him, lists of memorized exempla are like “embroidery” or precious jewels, “so many pearls,” “sapphires,” “rubies.”

  [Polonius: “Madam, I swear I use no art at all.”

  Among the behaviors that have been called pedantic at one time or another are “debating aggressively in public, teaching in an obnoxious manner, neglecting one’s wife, dressing badly, quoting poetry at parties.” Having done all of these except neglect my wife (and that omission, no doubt, comes down to not having a wife to neglect), it’s a good thing for me that being the Managing Editor of the Washington Review of Books came along when it did. Even if Montaigne wouldn’t like all the quotations. —Steve]

• In The Nation, Walker Rutter-Bowman reviews a novel about buying a theater (Seeing Further, by Esther Kinsky, translated from the German by Caroline Schmidt, 2024) [We linked to an earlier review in WRB—Nov. 13, 2024.]:

  Despite the narrator’s efforts, however, a revived community of cinema is never realized. Sixteen years pass between the theater’s closing and the novel’s epilogue, in which she returns to the Alföld. The narrator has seen cinemas die all across Europe, and now she wishes to revisit her twice-dead theater. “I wanted to see the multi-seated temple of moving images in its abandoned state again,” she confesses, “to ask questions from the remove of years, either to myself or to the cinema auditorium, deserted as it was, and sound out the town’s slumped promises once again, to listen out for signs of life, for the silence.” The eulogy for the institution that once attracted and honed the attention of the people gives way to something more complicated. On the one hand, the narrator, like the Romantics, valorizes the ruins, seeing in the institution’s death another kind of art. But on the other, this leads to a sense of self-satisfaction: that she was one of the select few who could value this past. Her complaints about “the illusory convenience of continually available data” and “the feeble opinion that it’s enough to watch digitalized images flicker across any old screen” have a self-righteous, sullen tone.

  [As if the Romantics didn’t also have a sense of self-satisfaction. —Steve]

• In the Journal, Henry Hitchings reviews a book about translating Shakespeare (If This Be Magic: The Unlikely Art of Shakespeare in Translation, by Daniel Hahn, April 21) [An Upcoming book in WRB—Apr. 15, 2026.]:

  One tenacious fallacy about Shakespeare is that his speeches are always clotted with gargantuan words; Macbeth’s “multitudinous seas incarnadine” is a classic example. Yet often it is the compactness of Shakespeare’s writing that troubles translators. Romeo’s line, “Thy drugs are quick. Thus with a kiss I die,” or Lear’s verdict on Cordelia, “I know when one is dead and when one lives; / She’s dead as earth,” compress a huge amount into a string of monosyllables. Such succinctness doesn’t travel easily.

  To demonstrate this, Mr. Hahn acquires copies of “My First Hundred Words” in eight languages. In English, 75 of the 100 are a single syllable. In Italian and Greek, by contrast, 99 contain at least two syllables. For translators of Shakespeare working in those languages, the challenge is immediately apparent.

  [The words after “multitudinous seas incarnadine” are “making the green one red,” as if Shakespeare felt a need to gloss the gargantuan words. —Steve]

• In The New Yorker, reviews Wolfgang Koeppen’s “trilogy of failure” (Pigeons on the Grass, 1951, translated from the German by Michael Hofmann, 2020; The Hothouse, 1953, translated from the German by Michael Hofmann, 1991, May 5; and Death in Rome, 1954, translated from the German by Michael Hofmann, 1992, May 5):

  Siegfried is largely resigned to the departure of the old gods and the innocent past they represent. Still, every so often, Koeppen’s creations wonder whether divinity could be lurking where they least expect it. Siegfried is not religious, but he lights a candle in a church and offers it up to an “unknown saint.” Maybe this figure “is even living in our midst, maybe he’s someone we pass on the street, maybe he’s the newspaper vendor in the passage shouting out the headlines.” On the book’s first page, Koeppen asks, “And what about great Jupiter? Is he here in our midst? Could he be the fellow in the Amex office, or the rep for the German-European Travel Agency?” In one mood, it is a ridiculous conjecture, a mockery. In another, it is a fleeting and fragile but decidedly real possibility.

  For the most part, the trilogy of failure casts history as an inexorable force: “water flowing through the old Roman pipes” and sweeping us along with it, a “stream . . . noisily rushing past,” a guide leading a blind man. And yet the very same characters who are most entangled in history’s meshes sometimes briefly wriggle free. In one moment in Pigeons on the Grass, the sun is setting: “The people were released from their factories and shops, and they weren’t yet caught up in the demands of their ordinary lives and the expectations of family. The world hung in the balance. For a moment, everything seemed possible.” Despite its cynicism, Koeppen’s trilogy is full of such moments, of cracks in the edifice of things, of what you might call grace.

• In The American Scholar, Joseph Horowitz reviews a collection of Michael Steinberg’s music criticism (Defending the Music: Michael Steinberg at the Boston Globe, 1964–1976, edited by Susan Feder, Jacob Jahiel, and Marc Mandel, April 7):

  Between the lines, Steinberg’s reviews confide increasing dissatisfaction with his job. In “The Power of Critics” (April 21, 1974), he writes to a disgruntled soprano unhappy with a review: “The critic can’t, for the sake of supporting a good cause, pretend to an enthusiasm he doesn’t feel. I wish it were otherwise. … Of course critics hope and like to persuade. We write to persuade, but even more to stimulate, to interest, to point out, to make people think. It’s a lot like teaching.” Celebrating the 100th anniversary of Koussevitzky’s birth (July 21, 1974), he peruses a career that mattered: “Koussevitzky was the first to see that an orchestra was more than a collection of players who gave concerts regularly, that it could be the nucleus of a musical university.” Steinberg took a leave of absence in 1975–76 to write a book about Elliott Carter—an unfinished project. He announced his resignation on September 19, 1976, in a low-key essay including a barbed aside: “By and large, journalistic criticism continues an irritant and a depressant.”

  [Before this Horowitz quotes Steinberg:

  It occurred to me that artists’ agents must be among the few people who care about keeping the review as an institution alive. It helps them sell, or they think it does. Other than that, who needs it? I submit that nobody does, really. . . . We must now question the assumption traditional to American musical journalism, the assumption that every concert—or as many as space in the paper and availability of writers permit—is followed by a review.

  I shall not go to fewer concerts. . . . I do, however, want to find a new texture for these pages. . . . The traditional commitment to the review as the chief journalistic and critical form has . . . locked us into writing about many things that were not worth writing about.

  Steinberg, writing in 1973, predicts much of our recent agita about book reviews with his complaint that the standard 800-word review was dead about music then. But I think it is not the review as such that “locked us into writing about many things that were not worth writing about”—the formulaic 800-word review where you can Mad Libs 750 of the words did that. As Steinberg says, we need a new texture.

  But more about this in Critical notes below; can’t have too much navel-gazing too high up in the newsletter. —Steve]

N.B.:

• People used to get on soapboxes in this country.

• People are once again keeping score at baseball games in this country.

• “What mending a suit taught me about masculinity”

• New issues:

  • Bookforum Spring 2026

  • The New Criterion Volume 44, Number 9 / May 2026

Poem:

“The Mower to the Glow-Worms” by Andrew Marvell

Ye living lamps, by whose dear light
The nightingale does sit so late,
And studying all the summer night,
Her matchless songs does meditate;

Ye country comets, that portend
No war nor prince’s funeral,
Shining unto no higher end
Than to presage the grass’s fall;

Ye glow-worms, whose officious flame
To wand’ring mowers shows the way,
That in the night have lost their aim,
And after foolish fires do stray;

Your courteous lights in vain you waste,
Since Juliana here is come,
For she my mind hath so displac’d
That I shall never find my home.

[In Julius Caesar Calpurnia says that “When beggars die there are no comets seen; / The heavens themselves blaze forth the death of princes.” In pastoral, though, even the grasses get comets when they die.

The glow-worms turn out to be the only fixed thing in the poem. Everything else is shadowy, even violent. In this instability the poem is similar to Horace’s Odes 4.12, from which Marvell derives much of his non-glow-worm imagery. The nightingale is there, in a reference to the myth of Philomela and Procne: Ityn flebiliter gemens, / infelix avis (“the unfortunate bird, mournfully weeping ‘Itys.’”) The grasses are there; Horace mentions shepherds singing their songs in tenero gramine, “in soft grasses.” And the darkness and fire are there, combined into the nigrorum . . . ignium (literally “dark fire,” but implying the funeral pyre). —Steve]

Upcoming books:

Out April 30:

University of Chicago Press: Bramble by Susan Stewart

Graywolf Press | May 5

This Poor Book: A Poem
by Fanny Howe

From the publisher: For decades, Fanny Howe has been our great poet of spirit and conscience, dislocation and bewilderment. In This Poor Book, completed just before her death, she has gathered a selection of poems and excerpts from the last thirty years, including new and revised poems, and has arranged them into an astonishing singular poem. Across this brilliant reconfiguration of her work, we follow the poet as seeker, both faithful and foolish, searching for language and existence beyond the machines of economy, judgment, and war. Howe interrogates the contradiction and violence of the twenty-first century, the misbegotten experiences that have given rise to a culture of authority and adulthood rather than one of innocence and childhood.

These spare lyrical shards move with a jagged but persistent direction—leading us between doubt and belief and toward Howe’s enduring vision for a life of humility, justice, and imagination.

Also out Tuesday:

Astra House: Offseason: A Novel by Avigayl Sharp

OR Books: American Trickster: The Hidden Lives of Carlos Castaneda by Ru Marshall

What we’re reading:

Steve read a collection of Martin Amis’ essays (The Rub of Time: Essays and Reportage, 1994–2017, February) and started on his Koba the Dread: Laughter and the Twenty Million (2002, March). He also read through large parts of St. Augustine’s De doctrina Christiana to find the passage quoted below. [It turns out that ctrl-f-ing it for “words” and “signs” doesn’t narrow it down much. —Steve]

Critical notes:

• on difficult books:

  I guess my point here is that somebody who logs on to say they’re struggling with Toni Morrison is a billion times more valuable, to me, as a reader than somebody who is more sophisticated but cannot do the work of understanding the source of their own pleasure, instead pretending that reading Beloved is just another thing one can do that is no more demanding than any other thing. If you don’t want to be stuck having 101-level conversations about texts with newcomers, that’s your prerogative. (Neither do I.) What I see online, however, are conversations that are not even 101-level; they’re just talking shit in the hallway.

  [As John F. Kennedy said:

  We choose to read Beloved in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard; because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one we intend to win, and the others, too.

  I complained last week about the trend of talking about “friction” as good or bad without bothering to think about what any given piece of friction does when encountered. Because slapping labels on things is easy, and thinking is hard, something similar happens with “difficulty.” The people BDM is talking about here have decided that “difficulty” is a bad word and therefore anything they like must not be difficult. Now, people use words in all kinds of ways, but I would prefer not to reduce every adjective to an elevated way of saying “good” or “bad.” This is the end result, though, of your main engagement with art coming from fighting with a person you encountered once or maybe made up in your head, as BDM says:

  If I were to armchair speculate about this kind of person’s psychology—and I am doing that—I’d say that at some formative time they became defensive about their tastes, in particular over being accused of being pretentious and not really enjoying what they said they enjoyed. This defensiveness calcified over time into a feeling that reading modernist literature or watching art films can’t be difficult—rather than what I think is the more productive position of “I enjoy doing difficult things.”

  To quote another president, “if you’re explaining, you’re losing.” If you’re explaining to somebody who called you pretentious on the Internet once and hasn’t thought about you ever since, you’re definitely losing. —Steve]

• on writerly paranoia:

  The lineaments of these psychoses are writerly, or more precisely readerly-writerly. The nature of their psychoses is that they read their environments with extraordinary attention, taking random and non-deictic signifiers as personally meaningful and deictic: a decoding of the various texts that surround; and then all three write their experience into their fiction and non-fiction. Spark was always fascinated by codes and decoding, by secrets and blackmail, ciphers and spies, which occur and reoccur in her novels, and she wrote her life into her fiction repeatedly. Dick wrote “2-3-74” into his VALIS trilogy, where he himself appears under the pseudonym Horselover Fat. Waugh wrote Gillbert Pinfold. Madness as close-reading.

  The point is that these psychotic breakdowns are intensifications of being a writer. I have never had a psychotic or schizoid interlude like these three, but in milder form I am certainly familiar with their shape of them, with the compulsion to “read” the world, and other texts, in immense, personalised and perhaps productive ways.

  • on literacy:

    In fact, the written word is a kind of madness. It tears you out of your actual context and deposits you in a world of bodiless abstractions. Lewis Mumford called it the “general starvation of the mind,” in which actual sensuous knowledge of the world is replaced by “mere literacy, the ability to read signs.” In late medieval Europe, the printing press and the beginnings of mass literacy didn’t produce an age of sober reason, but an enormous explosion in all forms of mysticism and esotericism, astrology, divination, witchcraft, Neoplatonist sects and charismatic religious cults, some of them peaceful, some of them murderous. It’s not hard to see why. These doctrines usually centered around the idea that material facts are just an echo of mental processes; they would have made a lot of sense to people who’d just been traumatically ripped out of physical reality by the strange magic of the written word.

  • St. Augustine, in De doctrina Christiana (translated by James Shaw):

    For among men words have obtained far and away the chief place as a means of indicating the thoughts of the mind. . . . But the countless multitude of the signs through which men express their thoughts consist of words. For I have been able to put into words all those signs, the various classes of which I have briefly touched upon, but I could by no effort express words in terms of those signs.

    But because words pass away as soon as they strike upon the air, and last no longer than their sound, men have by means of letters formed signs of words. Thus the sounds of the voice are made visible to the eye, not of course as sounds, but by means of certain signs.

    [Signs within signs, signs for signs. —Steve]

  • Robert M. Durling, in “Petrarch’s Giovene Donna Sotto un Verde Lauro”:

    The image of Laura in the lover’s fantasy is an idol in a technical sense. It is an idol because he worships it instead of God, and meditates on it instead of on God; it is an idol in the technical psychological sense, and thus fashioned by the lover’s own faculties; metaphorically, it has been sculptured by his own hands; it is an idol because it is made out of wood, metal, and precious stones.

    [It is also an idol made out of words, and fashioned with words, and Petrarch in turning everything into words leaves nothing of himself but what he can convey in words; as the Psalmist says of idols, “they that make them are like unto them.”

    I think of Robert Browning’s bishop ordering his tomb at St. Praxed’s, creating in words both his own death and the monument supposed to endure beyond it. His corrupt idiot sons, as he knows, are going to betray him and skimp out on his monument; every dollar put towards dad’s tomb is a dollar not put towards various delights accessible to debauched princes of the Renaissance Church. All you get in the end is words, and they’d better be good ones (hence the bishop’s repeated mocking of Gandolf and his inferior Latin. He’s so owned.)

    Roberts, incidentally, had a good blog post about that poem a few years back, in which he mentions that

    John Ruskin later commented upon it in Modern Painters IV, praising Browning’s portrait of Renaissance Italy, “its worldliness, inconsistency, pride, hypocrisy, ignorance of itself, love of art, of luxury, and of good Latin. It is nearly all I said of the central Renaissance in thirty pages of The Stones of Venice put into as many lines, Browning’s being the antecedent work.”

    In Modern Painters IV Ruskin doesn’t print the whole thing: “I miss fragments here and there not needed for my purpose in the passage quoted, without putting asterisks, for I weaken the poem enough by the omissions, without spoiling it also by breaks.” That’s the business of literary criticism for you—but not for Ruskin, who later wrote Browning a letter opening with

    After all, you are in my debt for a letter you know, so really I am not quite so bad as I appear to myself thinking just now how I have been treating you. I was so ashamed of the way I had mangled that poem of yours that I dared not look you even by letter in the face for some time afterwards.

    They don’t make guys like that anymore. —Steve]

• [Speaking of Renaissance Italy, and to return to my promised commentary about Michael Steinberg’s lamenting the state of the review: one of the more depressing things I’ve read in the past few years was someone (I want to say ) tweeting that during the Italian Renaissance the population of Florence was about one hundred thousand. The population of the whole of Italy was several million. These numbers are comparable to the current population of South Bend, Indiana and the whole of Indiana, respectively. The United States has many more people than Renaissance Italy; they possess material wealth and technological marvels that Lorenzo the Magnificent would never have dreamed; there has always been enough religious, political, and economic turmoil in this country to inspire new thinking and new art, and yet—how did they do it? What are we not doing?

  These are the questions looming behind every worry about the end of criticism. The answer, we suspect, has something to do with “the audience,” since everything else is the same or points in the favor of the modern-day United States. I don’t mean merely in terms of number, although having more people patronize the arts is better than having fewer. (Subscribe to the WRB!) The real fear, I think, comes in when critics wonder if their work is actually doing anything at all to create, to form, to shape, to educate an audience. (Steinberg is so down on formulaic reviews of uninteresting concerts because he knows they don’t.) The best criticism is always reaching out to the reader, including them in the critic’s ongoing education, and is theoretically accessible to anyone. It wants to reach everyone. But what’s the point of teaching in an empty classroom? —Steve]

If his inmost heart could have been laid open, there would have been discovered that dream of managing to edit the Washington Review of Books, which, dream as it is, is more powerful than a thousand realities.

Links:

• In Socrates on the Beach, Bennett Sims on person and ending:

  There’s a larger lesson here, I think, about endings: how a story’s most unexpected and necessary developments can be emergent properties of its style; how, whenever you hit a wall (or some wallpaper) in a draft, the path forward may already have been prepared somewhere behind you. We can almost imagine Gilman arriving at “in spite of you and Jane” in this way. We can imagine her, for instance, drafting the line “I’ve got out at last” and getting stuck on it: it’s good, she feels, but merely good, the ending is still missing something. We can imagine her reading over the story from the beginning, pausing at “what is one to do?”, and gradually coming to see it: how the answer to this question—the answer to the ending—is embedded in the form of the question itself, in its shift to 3rd-person. That is what one is to do. And so we can imagine Gilman’s thrill in returning to the final paragraph and adding “in spite of you and Jane.” Now that that line has been written . . . now the story can end.

Reviews:

• Two in our sister publication on the sweet Thames:

  • Ian Penman reviews a book about the Beach Boys (Surf’s Up: Brian WIlson and the Beach Boys, by Peter Doggett, 2025 in the UK)

    The progression from the Beach Boys’ early commodity pop to Pet Sounds (1966) to SMiLE (1967) seems to mirror a broader cultural shift: clean-cut collegiate larks to reefer madness to psychedelic revelation. One of the biggest distributors of LSD in California was a gang of working-class ex-surfers called the Brotherhood of Eternal Love, who merged Eastern mysticism with psychonaut politics and heavy-duty illegality. Chasing the white light and the dark sun. Chasing the memory of a high that will never be recaptured. John Milius’s wistful Big Wednesday (1978), set between 1962 and 1974, tracks the difficult transition to adulthood of three young surfers. Offscreen, two of the film’s lead actors—Gary Busey and Jan-Michael Vincent—had their own gnarly difficulties. The dream of those early surfer-boy Beach Boys songs inculcated the promise of smiley teenage omnipotence. But how was that promise to be fulfilled in a culture that allowed too many men to drift through life as if it were indeed an “endless summer,” in which they never had to grow up or make amends or lose their appetite for self-distraction? By 1975 a hollowed-out, disconsolate Wilson had retreated to his bed, where the porous line between dream and reality washed away completely. The safe space of “In My Room” had become a sorry terminus: drawn blinds, junk food and an ogreish need for drugs, heroin included. A beached boy. Willful son to blotted-out sun.

    [Penman:

    He just ups and says out loud whatever’s on his mind or in his heart, without any masks or baffles or qualifications. A complicated tenderness, with no macho bluff. Which is the reason so many men feel close to Brian Wilson in a way they never do to Mick Jagger.

    Well, I feel closer to Jagger than to Wilson (not as if “Managing Editor prefers posturing and perverse intellectual to uncalculated naïf” will come as a surprise to regular readers of this newsletter). I say that to explain the source of my belief that Penman misstates the appeal of Wilson; or, at least, he’s wrong to identify this up and saying it with the lyrics. It’s in the music. Pet Sounds and SMiLE especially are the work of a genius with no real idea what he’s doing—nothing sounded like this before, and very little would ever sound like it again—and, because he doesn’t know what he’s doing and is working with no real model, he has nothing to fall back on besides his own belief that the sounds he’s putting together to convey his emotional state sound good. And he pulls it off. This achievement is far more moving than something like the lyrics of “Wouldn’t It Be Nice.” Plenty of ’60s rock has stupid lyrics, but none of it is as wrong about the world as that song’s attitude of “if I could just get married all my problems would go away.” —Steve]

  • reviews Ben Lerner’s latest (Transcription, April 7) [An Upcoming book in WRB—Apr. 1, 2026; we linked to earlier reviews there and in WRB—Apr. 8. 2026.]:

    Transcription is set in 2024, but Joe Biden is never mentioned, though the place where he funded a genocide is, and there’s a lot about Covid. It’s a novel about an older generation that is faltering and soon to be gone, dysfunctional youth and adults in between who are prone to fucking up (though dropping your phone in the sink is hardly a Hunter Biden-level fuck-up). Emmie’s failure to thrive might be an allegory for the novel, not this slender and subtle one, but the novel as a form, crowded out as it is by all those screens and other junk food, the broader culture contemplating offing itself in the name of AI. When Adam in Leaving the Atocha Station (2011) considers that the poetry he reads and wants to write could never effect a political revolution or overthrow the world economic system, it makes him want to swallow his year’s supply of white pills. I found all the stuff about phones and screen time in Transcription tedious and unoriginal, but I see its broader appeal. Novelists enjoy writing about these anxieties and people enjoy reading about them. They are relatable for now; Thomas likens phones to secular details in an icon painting: a newspaper, a pocketwatch, a tallow candle—details that can be burned off without a loss of meaning. That material seems to me the sugar-coating around a more bitter pill: a novel about mortality with strong suggestions of suicidal tendencies, themes that are difficult to address directly, subjects that wither with too much explanation or direct confession.

    [I talked at some length about the function in cultural criticism of people in obviously depraved relationships with their phones in WRB—Dec. 3, 2025; most of what I said there applies to novels as well. The self-abasement that is also self-exultation, the condemnations of self that are secretly condemnations of others, the elaborate ruses necessary to talk frankly about wanting to die—all this reminds me of The Fall by Camus:

    Covered with ashes, tearing my hair, my face scored by clawing but with piercing eyes, I stand before all humanity recapitulating my shames without losing sight of the effect I am producing, and saying: “I was the lowest of the low.” Then imperceptibly I pass from the “I” to the “we.” When I get to “This is what we are,” the trick has been played and I can tell them off. I am like them, to be sure; we are in the soup together. However, I have a superiority in that I know it and this gives me the right to speak. You see the advantage, I am sure. The more I accuse myself, the more I have a right to judge you. Even better, I provoke you into judging yourself, and this relieves me of that much of the burden. Ah, mon cher, we are odd, wretched creatures, and if we merely look back over our lives, there’s no lack of occasions to amaze and horrify ourselves.

    —Steve]

[Behind the paywall are even more links to the best and most interesting writing from the past few days, Upcoming books, What we’re reading, and Critical notes. Today’s specials:

• Why baseball fans are like that

• A Poem by John Donne, and whether Dr. Johnson was thinking of it when critiquing Lycidas

• New frontiers in Petrarchan self-obsession

If you’re interested in any of that, and if you want to support the WRB in making the lifelong task of literacy not take anyone’s entire day, please subscribe.

And if you’re already a subscriber, thank you very much. Why not share the WRB with your friends and acquaintances? The best way to support us is by subscribing, but the second-best is by sharing the WRB with other people. —Steve]

Read more

Links:

• In Liberties, David A. Bell on the book review:

  Although the general-interest book review had already assumed its mature modern form during the Enlightenment, the nineteenth and twentieth centuries brought major changes, notably thanks to the explosive expansion of book publishing itself. In 1749, the newly founded Monthly Review claimed it would report on all new books and pamphlets published in Great Britain, but already this goal was impossible to meet. By 1800, the expansion was forcing reviewers to specialize, which reduced the marvelously cosmopolitan range of the early review publications. (By 1800, no one in Europe other than a professional cleric was likely to come across reviews of a lexicon of the Hebrew psalms published in South Carolina.) In 1890, the British editor W. T. Stead could complain that there were not only too many books to read, but too many book reviews as well. He proposed a solution in the form of a publication called the Review of Reviews that provided capsule summaries of reviews published elsewhere. Meanwhile, the pressure on reviewers to keep up with the volume of new books grew so great that it became conventional wisdom among disgruntled writers that, as Anthony Trollope put it, “books are criticized without being read.” In New Grub Street, one of George Gissing’s characters declared that “I got up at 7.30, and while I breakfasted I read through a volume I had to review. By 10.30 the review was written—three-quarters of a column of the Evening Budget.”

  [Someone please notify W. T. Stead of a certain email newsletter that would solve his problem. —Steve]

Reviews:

• In The New Yorker, Anthony Lane reviews Andrew Graham-Dixon’s biography of Vermeer (Vermeer: A Life Lost and Found, April 7):

  For the same details, walk into a nearby room and consult View of Delft, which was painted a few years earlier. The main difference is that Ruisdael cranes upward, to behold a castle on a hill, whereas Vermeer levels his gaze across open water. For all the splendor of Ruisdael’s picture, it is the second that partakes—in ways that countless gallerygoers have keenly felt but struggled to articulate—of the miraculous. My favorite sentence in Graham-Dixon’s book has him probing the nitty-gritty of Vermeer’s roofs: “It is possible that he ground actual red terracotta tiles in with his pigments and oil to get the required result.” So compelling are these critical closeups that I found myself leaning in to investigate the surface of a yellow roof on the right, and found it stippled and dotted, as if it bore a message in Braille. I was warned away by a guard, despite the fact that my shirt was not blazoned with “Just Stop Oil.” Breaking news: oils can just stop you in your tracks.

• In The Guardian, Kathryn Hughes reviews Caroline Bicks’ book about exploring Stephen King’s archive (Monsters in the Archives: My Year of Fear with Stephen King, April 21) [An Upcoming book today.]:

  Bicks quickly spots what she is after in the editorial interventions on Pet Sematary, King’s novel of 1983 which many fans think is the scariest, certainly the bleakest, he ever wrote. There’s a moment early in the book where a tangle of fallen tree branches turns into a pile of moving bones. In an early draft, King writes “fingerbones clittered”, which the copy-editor circles and asks “Word OK?” King in turn replies “Word OK. A clitter is a very soft, ghostly clatter.” And there you have it. Clitter—softly insinuating—is so much scarier than a crash-bang clatter.

  In the same manuscript, Bicks also finds the novelist resisting the copy editor’s attempts to replace the word “rattly” which King has used to describe the labored breathing of the novel’s dying two-year-old protagonist, Gage Creed. The copy editor suggests “congested” would be better. But King knows that rattly contains within itself a whole ghastly set of subliminal associations including scavenging vermin and unquiet ghosts with their infernal chains. Congested is something a coroner would write.

  [Fallen tree branches turning into moving bones is a rather chthonic version of Apollo and Daphne.

  The events depicted in Pet Sematary are one of the better outcomes for “guy from Chicago moves to the rural Maine of the 1980s.” Most of the others involve both the wendigo and Allen’s Coffee Brandy. (The Managing Editor loves Allen’s and keeps it in his liquor cabinet.)

  And here is what Dickens writes in A Christmas Carol when the ghost of Marley does something unquiet with his infernal chains:

  At this the spirit raised a frightful cry, and shook its chain with such a dismal and appalling noise, that Scrooge held on tight to his chair, to save himself from falling in a swoon.

  “Shook”? —Steve]

N.B.:

• “Gentleman’s Relish is toast after its maker axes the pungent anchovy spread” [The Gentleman’s Ketchup is cocktail sauce with a lot of horseradish in it. Any good mustard mustard is the Gentleman’s Mustard. The gentleman does not eat ranch. —Steve]

• “I Found It: The Best Free Restaurant Bread in America” [I almost never eat the bread but I suppose other people must. —Steve]

• “I know how things go in Stockholm. They will crown me not because I am a great poet but because I am the least bad Canadian poet.”

• “High-speed accidents, crooked lawyers, and poor people desperate for cash—it was the kind of scheme that could have been cooked up only in the Big Easy.”

• Oscar Wilde’s hair.

• New issues:

  • Liberties Volume 6—Number 3 | Spring 2026 [As linked to above.]

  • Literary Review of Canada May 2026 [The source of the line above about “the least bad Canadian poet.” Somehow comforting to know that the spirit that brought us “You said they were the best engineers in the world!” “No, I said they were the best engineers in Canada.” in Blackberry (2023) and “You can’t fix all of the world’s problems. You can’t even fix all of Canada’s problems.” in Rumours (2024) goes back a long way in Canadian art. —Steve]

Poem:

“The Definition of Gardening” by James Tate

Jim just loves to garden, yes he does.
He likes nothing better than to put on
his little overalls and his straw hat.
He says, “Let’s go get those tools, Jim.”
But then doubt begins to set in.
He says, “What is a garden, anyway?”
And thoughts about a “modernistic” garden
begin to trouble him, eat away at his resolve.
He stands in the driveway a long time.
“Horticulture is a groping in the dark
into the obscure and unfamiliar,
kneeling before a disinterested secret,
slapping it, punching it like a Chinese puzzle,
birdbrained, babbling gibberish, dig and
destroy, pull out and apply salt,
hoe and spray, before it spreads, burn roots,
where not desired, with gloved hands, poisonous,
the self-sacrifice of it, the self-love,
into the interior, thunderclap, excruciating,
through the nose, the earsplitting necrology
of it, the withering, shriveling,
the handy hose holder and Persian insect powder
and smut fungi, the enemies of the iris,
wireworms are worse than their parents,
there is no way out, flowers as big as heads,
pock-marked, disfigured, blinking insolently
at me, the me who so loves to garden
because it prevents the heaving of the ground
and the untimely death of porch furniture,
and dark, murky days in a large city
and the dream home under a permanent storm
is also a factor to keep in mind.”

[Seasonal and largely a soliloquy, Tate’s poem amused me. It also made me think of my mom, who in her late 50s cleared more than half an acre of greenbrier and poison ivy by hand. In their absence, we now see a beautiful hillside, unearthed rhubarb plants and cherry trees, crawling moss. It was a labor of love and also a labor of hate. Rather than salt and fire, our recipe for destruction was vinegar spitz (for the leaves) and powdered limestone (at the roots).

The line, “flowers as big as heads, / pock-marked, disfigured, blinking insolently / at me” popped into my head this morning, as I was pressing the blooms I had stolen from a neighbor’s yard. The petals were a vibrant, spongey pink, the blossoms large enough to engulf my open palm, but pock-marked by water burn or blight. A few more of my favorite phrases in Tate’s poem include: “kneeling before a disinterested secret, / slapping it, punching it like a Chinese puzzle” and “the earsplitting necrology / of it, the withering, shriveling” and “smut fungi” and finally, “the me who so loves to garden / because it prevents the heaving of the ground / and the untimely death of porch furniture.” —K. T.]

Upcoming books:

Out April 16:

Bloomsbury Academic: I Think of You Constantly with Love: The Letters of Ludwig Wittgenstein and Ben Richards edited by Gabriel Citron and Alfred Schmidt

Oxford University Press: The Republic of Love: Opera and Political Freedom by Martha C. Nussbaum

Knopf | April 21

If This Be Magic: The Unlikely Art of Shakespeare in Translation
by Daniel Hahn

From the publisher: Shakespeare may have breathed the air of sixteenth-century England, but today, all the world is his stage. Every year, millions of people, from Bogotá to Borneo, read Hamlet for the first time, thanks to the tireless work of translators. Drawing on the work of the very best of them, Hahn dives into the infinitesimally complicated ways the great playwright is reinvented and yet sounds, somehow, like himself—in Chinese, Dutch, Turkish, and more than a hundred other languages.

From word order, puns, and punctuation to metaphor, accent, and song, Shakespeare’s variety of genius presents an endless set of conundrums, among them: How does Romeo and Juliet’s love story unfold if their dialogue cannot form a sonnet (nor rhyme), as it does in the original? How can you form wordplay around the letter “I” and its sound if its meanings are not shared in other languages? These are just two out of millions of issues facing translators tasked with bringing Shakespeare to non-English languages, non-Shakespearean eras and cultures. To attempt such a feat, they must cut and add beats, maintain rhymes, adapt names and locations, and preserve meaning while not unilaterally prioritizing it, all while knowing that for each word, line, or scene they construct, another option is yet to be discovered.

Traveling the world, Hahn speaks to writers and actors engaging with Shakespeare’s work, sharing stories of his own. Hahn, whose great-grandfather produced one of Brazil’s earliest Shakespeare translations, emerges as a wise and enthusiastic guide, teacher, and sleuth. If This Be Magic does not require knowledge of any other language or more than a passing acquaintance with the Bard’s canon, but it draws out fascinating insights on both. As nerdy as they come (there is a chapter on commas), supremely readable, and funny throughout, this is a book for everyone and a fitting tribute to the Globe’s Bard.

Also out Tuesday:

Hogarth: Monsters in the Archives: My Year of Fear with Stephen King by Caroline Bicks

Knopf: Mon Cher Amour: The Love Letters of Albert Camus and Maria Casares, 1944–1959 translated from the French by Sandra Smith and Cory Stockwell

Paul Dry Books: Sidetracked: Exile in Hollywood by Alexander Voloshin, translated from the Russian by Boris Dralyuk

What we’re reading:

Steve read more of A. M. Juster’s new translation of the Canzoniere (April 7). [I was talking to a friend who made the point that the best way for someone who doesn’t know Italian to get the idea of Petrarch is to read the adaptations of his poems made by Wyatt, Sidney, and others. For one poem, I agree, but an essential piece of the Canzoniere is that there are 366 of these things, and the obsession and the endless revisiting of the same ideas and images only comes through if you can read a bunch of them in a row. —Steve]

Critical notes:

• Moul and Jeremy Wikeley () discuss a recent short collection of early modern poetry she edited (Poems Beautiful and Useful, March). Moul:

  I’m not at all against complexity or difficulty in poetry and wouldn’t want to give that impression. If anything I am rather obsessed by it—I come back and back in my own work to Horace, to Pindar, to Sanskrit poetry and grammar—these are all sort of paradigmatic examples of literary difficulty I suppose. I work a lot on very obscure early modern Latin verse and I am fascinated, both as a critic and as a poet myself, by translating poetry, which is immensely difficult—impossible, really. But I suppose like you I don’t see a contradiction. Poetry should be beautiful because that is, as it were, its proper virtue, and it should also have something to say. Pindar is very difficult, yes, because the literary conventions in which he was working were highly complex and they are very distant from ours, but he is also supremely beautiful and there is no doubt that he has something to say. Very “simple” poems can also be very beautiful. And of course many apparently “simple” poems—poems in what we might call the plain style—are in fact underpinned by very subtle and complex effects.

  [I had some notes on Poems Beautiful and Useful in WRB—Mar. 25, 2026. —Steve]

  • Hilaire Belloc:

    The whole point of Homer is knocking one down with a verb and a noun and a conventional adjective. How it is done nobody knows. It is done in the New Testament: Confidite, ego vici mundum. It is done in the song of Roland: “To God on His Holy Hill in the City of Paradise.” It is done in the Border Ballads over and over again. It is done in the twelfth century, Angevin French singing the burial of Iseult: “She by him and he by her.” How it is done nobody knows. If anyone could know, anyone could be a poet.

    [Before this Belloc argues that Ὣς οἱ μὲν μάρναντο δέμας πυρὸς αἰθομένοιο (Chapman: “They fought still like the rage of fire.”) has a power that Pope’s “Fierce as conflicting fires the combat burns, / And now it rises, now it sinks by turns” lacks. The explanation of the image is good, but why should the image need explanation?

    When I was younger I read Yeats’ early work and Housman and was stunned, but part of me wondered—look how simple this all is! Look how easy it seems! You should try to duplicate it! How hard can it be? And then I proceeded to write several poems that were significantly worse than the early Yeats and A Shropshire Lad. Part of difficulty’s appeal for the reader is that it lets us see the writer sweat; it says that, even if the work demands a lot of us, it also demanded a lot of the author. Simple poetry, though, might as well be magic. It’s not, of course. Housman says of the last poem in A Shropshire Lad that

    Two of the stanzas, I do not say which, came into my head, just as they are printed, while I was crossing the comer of Hampstead Heath between the Spaniard’s Inn and the footpath to Temple Fortune. A third stanza came with a little coaxing after tea. One more was needed, but it did not come: I had to turn to and compose it myself, and that was a laborious business. I wrote it thirteen times, and it was more than a twelvemonth before I got it right.

    But it feels as though the whole thing came into his head just as it was printed. —Steve]

• on Helen DeWitt:

  DFW isn’t hard. He wrote long sentences and long paragraphs with frequent digressions and qualifications. Since this resembles the way many people think, including me, it makes his writing intuitively easy to fall into for many of us; we pick him up and can’t put him down. Even for people who don’t fit that description, I still think a page of DFW is easier to read, if you’ve grown up assailed by television and smartphones, than a page of, say, Jack London. DFW just feels like somebody is finally talking to you rather than using words to avoid talking to you. The thing that makes him “difficult” is precisely what makes him easy, precisely what made him the author I’d read when I got home from my endless shifts at Burger King in the summer of ‘98 and couldn’t sleep because I was sad about a girl, the author I’d read instead of doing my homework that fall. And yet up till DeWitt wrote this I’d probably, if writing about DFW, just go along with the conventional habit of describing him as “difficult.” Everybody says it; must be true. I’m convinced that a lot of ideas about artistic “difficulty” or “inaccessibility” work in this exact way, as sheer mindless habit. DeWitt concludes her post thus: “But he seems to have thought that in this world, here, now, many people had been cheated by the educational system into thinking they didn’t like literature; that many people could be brought to surpass what they thought they could do, if someone was willing to take the trouble. We were lucky to have had him.” She’s dead right. If you treat the reader like they’re as smart as you are—if you treat the reader like an equal—you get labeled an elitist, though what you’re actually being is a democrat.

  [This is the other side of “difficulty,” even for writers less easy to read than DFW (about whom I will remain silent); it is always an invitation. Nobody would write like this—nobody would write anything—if they didn’t think somebody else would read it. Many of the most difficult writers, even some with a misanthropic streak, are jumping out of their skin on every page to tell the world about all the wonderful art they could embrace if they only tried, if they only made an effort, if they only gave it a chance. (This trait is central to the Managing Editor’s affection for Ezra Pound and William Gaddis.) Christman wrote movingly about this a few years ago in a discussion of Gaddis’ J R (1975):

  Late in J R, there’s an incredibly sad sequence where the title character—an arbitrage genius and Wall Street titan nobody knows is a sixth grader—is trying, as usual, to gain the attention and approval of Bast, the composer and part-time teacher whom he uses as a figurehead (and wants as a father-figure). Bast is, as always, angry at JR for meddling in things he doesn’t understand and for ruining everything with his money. He plays JR a bit of Bach, which JR doesn’t understand, whereupon Bast upbraids the poor kid—who, again, is in sixth grade, and has no cultural or spiritual preparation whatsoever that might help him “get” Bach—for most of a page. There are two ways to read this passage. One is the way that John Gardner (a sometimes difficult novelist himself, but one with a populist streak) reads it, in his damning review of J R: As Gaddis being too preoccupied with his own favorite subject, the vulgarity of America, to notice that Bast is being an asshole to a poor dumb kid who just wants a dad. The other is the way friend of the substack Roz Milner read it, when we talked about it online—as a tragic moment, one that dramatizes another Gaddis preoccupation, the inability of humans to hear each other. On this reading, Gaddis knows that Bast is being an asshole, and he wants us to half-sympathize with the content of what Bast is saying while also seeing Bast’s limitations.

  Bast finishes this rant by saying that “if there’s any way to ruin something, to degrade it to cheapen it” JR will find it, but a few pages later the conversation ends with JR musing about some music Bast has been working on (to serve as background for a film promoting importing African animals to the Everglades so they can be hunted, and surely about as good as that makes it sound, but JR doesn’t know that): “I mean I bet it’s as good as this thing [the Bach] you just made me . . . hey? even if I don’t hear exactly what I’m suppose to . . . ?” Even JR, with his total lack of spiritual and cultural preparation and having just been excoriated by the person who recommended the Bach to him, is, despite it all, willing to try again.

  I confess to Almighty God and to you, my brothers and sisters, that I have filled the WRB with unfiltered crankery, reactionary posturing, Spenglerian gloom, Miniver Cheevying, despair over our post-literate present, and so on. (And you only see what I decide is fit for the page; imagine what it’s like in my head.) But I think—at least, I tell myself—that under all that rage and fury and despair is hope. It’s not like I do this for the money (please subscribe!) or the power or the women, after all. But maybe someone will read the WRB and, despite a general lack of inclination to, will give some difficult piece of art a shot. Maybe someone will read the WRB and find something new to dig around in. JR, who is basically the worst person in the world (and let’s not blame the kid for that; it’s not his fault he’s a middle-school-aged boy, and it’s not his fault he has been failed in innumerable ways by his society and by almost everyone in his life) could manage that. I believe that everyone out there, aided by not being a character in a Gaddis novel, can too. This is how I was educated (I wrote about that a couple months ago), and this is all I can do. We’re all working together, and anyone is welcome to join. If I may steal the idea of quoting this passage from William Blake: “would God that all the LORD’s people were prophets, and that the LORD would put his spirit upon them!”

But how can you really care if anybody gets the Washington Review of Books, or gets what it means, or if it improves them. Improves them for what? For death? Why hurry them along?

Links:

• In The Paris Review, Krithika Varagur on Aramco World, “the free magazine published by the U.S. subsidiary of the Saudi Arabian Oil Company”:

  But Aramco World’s genius lies in its more gently gonzo offerings, which tend to be unconcerned with either Saudi Arabia or the United States. My favorite article recounts an epic journey to Uzbekistan to ascertain which of the region’s famous varieties of melon may have been the ones mentioned by the fourteenth-century Tangerine explorer Ibn Battuta. Aramco World has a breathtakingly catholic interpretation of what kinds of people, places, and things fall under its jurisdiction. “What would you have eaten in ninth-century Baghdad?” is the premise of one quite typical 2006 article, which considers the oldest surviving Arabic cookbook, Kitab al-Tabikh. (Though eggplant is now crowned as sayyid al-khudaar, the lord of vegetables, it was once a suspicious novelty from India, “considered impossibly bitter,” blamed by doctors for “everything from freckles and a hoarse throat to cancer and madness”; nevertheless, writes Charles Perry, the Kitab contains seven eggplant recipes, “probably because a taste for eggplant first arose among the aristocracy.”) A 2003 piece tracks an eighteenth-century silver coin called the Maria Theresa thaler from the Habsburg Empire into Africa and Arabia, where it survived in places like Oman as late as 1970. A 2010 feature narrates the experiences of Tichit women in Mauritania, who lead caravans while managing menstruation and pregnancy in the desert.

  [If the CIA can have magazines Saudi Aramco can too. (It’s supposed to be called the Riyadh Review of Books, though.) (I’ll change the name of the WRB for the right price.) (Or, perhaps, for the opportunity to go on an epic journey to Uzbekistan in search of melons.) (One thing a lot of the best magazine journalism has in common is that somebody spent way more time and effort hunting something down than would seem reasonable.) (In this it resembles some of the best literary criticism, which documents somebody spending way more time and effort hunting something down in the library than would seem reasonable.) (Somebody send Eliot Weinberger on an epic journey to Uzbekistan in search of melons.)

  And it had not occurred to me that “Tangerine” is the demonym for residents of Tangiers. —Steve]

• In The Lamp, Stanley Fish on insurance and noir:

  Insurance thus conceived or glorified takes on another aspect of religion. It not only establishes regularities; it promises to alter them for the better and bring us closer to the promised land. “Risk makers,” [Dan] Bouk explains, “began pitching their techniques as means for altering fates and not just predicting them.” Soon, statistical writers persuaded their readers that they could construct systems that, as [Theodore M.] Porter writes, “could be presumed to generate large-scale order and regularity that would be virtually unaffected by the caprice that seemed to prevail in the actions of individuals.” An “orderly reign of facts” could replace the “confusion of politics.” Indeed, the whole human race could be improved with the help of the knowledge provided by statistical calculations. Francis Galton, the founder of eugenics, called for “the establishment of a sort of scientific priesthood,” whose “high duties would have reference to the health and well-being of the nation in its broadest sense.” In Billy Wilder’s Double Indemnity (1944), the most famous example of an insurance-themed noir film, Barton Keyes (Edward G. Robinson), a claims manager at Pacific All-Risk Insurance, elevates the wielder of statistical knowledge to a position of wisdom and near omniscience. “A claims man is a doctor and a bloodhound and a cop and a judge and a jury and a father confessor all in one,” he says. On this view, the skilled statistician can do everyone’s job, including the job of the priest, and do it better.

  [Not just insurance but the statistics that make it possible—the field as we think of it begins with early modern mathematicians thinking about games of chance. In the background of both insurance and statistics is Pascal’s wager, which—if taken at face value—turns life into a game of chance, one in which the most important aspect of the game is specified in the rules and so can be quantified. —Steve]

Reviews:

• In the Times, Parul Sehgal reviews Ben Lerner’s new novel (Transcription, April 7) [An Upcoming book in WRB—Apr. 1, 2026; we linked to an earlier review there as well.]:

  It’s a misapprehension that literature is inherently threatened by new technologies; novels and poems, themselves kinds of technology, have always been curious about other forms as they appear. The Count of Monte Cristo, for example, showcases the telegraph in enraptured detail (and makes it a key part of the plot); the stories of Tagore explore a world remade by the arrival of the railways. And is there a more charming example of this genre than the essay “Personism,” in which Frank O’Hara describes interrupting himself while writing a love poem, realizing that he can just ring up the object of his desire instead?

  Lerner has always been attentive to how technology mediates communication; Leaving the Atocha Station (2011) contains one of the first convincing renditions of characters chatting online, complete with the lags and awkwardness. I suspect what is so interesting to Lerner about new technologies are the opportunities for misunderstanding that they introduce. Transcription is a chronicle of that confusion.

  • Frank O’Hara in “Personism”:

    But to give you a vague idea, one of its minimal aspects is to address itself to one person (other than the poet himself), thus evoking overtones of love without destroying love’s life-giving vulgarity, and sustaining the poet’s feelings towards the poem while preventing love from distracting him into feeling about the person.

    [Frank, who told you that was the point of a love poem? (Frank, did you make it to the end of any sonnet cycles?) Petrarch tells us otherwise in Rime sparse 60:

    What can a lover sigh if pages

    from my old rhymes provided him

    with some fresh hope she will deny?

    Don’t let a poet touch a limb,

    nor Jove indulge, and let the rages

    of the sun turn its green leaves dry.

    (A. M. Juster’s new translation; the plant under discussion is the laurel tree.) The end of John Berryman’s cycle knows it too:

    The weather’s changing. This morning was cold,

    as I made for the grove, without expectation,

    some hundred Sonnets in my pocket, old,

    to read her if she came. Presently the sun

    yellowed the pines & my lady came not

    in blue jeans & a sweater. I sat down & wrote.

    When you can’t call up the object of your desire on the phone, you call her up in your memory and your poetry. —Steve]

[Behind the paywall are even more links to the best and most interesting writing from the past few days, Upcoming books, What we’re reading, and Critical notes. Today’s specials:

• I propose a new model for the 800-word book review

• Jim Morrison is a good lyricist, sometimes

• K. T. on a Poem by Isabelle Baafi and fairy tales

If you’re interested in any of that, and if you want to support the WRB in making the lifelong task of literacy not take anyone’s entire day, please subscribe.

And if you’re already a subscriber, thank you very much. Why not share the WRB with your friends and acquaintances? The best way to support us is by subscribing, but the second-best is by sharing the WRB with other people. —Steve]

Read more

Links:

Reviews:

• In Engelsberg Ideas, Boyd Tonkin reviews the Rijksmuseum’s exhibition of art inspired by the works of Ovid:

  After the Renaissance, the Metamorphoses became much more than a popular encyclopedia of the Greco-Roman legends later labelled as “mythology.” The epic came to define, almost to monopolize, the storytelling of antiquity, so that Ovid’s iteration of these motifs served as the template for their transmission. This familiarity, and ubiquity, can dull their force and muffle their shock. The most irresistible pieces on display in Amsterdam restore the shattering violence or strangeness of the moment, and process, of change. Titian’s Danäe, suffused with violating gold; Michelangelo’s Leda, the original lost but present here in a magnificent engraving, as the divine fowl entangles its victim in an invasive sensuous stranglehold; Caravaggio’s Narcissus, not idly inspecting his pretty face in the pool but actively, desperately enamored of the self as other: such works channel the uncanny terror of becoming after a divine desire attacks.

  [The familiarity and the ubiquity contribute to this dullness, but the treatments some of the myths get do as well. Bernini’s Apollo and Daphne is the world’s most skilled technical exercise.

  “Suffused with violating gold”! Ovid already links Danäe to Midas when he tells that story later in the Metamorphoses: “The water where he washt his hands did from his hands so ronne, / As Danae might have beene therwith beguyld” (as Arthur Golding has it). It also reminds me of Cassius Dio passing on the story that, after defeating Crassus at the battle of Carrhae, the Parthians poured molten gold down his throat in mockery, which is taking “suffused” and “violating” very literally.

  This same sense of excess characterizes Golding’s sets of oppositions to describe Narcissus. It reads as almost proto-metaphysical:

  All these he woondreth to beholde, for which (as I doe gather)

  Himselfe was to be woondred at, or to be pitied rather.

  He is enamored of himselfe for want of taking heede,

  And where he lykes another thing, he lykes himselfe in deede.

  He is the partie whome he wooes, and suter that doth wooe,

  He is the flame that settes on fire, and thing that burneth tooe.

  O Lord how often did he kisse that false deceitfull thing?

  How often did he thrust his armes midway into the spring

  To have embraste the necke he saw and could not catch himselfe?

  (Perhaps this would have been unremarkable, stylistically, in 1620, but not in 1567. “He is the flame that settes on fire, and thing that burneth tooe” sounds a lot like Robert Southwell’s “The Burning Babe,” another proto-metaphysical poem.) The circularity of the descriptions, seeming to move away from Narcissus repeatedly only to always return to him, parallel his unquenchable desire for himself.

  And Yeats’ “Leda and the Swan” makes, beyond its smaller synecdoches, one change serve as synecdoche for all change, moving from sex to history to death:

  A shudder in the loins engenders there

  The broken wall, the burning roof and tower

  And Agamemnon dead.

  “Invasive sensuous stranglehold” is a great phrase too. —Steve]

• In our sister publication on the sweet Thames, Patricia Lockwood reviews a reissue of Death Comes for the Archbishop (1927, 2025) and a book about Willa Cather’s trips to the American Southwest that inspired the novel (The Bright Edges of the World: Willa Cather and Her Archbishop, by Garrett Peck, March):

  Thea is unsexed by her vocation, her ambition, her choice of lover—and also by her genius, a quality we recognize but are unable to quantify. When we are inside her consciousness, this quality is less apparent than when she is seen through the eyes of others: Ray, the railway brakeman who loves her; Doctor Archie, who first notices her talent during a house call; and others who view her almost as a natural phenomenon. The model for Thea was the opera singer Olive Fremstad, one of three performers Cather profiled for McClure’s in 1913. She was Swedish and had marvelously substantial arms. “Cather went to interview her in her New York apartment,” Doris Grumbach writes in her introduction to The Song of the Lark. “She saw her transformed, when the opera house needed her to fill in at the last moment, from a weary, wan woman to a glittering, radiant star.” A version of this appears towards the end of the book when Thea, who has achieved her success and whose exhaustion is now total, is called in to play Sieglinde in Die Walküre. At once, weariness transforms into fire.

  “The higher processes of art are all processes of simplification,” Cather wrote in her essay “The Novel Démeublé” from 1922. “The novelist must learn to write, and then he must unlearn it; just as the modern painter learns to draw, and then learns when utterly to disregard his accomplishment, when to subordinate it to a higher and truer effect.” Learn to sing, then learn to unsing. Learn how to touch and pass on.

  [Some of this is also true of Sieglinde. —Steve]

• In The New Statesman, Rowan Williams reviews some recent novels involving clergy (My Lover, the Rabbi, by Wayne Koestenbaum, March; A Private Man, by Stephanie Sy-Quia, April 14; and Communion, by Jon Doyle, April 2):

  It means the lines between failure, suicidal recklessness and exemplary fidelity are pretty shaky. Doyle offers a story with something of the same unsettling challenge as the Passion narrative itself, leaving us to think through what kinds of loyalty matter most, where heroism ends and folly begins. But ultimately, what all these fictions—and so many other novelistic explorations of clerical identity—place on the agenda is this: what if there were a place to stand beyond the realm of majority opinion, institutional compliance, the conventions that make someone popular? And what if that place were not a place of privileged freedom to ignore and demean the reality of others in the name of unchallengeable power, sanctioned by the divine, but a place of both absurdity and extreme jeopardy? What if this were the place whose existence was testified to by the life of the priest, pastor, rabbi, whatever—even when these people so regularly themselves failed to occupy that place convincingly? Is this what makes fiction about the clergy—behaving or misbehaving—still a compelling way of asking where freedom really lies and how it works in a culture ever more in love with simple, authoritarian answers?

  [“Majority opinion, institutional compliance, the conventions that make someone popular”—in other words, the bourgeois attitudes about money and marriage that have been central to the novel as an art form. The clergy are in this world but their presence points to methods of evaluating human life beyond it. All those discussions of what makes a good clergyman in Mansfield Park are not intended to resolve anything about how a clergyman should be; they instead allow the Crawfords to reveal the limitations of their thinking. To them, the whole thing is folly. And, as Paul says, “the wisdom of the world is foolishness with God.” —Steve]

• In The Atlantic, reviews a reissued novel by Charlotte Wood (The Natural Way of Things, 2015, March):

  This limits Natural Way as a novel; worse, it dramatically dulls the impact of Wood’s critique. She wants us to see how a society that treats women as naturally inferior traps, exploits, and denigrates them. Unfortunately, her plot confines these characters to another narrow set of roles, and most of them are portrayed as incapable of leaving their cage. The novel ends with the group of women gleefully giving up their own lives in exchange for small bags of luxury cosmetics—a metaphor so reductive and condescending that it scans as misogynistic. How else to read this moment but as the culmination of that “natural way of things,” which pins the blame on contemporary, commercialized womanhood? They might as well be doing it to themselves.

  [Roger Ebert’s review of A Clockwork Orange (1971):

  Alex has been made into a sadistic rapist not by society, not by his parents, not by the police state, not by centralization, and not by creeping fascism—but by the producer, director, and writer of this film, Stanley Kubrick.

  Did the characters do that, or did the artist make them? —Steve]

• In The New Republic, Hannah Rosefield reviews Ben Lerner’s new novel (Transcription, April 7) [An Upcoming book today.]:

  The ability to dissolve boundaries in this way, to make the individual social, is what originally drew the narrator to Thomas. During his breakdown in college, he started hearing voices. Thomas’ insistence that “we all hear phantom voices [ . . . ] hallucination, too, is social” was one of the many things he said and did, the narrator tells us, that “might have saved me.” Yes, there are numerous moments in their unrecorded interview that are unpleasantly destabilizing—but aren’t those just the disorientations of Thomas’s nonagenarian memory loss? Or perhaps the narrator’s own twitchiness about being separated from his phone?

  Max’s depiction of Thomas suggests otherwise. “There was no point, none, in telling him about [Emmie’s] struggles,” he says to the narrator. “Just as there was no point, there had never been any point, in telling him about my own personal problems.” Some time ago, he recalls, his partner had a biopsy to test for cancer; when Max confided his fears, Thomas’ response—at least, in Max’s memory—was “Ah, bios, opsis—what a beautiful combination. Life, sight. Did you know that it is al-Zahrawi in the eleventh century who first uses a needle to puncture and examine the material. He also, they say, invented lipstick, but this is disputed.” As a parody of Lerner’s own tendencies, it’s a darkly funny moment—but the concern it betrays is real. Max’s description of his father calls attention to how often Thomas’ words to the narrator in the book’s first section were dismissive or coercive, rerouting their conversation to Thomas’ own preoccupations. The details of the narrator’s dream are unimportant, Thomas insists; the narrator’s desire to establish the facts of Thomas’ upbringing is “silly.”

  [I sort of resent the implication that my preferred approach to WRB editorial notes is basically that of an elderly man free-associating and rambling about whatever is in his mind, but I guess it’s not wrong. —Steve]

• reviews Elevator Repair Service’s Gatz, “an eight-hour long play that represents but—importantly—does not adapt The Great Gatsby”:

  Still, The Great Gatsby the novel is not as funny as Gatz the show. When Shepherd kindly made a guest appearance in my wife’s intro-acting class this week, he apparently gave a bit of an explanation as to why. Having read the novel many hundreds of times now, and memorized every word, he knows The Great Gatsby probably better than anyone else now living, and he doesn’t like any of the movie versions. His biggest complaint about them is that the movies always try to portray the glitz of Gatsby’s parties and the glamor of Daisy Buchanan’s social world, when the point of the novel is that these things are a) completely illusory and b) exist only via the power of suggestion, which is the very power that the novel exercises over us through the miracle not of Daisy’s “low, thrilling voice,” which we can’t hear, nor Gatsby’s all-forgiving smile, which we can’t see, but through Nick’s description of these things. Everything we know we know through Nick. So a version of the text that is true to Fitzgerald’s vision will keep us honed in on that. The actors, who are all clearly capable of doing the story in a straightforwardly tragic register and making us all weep profusely, instead go for a slightly cartoonish, in places almost slapstick representation of the scenes that Nick describes, and they switch back and forth between regarding Nick as a narrator-director of the action and as a fellow-character. Their eyes communicate over third and fourth walls, and the number of walls changes from second to second.

  [The problem with The Great Gatsby is that everybody read it for the first time in high school, which makes it difficult to distinguish the novel as it actually is from the novel as everyone half-remembers it from a while back. (Personally, I refuse to re-read it; when I read it in high school I found it perfect, and I’m sure I wouldn’t if I returned to it. I won’t be borne back ceaselessly into the past! I’ll just refuse to look at it! —Steve]

• In the Journal, Belinda Lanks reviews a book about defining colors in the dictionary (True Color: The Strange and Spectacular Quest to Define Color—from Azure to Zinc Pink, by Kory Stamper, March):

  Ms. Stamper, a former Merriam-Webster lexicographer, traces the story back to I. H. Godlove, a young chemist the publisher hired in 1931 to help bring scientific rigor to the slippery business of defining colors. His entries read like a strange hybrid of laboratory report and poetic comparison. One entry describes begonia as “a deep pink that is bluer, lighter, and stronger than average coral . . . and bluer and stronger than sweet william—called also gaiety.”

  By the early twentieth century, color had become a scientific and industrial problem as much as an aesthetic one. Synthetic dyes—dominated by German companies before World War I—had transformed color into a global commodity, while wartime shortages exposed how little standardization existed in describing it. One manufacturer’s idea of khaki or olive drab, for example, might not match another’s—a serious problem when thousands of yards of uniform fabric had to be dyed the same shade.

  [Merriam-Webster is all very fine, but I wanted to see how a real pro does it and so looked up colors in Dr. Johnson’s dictionary. Red: “Of the colour of blood, of one of the primitive colours, which is subdivided into many; as scarlet, vermilion, crimson.” Yellow: “Being of a bright glaring colour, as gold.” Green: “Having a colour formed commonly by compounding blue and yellow; of the colour of the leaves of trees or herbs. The green colour is said to be most favourable to the sight.” Brown: “The name of a colour, compounded of black and any other colour.” Poor blue doesn’t get a description: “one of the seven original colours.” And purple gets two definitions: “Red tinctured with blue. It was among the ancients considered as the noblest, and as the regal colour; whether their purple was the same with ours, is not fully known” and “In poetry, red.” (I’m not sure what Dr. Johnson was thinking about when he questioned whether the purple of classical antiquity was the same as ours; in his defense, it’s not like he had access to photographs of Byzantine mosaics. “Wine-dark sea,” maybe. No doubt he would be pleased to know that we have reconstructed Tyrian purple, and it is, in fact, purple.) —Steve]

N.B.:

• “Cucumber: The Plant That Moves More than You Think” [“My vegetable love should grow / Vaster than empires and more slow.” —Steve]

• 12 tons of Kit Kats were stolen in Italy [“The candy bars were molded after race cars, still featuring KitKat’s iconic chocolate-covered wafers,” the Guardian reports. Is it really a Kit Kat (I’m not indulging this stylization) if it doesn’t have the long skinny pieces you can break off? Isn’t that the whole point? —Steve]

• Americans are buying vacant Japanese homes.

• Among the things baseball teams are giving away this year include team-branded fishing lures, a Grateful Dead tie-dye puffer vest, a hat reading “BAD DAY TO BE A [hot dog emoji],” and a George Costanza calzone bobblehead. [America’s real national pastime: junk. —Steve]

Poem:

“Chiaroscuro” by Isabelle Baafi

ask me about my first crush my brother piling sand on me till i couldn’t breathe he gave me a hammer i didn’t use it but i took its power son rise son threat son drinks the rain that pools in collarbones mother’s hands raking my scalp yesterday i pressed her sponge to the lake to clean it now the lake is gone it is easier to lasso the moon than to help your father lay down to die but what if the tomatoes never went bad what if splinters are a warning to run i once found a ransom note in my ear the face in the photo was mine i pawned everything went to the drop-off point no one ever came to set me free give me a bed with no crumbs in it pluck the fishbones from my throat i forgot where i hid the matches and after that it was easier just to live in the dark

[I enjoyed the integration of spaces into the prose poem format, modifying the linebreak but nonetheless controlling the reader’s speed. I thought the spaces were particularly effective in the moments of repetition, “son rise / son threat // son drinks” and “but what if // the tomatoes never went bad / what if splinters / are a warning to run,” as they slowed my eye, but did not insist on the vehemence of a line break.

This piece also reminded me a little of Andrea Gibson, who was an artist of some significance for me in my adolescence. My taste has evolved since then, but I’m seeking to renew my appreciation for work that is unafraid of sentiment or even theatricality. My favorite lines here are: “i once found a ransom note / in my ear / the face in the photo was mine,” which elicited a shiver of anxiety, and “i forgot where i hid / the matches / and after that / it was easier / just to live in the dark,” which I read as an outbreath of frustration rather than futility. —K. T.]

Upcoming books:

Out April 3:

University of Chicago Press: Phantom Byzantium: Europe, Empire, and Identity from Late Antiquity to World War II by Anthony Kaldellis

Seagull Books: Within, Without: On Two Cities by Ilya Kaminsky and Piotr Florczyk

Farrar, Straus and Giroux | April 7

Transcription: A Novel
by Ben Lerner

From the publisher: The narrator of Ben Lerner’s new novel has traveled to Providence, Rhode Island, where he is to conduct what will be the final published interview with Thomas, his ninety-year-old mentor and the father of his college friend Max. Thomas is a giant in the arts who seems to hail “from the future and the past simultaneously” and who “reenchants the air” when he speaks. But the narrator drops his smartphone in the hotel sink. He arrives at Thomas’ house with no recording device, a fact he is mysteriously unable to confess.

What unfolds from this dreamlike circumstance is the unforgettable story of the triangle formed by Thomas, Max, and the narrator, and an exploration of fathers and sons, male friendship and rivalry, and the challenges of parenting in a burning world. One of the first great novels about the early days of COVID, it is also a brilliant meditation on those technologies that enrich or impoverish our connection to one another, that store or obliterate memory. Full of startling insight, but written with the intensity of a séance, Lerner shows us how the air is full of messages, full of ghosts. Ultimately Transcription demonstrates what only a work of fiction can record.

Also out Tuesday:

Biblioasis: On Sports by David Macfarlane

Liveright: Canzoniere: A New Translation by Petrarch, translated from the Italian by A. M. Juster [We linked to a piece by Juster on Petrarch in WRB—Feb. 18, 2026.]

New York Review Books: The Oyster Diaries by Nancy Lehman

Transcendence for Beginners: Life Writing and Philosophy by Clare Carlisle [We linked to a review in WRB—Nov. 5, 2025.]

OR Books: Duchamp Takes New York by John Strausbaugh

Princeton University Press: The Roman World War: From the Ides of March to Cleopatra’s Suicide by Giusto Traina, translated from the French by Malcolm DeBevoise

Simon & Schuster: In Trees: An Exploration by Robert Moor

W. W. Norton: Attention: Writing on Life, Art, and the World by Anne Enright

What we’re reading:

Steve read more of Medieval Misogyny and the Invention of Western Romantic Love by R. Howard Bloch (1991). [Haven’t figured out Petrarch yet. —Steve]

Critical notes:

• Jorge Luis Borges on Edward FitzGerald (h/t Patrick Kurp):

  Seven centuries go by with their enlightenments and agonies and transformations, and in England a man is born, FitzGerald, less intellectual than Omar, but perhaps more sensitive and sadder. FitzGerald knows that his true fate is literature, and he practices it with indolence and tenacity. He reads and rereads the Quixote, which seems to him almost the best of all books (but he does not wish to be unjust to Shakespeare and “dear old Virgil”), and his love extends to the dictionary in which he looks for words.

  [They never made them more sensitive and more sad than they did in the fin de siècle. And I typed “Edmund FitzGerald” the first three times. You know. —Steve.]

Links:

• on death by train in nineteenth-century novels:

  [The death of Lopez in Trollope’s The Prime Minister (1875-6)] resembles Dickens’ abrupt, catastrophic death: the train moving at hyperbolic speed (“a thousand miles an hour”) with banshee cacophony, Lopez’s chillingly unhurried walk into the path of the locomotive. For Tolstoy, the train is slow but implacable, a figure of inevitability—the inevitability of slow-approaching death, the crushing force of societal disapproval, of depression. For Dickens and Trollope the engine is acceleration, speed, devastating force and death an unimaginable catastrophe, an instantaneous breaking of corporeality into its bloody components.

  [The difference here is between the train as the future, specifically, or the train as inexorable force, generally. When the train appears in twentieth-century culture it no longer smacks of technological progress, and so it can symbolize such powerful forces as salvation (“let the Midnight Special shine a light on me”) or sexual prowess (the ending of North by Northwest (1959), “the train kept a-rollin’ all night long”). The only place I can think of where the train retains its association with the future is, weirdly enough, Atlas Shrugged (1957). Everybody else had already moved onto, and then left behind, the automobile for this purpose. —Steve]

Reviews:

• In The New Statesman, Cooper reviews a biography of W. H. Auden (Auden, by Peter Ackroyd, June):

  To understand Auden, readers must appreciate his sense of Englishness, which was simultaneously rooted and restless. England was that sanctuary that he intermittently fled but to which he always returned in his mind’s eye. It was at once a muse and a subject to parody, the environment that determined his eccentricities, erudition and the debauchery that likely contributed to his death aged 66: even as an aging man in America, he “always carried a bottle of vodka or gin in his suitcase, for use in the event of arriving in a ‘dry’ county.” Scotland, where Auden was a young schoolmaster, also proved ripe for poetic plumbing. An “invigorating and rhythmically inventive chant,” “Night Mail”—a poem about crossing the border into Scotland—proved Auden to be “a master of all forms of poetry” and was turned into a short film with a score by Benjamin Britten, who would become a long-standing collaborator. Being mocked for his Englishness while tutoring in Helensburgh might have suited him; he liked to stand out, and while at Oxford would scandalize his peers with vulgar sexual divulgences and provocative pronouncements about life and art. Like many a university wit, “Auden’s talk tended to be dogmatic,” Ackroyd writes. “The cinema was not of the slightest interest; modern drama was impossible; the ballet should be forbidden.”

  [Shame the headline writer didn’t go for “We must love Wystan Auden or die,” but I suppose you can’t call him that in a headline.

  And from this review I learned that “Auden claimed that for more than a year of his adolescence he endeavored to read Thomas Hardy and ‘no one else.’” I wish I had actually done this, and I wish I had thought of claiming to have done so. Maybe I will anyway. When I was thirteen I read Tess of the d’Urbervilles twenty-nine times in a row, and to that reading I attribute my vast riches, good looks, winning personality, and general success in life. —Steve]

• In The New Yorker, Anthony Lane reviews a book about plagiarism (Strikingly Similar: Plagiarism and Appropriation from Chaucer to Chatbots, by Roger Kreuz, January) [An Upcoming book in WRB—Jan. 7, 2026.]:

  If that is the shape of things to come, it will be comically hard to police. Give me raiders of the lost past, any day, and forgive them their lack of footnotes. I remember listening to Bedtime Stories, Madonna’s 1994 album, and being surprised by a moony track called “Love Tried to Welcome Me,” which contains the lines “But my soul drew back, / Guilty of lust and sin.” This is an unacknowledged but unmistakable nod to George Herbert, one of the most enduring religious poets of the early seventeenth century, who wrote a magnificent poem that begins “Love bade me welcome: yet my soul drew back, / Guilty of dust and sin.” How Herbert, who was an Anglican priest of surpassing gentleness, might have felt about being quoted, three and a half centuries later, by somebody with a Catholic name and a conical bra we shall, alas, never know. The most gratifying irony is that, in changing the mortally ashen “dust” to the cheaper and more obvious “lust,” Madonna proved only that Herbert wrote better lyrics than she did, and I can’t help wishing that she had turned to him more often for guidance both verbal and spiritual. Papa does preach.

  [The subject of whether the “plagiarized” work is better than the original, as addressed here, comes up less often than it should. (“My Sweet Lord” is a better song than “He’s So Fine,” for example.) And artists who make it worse can adapt the approach of Paddy writing to his Irish Molly-O: “Remember, it’s the pen that’s bad, / Don’t lay the blame on me!” —Steve]

[Behind the paywall are even more links to the best and most interesting writing from the past few days, Upcoming books, What we’re reading, and Critical notes. Today’s specials:

• I finally finished The Recognitions, a book designed to appeal to me

• The best poems about baseball and football

• K. T. on a Poem by Karen Solie and unexpected images

If you’re interested in any of that, and if you want to support the WRB in making the lifelong task of literacy not take anyone’s entire day, please subscribe.

And if you’re already a subscriber, thank you very much. Why not share the WRB with your friends and acquaintances? The best way to support us is by subscribing, but the second-best is by sharing the WRB with other people. —Steve]

Read more

Links:

• In The Dial, an excerpt from a chapbook by Jan Steyn (Jig, January) about gout and the language used to describe it:

  Just as my own Afrikaans version follows Du Toit’s effort, so La Fontaine’s fable follows Petrarch, who paired Spider and Gout 300 years earlier. Petrarch also wrote about gout more generally, for instance in De remediis utriusque fortunae (Remedies for Fortunes) where he recounts the case of a nobleman who lavishes more attention on his sick horse than on his own afflicted body. Confined to bed by gout, the man commissions doctors to tend to the horse, has it laid on silk sheets with a golden pillow, and grieves as if he has lost a child when it dies. The anecdote is true, Petrarch insists, and widely known. The target is not the disease itself, but the grotesque distortions of care it exposes, and all for a malady he considered preventable. He is especially caustic toward those who forsake walking, out of ease or vanity. “Did they come into the world on horseback?” he scoffs (in Susannah Dobson’s delightful Englishing of the Latin done in 1791). “Will they so ride out of it?” He calls it madness to exchange the use of one’s own feet for the anxious labor of maintaining a horse. For horsemen, he writes, nothing would be more fitting than “the rich gout”—a punishment that renders the feet useless and ensures that a retinue of horses must be kept.

  [I like the James Gillray print that portrays gout as a little scorpion-demon creature. Unfortunately this did not give rise to any nicknames for gout—not as if “disease of kings” can be improved upon. (I also appreciate the Met providing the context at that link that “eighteenth-century Britons enjoyed roast beef, beer and port.” I’m not a doctor, but I think that’ll do it. The representative of “British Slavery” in Gillray’s “French Liberty—British Slavery” is single-handedly eating an entire roast while complaining that the “damn’d Taxes” are “Starving us to Death,” which will absolutely do it.) —Steve]

Reviews:

• In Portico, Randy Boyagoda reviews Kiran Desai’s new novel (The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny, 2025) [An Upcoming book in WRB—Sept. 20, 2025; we linked to an earlier review in WRB—Oct. 4, 2025.]:

  Sincerely rendered moments of transformative connection between two people are more acceptable (whether to enjoy or criticize) if they come to us from the distant and exclusively Western literary past—Dante seeing Beatrice for the first time, Romeo with Juliet, Milton’s Adam marveling at Eve, or the feelings between Ladislaw and Dorothea in Middlemarch, never mind between Anna and Vronsky in Anna Karenina. Even the cynical and melancholic narrator of Graham Greene’s The Human Factor observes, “Love was a total risk. Literature had always so proclaimed it.”

  But to reach the heights of literature, to match the total risk that is love, you can’t go in for irony. You can’t assure the reader that this is a cliché moment constructed to conceal the psychosomatic and historical materialist determinations at play in two privileged, cisgender, able-bodied heterosexuals responding to each other’s biomarkers and selective-school BAs—and isn’t this all just the author’s critical comment on failing Indian infrastructure (the blackout just before they meet)?

  [Great literature sometimes ironizes the “total risk” that is love; think of Emma Bovary entranced by Roldophe’s flattery at the fair while a man gives a speech about manure.

  But the problem is more fundamental than this. Roland Barthes:

  Every amorous episode can be, of course, endowed with a meaning: it is generated, develops, and dies; it follows a path which it is always possible to interpret according to a causality or a finality—even, if need be, which can be moralized (“I was out of my mind, I’m over it now” “Love is a trap which must be avoided from now on” etc.): this is the love story, subjugated to the great narrative Other, to that general opinion which disparages any excessive force and wants the subject himself to reduce the great imaginary current, the orderless, endless stream which is passing through him, to a painful, morbid crisis of which he must be cured, which he must “get over” (“It develops, grows, causes suffering, and passes away” in the fashion of some Hippocratic disease): the love story (the “episode,” the “adventure”) is the tribute the lover must pay to the world in order to be reconciled with it.

  Once you start telling “a love story” you’re already in the domain of irony, forcing the ineffable to obey a narrative logic. And, whatever the problems with heterosexuals who have BAs from selective schools, we have a word for things “literature has always so proclaimed”: cliché. The power of a love story is not in escape from cliché but in wallowing in it. This can be done with perfect sincerity, but it must be done nevertheless.

  As Boyagoda says, when we read a love story we think about Dante and Shakespeare and Milton. We think of many other works of art as well, and we also think about our own lives. When we come to a work of art about love we are not impressed by its sincerity—probably all of us have been in love before and are therefore aware that love can sincerely express itself dully and stupidly. We want it to approach the subject with something new, a new variation on the oldest theme. —Steve]

• In our sister publication on the Thames, Nicholas Spice reviews a book about lieder (Lyrical Diary: Lieder from Franz Schubert to Wolfgang Rihm, by Christian Gerhaher, translated from the German by Shaun Whiteside, 2025 in the UK):

  In his 1912 essay “The Relationship to the Text,” Arnold Schoenberg implicitly acknowledged the tendency of great songs to ingest and metabolize the poems they set when he explained that for years he had enjoyed Schubert’s lieder without ever taking in what they were about, and that, when he did bother to look at the words, they were no surprise to him, since he had intuited them all along. Leaving aside the daffiness of this last claim, the point he was making about the relative importance of music and words in the lied is surely correct, at any rate from the listener’s perspective: many of the most memorable lieder live in our imaginations as pieces of music, not as intoned poetry. We are so used to thinking of the process of songwriting (not, that is, the songwriting of a singer-songwriter—an altogether different thing) as setting a poem to music, the song in some sense an interpretation of the poem, that we fail to see how, in many instances, the process reverses itself and the poem becomes just one possible interpretation of the music rather than its progenitor. As an example, in the transition from Heine’s poem “Am Meer” to Schubert’s song, we move from one powerful semantic field to another so distinctive—as music—that the poem is left behind, cast off like the shell of a previous instar. Indeed, Schubert’s song is no longer concerned with the poem that inspired it but opens itself to all the yet unwritten poems it might engender, all the poems that might set its music to words. And just as there are any number of possible musical settings for a given poem, so there are any number of possible poetic settings for a given song.

  [Since I don’t know German this is how I feel about basically all lieder; even when I know what the text is about and have looked at translations that’s not enough to give the words an independent existence from the music. The lieder I probably think about most, Schumann’s “Im wunderschönen Monat Mai,” attained that status because I know of no better portrayal of what it feels like to say something vulnerable and then wait the seeming eternity for the other person to respond. This idea is, sort of, in the text; that the whole song should be an expansion of that moment into a minute and a half is not, and this moment of waiting exists in situations besides confessions of love. —Steve]

• In Now Voyager, Ryan Ruby reviews Christian Bök’s books about encoding poetry into bacterial DNA (The Xenotext: Book 1, 2015; The Xenotext: Book 2, 2025):

  Just so: The thirty-six unique words that make up “Orpheus” and “Eurydice” are unlikely to be found next to Shelley’s “Ozymandias,” Rimbaud’s “Voyelles,” or one of Rilke’s sonnets to Orpheus in a future anthology. In that sense, Bök’s experiment, like Fitzcarraldo’s opera house—or indeed, Orpheus’ trip to the underworld—could be regarded as a failure. But the idea and the process that Bök documents in the other poems of The Xenotext have all the grandeur, virtuosity, and strangeness that, to me, are the hallmarks of great works of art, especially those whose achievement requires time to acknowledge. If, as critic Guy Davenport has argued, one of the characteristic features of high modernism is the merger of the cutting edge and the positively archaic, these are but a parenthesis to the cosmic time scale of The Xenotext. “The job of the avant-garde,” Bök said in a recent interview, “is to show up for the future on time, because the future is coming fast.” And in that sense, The Xenotext is an outstanding, even alarming success.

  [In an essay on Ronald Johnson Davenport comments “Someday someone will explain why the Romantics wanted to rewrite Paradise Lost and the moderns to rewrite the Odyssey.” (Unlike Davenport to leave this as an exercise for the reader instead of explaining it in a brilliant two-sentence digression.) In other words, you can define an age and identify its central concerns by its artistic touchstones. As Ruby notes, many different artistic movements and mediums have rewritten and retold the story of Orpheus and Eurydice, and the three reasons Ruby gives for this—it being the “mythmaker’s myth,” it being paradigmatic for the “immortality project,” and Orpheus failing—are universal concerns for artists, no matter their other commitments. Everyone wonders what their art could really achieve, and the myth gives the satisfyingly unsatisfying answer “everything and nothing.” —Steve]

• In Modern Age, Jude Russo reviews Megadoc (2025), a documentary about the making of Megalopolis (2024):

  Megadoc invites comparison to Federico Fellini’s 8½ (1963), another movie about an Italian director, Guido, struggling to make an epic movie—stuffed to the gills with quasi-classical erudition, sentimental personal motifs, and ill-defined futurism—despite the on-set chaos, the skepticism of the press and some of the director’s own notional collaborators, and the huge expense.

  Inevitably, the production of the unnamed movie ends in disaster. Guido’s friend and script collaborator, the pretentious critic Daumier, with a sublime indifference to the director’s feelings of failure, congratulates him for maintaining his artistic integrity by not producing a flawed film: “Believe me, you should feel neither nostalgia nor remorse. It’s better to destroy than create when you’re not creating those few things that are truly necessary. And finally, in this world of ours, is there anything so just and true that it has the right to survive? For [the producer], a bad film is only a fiscal event. But for you, at this point in your life, it could have been the end.”

  That all sounds good, as far as it goes—but Guido and Coppola both know it’s really bunk. As Daumier’s monologue drags on, he sneers at the idea that Guido wished “to leave behind . . . a complete film, just like a cripple who leaves behind his crooked footprint,” the director, hanging his head under the onslaught of words, begins to see in his mind a fantasy of his characters gathering together for a grand dance. “But all this confusion—it’s me, myself,” he thinks to himself. The difference is that Coppola was his own producer, and he got to make the movie.

  [Longtime readers of the WRB will know that I regard Megalopolis as one of the essential artistic works of the past few years.

  Before embarking on Megalopolis Coppola had already made a masterpiece of nearly-incoherent references to the canon all shoved into the present day: Apocalypse Now (1979). (And like Megalopolis it was the subject of a documentary detailing its disastrous production.) This exchange between Willard (Martin Sheen) and Kurtz (Marlon Brando) might as well be about Coppola himself:

  “They told me that you had gone totally insane. And that your methods were unsound.”

  “Are my methods unsound?”

  “I don’t see any method at all, sir.”

  Where Megalopolis surpasses Apocalypse Now is in its integration of the personal strain of 8½. The confusions of Apocalypse Now are the material getting the better of Coppola, but the confusions of Megalopolis, like Guido says, simply are Coppola. —Steve]

N.B.:

• “In America, the maneuver is known as an Irish exit or an Irish Goodbye. But it has existed under different names in other cultures, too—in England it’s the “French leave,” in France a “filer a l’anglaise.” In Germany, it’s attributed to the Polish.” [The various names for it in different languages attributing it to places all over the world connect leaving a party without saying goodbye to the turkey, currently, and syphilis, historically. —Steve]

• When Susan Sontag met Thomas Mann.

• John Steinbeck, source of ecological data.

• New issues:

  • BOMB Issue 175 | Spring 2026

  • Now Voyager Issue 01 [As linked to above.]

  • The Paris Review No. 255 | Spring 2026

  • Portico Number 1 | Spring 2026 [As linked to above.]

  • The Yale Review Volume 114, No. 1 | Spring 2026

    [Both the new magazines here are great and have plenty of interesting pieces in them besides the two I linked. Particularly happy to see in charge of a magazine; discovering Prufrock at thirteen or so was important for me, and I like to see good things happen to my fellow workers in the books-and-culture roundup newsletter mines. —Steve]

• Len Deighton died on Sunday, March 15. R.I.P.

Poem:

“Caribou” by Karen Solie

Why, after so many years, is she with me now?
We who were not close in life
walk among the caribou lichen

whose coral-like low forms, white against the mosses
and wild blueberry in its red phase,
seem to give off light.

She has escaped
through the window of the body’s house of harm
into the freedom of a truth that will never be recognized.

And indeed they do give off light, fungi and algae
in a collaboration that obscures
the individual collaborators

who’ve taken it entirely off-spectrum,
reflecting every wavelength and phosphorescing under the UV
intensely where appearing most delicate

as though, as has been written, the best metaphor for stillness
is constant motion. Out of weakness
are made strong, I guess.

A cold-hardy, slow-growing, clean-air species.
The fog makes surprising
what it does not conceal, and what is concealed reminds us

that an excess of surprise should be avoided, if one can help it.
Listen to the sea, she says,
surprising again and again the rock of the shore.

[Since first reading the poem, I’ve been thinking about the idea of the body as a “house of harm” and implicit relief of escape. The next line, and the word “freedom,” is almost superfluous. But what a forgiving way to acknowledge the pain of someone for whom selfhood is not simple. In a poem dense with ideas and images, there is still a sense of organization and moments of easy delight. “[C]ollaboration that obscures / the individual collaborators” is the language of indictment that has been transposed to a new context. Solie briefly interjects cliché—stillness and motion, weakness and strength—to bolster the light’s claim to delicacy. I also love the contradictory repetition of surprise in the final section, just short, it would appear, of the excess that should be avoided. —K. T.]

Upcoming books:

Mariner Books | March 24

Western Star: The Life and Legends of Larry McMurtry
by David Streitfeld

From the publisher: Before Larry McMurtry became one of the most celebrated writers of the twentieth century, he worked on his family’s ranch in rural Texas. At night he heard vivid stories of his cowboy uncles driving herds of cattle across the plains where there once were bison and Native Americans. “McMurtry Means Beef,” as one ranching magazine put it. By the time he died in 2021, McMurtry had published forty books, won a Pulitzer for Lonesome Dove and an Oscar for his cowritten adaptation of Annie Proulx’s Brokeback Mountain, and seen his work made into such classic films as Hud and Terms of Endearment. Now, McMurtry means great stories.

For all his fame, McMurtry was an elusive figure. He loved women but was married to his typewriter; he was wary of critics and distrustful of other men—except David Streitfeld. When McMurtry gave the Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist the keys to his past, Streitfeld dug into every archive and interviewed everyone who would talk. He found that, even as McMurtry’s work criticized the old cowboy myths, he loved making up stories about himself.

Western Star reveals the real and complicated life of a storyteller who was both an icon and critic of Texas, the favorite of presidents, confidant to movie stars like Diane Keaton and Cybill Shepherd, friend to Ken Kesey and husband to his widow Faye, an obsessive bookseller, and the most enduring voice of the American West.

Also out Tuesday:

Columbia University Press: The Melville Effect: A Literary Afterlife Across the Arts by Joseph Allen Boone

Harper: Python’s Kiss: Stories by Louise Erdrich

What we’re reading:

Steve read more of The Recognitions.

Critical notes:

• In the Times, Ryan Francis Bradley on “sync music”:

  Sync, it’s called. Once it was known as library music; sometimes it’s called production music. It’s not really a genre. It’s a category, defined by its function: This is music that exists to be paired—synced—with video. That’s why it’s so ubiquitous. Modern American life is absolutely steeped in video, which follows us, at every hour, from TV screens to smartphones to laptops, from movies to social media rants to workplace anti-harassment training modules. The soundtrack to most of it is some form of sync. This is partly because sync tends to be the cheapest and easiest option. But it’s also because sync is specifically crafted to be cut to video—and in a time when more and more of human communication involves editing video, this stuff is rapidly becoming our dominant form of music.

  • Erik Satie, most contemporary of composers:

    One might nonetheless create a musique d’ameublement [furniture music], that is to say, a music that would be a part of the ambient noise and take account of it. I imagine it to be melodic, softening the noise of knives and forks without dominating, without imposing. It would fill the sometimes awkward silences between guests. It would spare them from banal conversation. At the same time, it would neutralize the noises of the street, which enter without discretion.

  • Will Tavlin, in a piece about Netflix for n+1 last year:

    Such slipshod filmmaking works for the streaming model, since audiences at home are often barely paying attention. Several screenwriters who’ve worked for the streamer told me a common note from company executives is “have this character announce what they’re doing so that viewers who have this program on in the background can follow along.”

    [From trends in culture I can only conclude that the most beatific state attainable in this life is half-watching TV. Or perhaps technology has shifted the supply curve of art all the way to the right. —Steve]

“What do you think of the Washington Review of Books?”
“I think it would be a good idea.”

Links:

• In New Left Review, Xi Ruochen on Hong Kong’s role in Chinese publishing:

  Huge numbers of pirated editions, smuggled tamizdat and anonymous self-printed materials now began to circulate through flea-markets and other “secondary channels.” Although both the authorities and serious authors voiced alarm at the amorality unleashed by this tide, to which new regulations as well as scholarly debates on “the demise of Enlightenment” and “loss of humanistic spirit” (renwen jingshen) bore witness in the late 1990s, a new literary ecosystem gradually emerged between cultural entrepreneurs and their readers, both registering a certain autonomy. The state’s extensive privatizations also gave rise to an unofficial trade in primary sources for historical research, as old Party documents from shuttered factories and downsized institutions flowed onto market stalls and circulated through the networks of second-hand book sellers and private collectors. Party history has always been a highly centralized practice in the prc, where all publications—chronicles, anthologies, biographies of Party leaders—were lodged in a handful of specialized institutions, including the Bureau of Party Literature and Party History Research, whose “official historians” enjoyed privileged access to Central Archives. The expansion of the market allowed researchers to bypass official obstacles to historiographic production. Identifying themselves as minjian they began to revise the official narrative from alternative perspectives. The 1990s thus saw a diversity of approaches in the field of PRC history. In addition to domestic practitioners, these “grassroots archives” also enriched the fieldwork of foreign scholars, nurturing a body of scholarship sometimes referred to as “Sinological garbology.”

  [“Sinological garbology” is an incredible phrase. —Steve]

• In The New Statesman, interviews Will Self:

  Fictional worlds are, in some sense, even more inevitable than the real one. The man who commits suicide in the new book realizes that he is a powerless fictional character. But as Self wrote, quite beautifully, in the essay “Being a Character”: “It’s precisely in fictional characters’ conviction—despite all evidence to the contrary—that they are the authors of their own lives, that they resemble us most . . . It’s precisely this shared predicament which makes them so very worthy of our compassion.” In the same essay, Self reflects that, while he initially dismissed characters in favor of ideas, “People who need people—I began to suspect—are the luckiest people in the world.” I repeat that line. He snorts.

  “It’s something like a tagline from Friends or something—utterly cheesy.”

  “Why did you write it, then?”

  “Umm, oh no. I do believe it. I do believe it.”

  [As Norm Macdonald said: “if something is true it is not sentimental.” —Steve]

Reviews:

• In the Journal, Michael O’Donnell reviews Tom Junod’s book about his father (In the Days of My Youth I Was Told What It Means to Be a Man: A Memoir, March 10):

  The book builds on a 1996 feature that Mr. Junod wrote about his father’s fashion tips and lifestyle rules. The article’s accompanying photo of a tuxedoed Lou holding a martini and staring into the camera is extraordinary: He is Hollywood handsome, the pinnacle of manhood, virile and bold even in the September of his years. But the enterprise was a kind of sham. Mr. Junod now reveals that by that point, at age 77, Lou had abandoned his own maxims about turtlenecks (the most flattering thing a man can wear) and witch hazel (for cleaning the navel), dressing shabbily and throwing his money away. Mr. Junod says he wrote the piece to show Lou “that I am finally successful, and to make him understand I owe much of my success to him.” Yet Mr. Junod confesses that he desperately doesn’t want to be like his father.

  [The feature in GQ is one of the finest magazine pieces I’ve read; I think about it whenever I put on a turtleneck, which I do with some frequency. Junod’s “style is the public face you put together in private, in secret, behind a door all your own” is as good a definition of that word as you’ll find.

  That Lou had apparently “abandoned his own maxims” makes his son’s feature about him an act of printing the legend as filial piety. But in hiding the truth, it functions as critique for those who know it. For all Tom Junod’s ambivalence about his father, he insists that the man he owes much of his success to is not a broken-down old man who no longer cares to keep up appearances but a fastidious man who paid attention to style. (As in fashion, so in writing.)

  But the question haunting the feature (and, to take this review’s word for it, the memoir) is what lies under all the style. When Tom asks his father when he looked his best and gets the answer “The best I ever looked? Every day of my life,” it is impossible not to admire the self-assurance; it is also impossible not to note that to give a specific answer, to tell a story, to reminisce about a moment, would reveal something about Lou, something about what he found most important, something about a defining day of his life. The answer he gives is an impenetrable surface. —Steve]

[Behind the paywall are even more links to the best and most interesting writing from the past few days, Upcoming books, What we’re reading, and Critical notes. Today’s specials:

• Why Zoomers listen to old music, and how to use the internet better

• The targets of satire

• A Poem by Thomas Wyatt, kissing, and the weather

If you’re interested in any of that, and if you want to support the WRB in making the lifelong task of literacy not take anyone’s entire day, please subscribe.

And if you’re already a subscriber, thank you very much. Why not share the WRB with your friends and acquaintances? The best way to support us is by subscribing, but the second-best is by sharing the WRB with other people. —Steve]

Read more

In my younger and more vulnerable years my father gave me some advice that I’ve been turning over in my mind ever since. “Whenever you feel like criticizing any one,” he told me, “just remember that all the people in this world haven’t managed to edit all the email newsletters that you have.”

Links:

• In our sister publication Down Under, Jo Langdon on young children and poetic expression:

  The moon appears too in Galchen’s work. “Mysteries of Taste,” for example, which catalogues the baby’s interests and preferences, and closes with the line, “Always she is the first to notice the moon.” It is through Brown’s Neon Daze that I learn how Margaret Wise Brown, author of Goodnight Moon, “possessed no special desire to write children’s books” and “wanted to be a serious modernist—a Gertrude Stein or Virginia Woolf” but “believed she was stuck in childhood.”

  While this might imply an opposition between (the texts and perspectives of) childhood and the works of “serious modernists,” it feels worth contemplating how the disruptive presence of motherhood, babies and children—present in the works of many—has the potential to unsettle language and perception in meaningful and arguably positive ways. Children might interrupt and disturb the focus of adults, but what new forms—of listening, receiving, and response—might emerge through these ruptures, giving rise to potential for dialogue and interaction?

  [I discussed certain similarities between Goodnight Moon and the Cantos of Ezra Pound in WRB—Sept. 17, 2025.

  Listening to small children talk is fun. (He says, not having any himself.) They do things with language that you simply do not encounter anywhere else. Some of it comes down to their lack of familiarity with the language; they don’t know enough words, and so they use the words they do know in ways that would never occur to someone with a more developed vocabulary. And some of it is their endless desire to categorize things and understand their relationships, which combines with their lack of set conceptual frameworks to produce new ideas of how to understand the world. Part of the modernist project was defamiliarization, and few things are as defamiliarizing as trying to see the world through the eyes of a three-year-old. —Steve]

• Two in Literary Review; first, Peter Davidson on John Aubrey:

  An Oxford-educated Wiltshire gentleman who lost his small estates to lawsuits and debts after the Civil Wars, he was somehow set free by this personal disaster to live, in Auden’s words, “a wonderful instead.” Instead of worrying about lawsuits and estate work, he lived on and with his innumerable friends. He travelled and observed places, traditions and monuments, always with a sense that many of his contemporaries, especially during the wars, were intent on the destruction of all these things. His drawn records of the megaliths at Stonehenge and Avebury are still valued today; but so are his records of people’s customs, songs and beliefs, which he gathered in Remaines of Gentilisme and Judaisme (1686–7). Both comic and melancholy, his writings offer a paper museum of people and things. “How these curiosities would be quite forgot,” he writes in his celebrated Brief Lives, “did not such idle fellows as I am put them down.”

  The context for this delightful sentence about memory comes at the end of one of his most intricate and memorable pieces of writing. His notes for a life of the short-lived beauty Venetia Digby (as edited from Aubrey’s manuscript by Kate Bennett) are haunting: “She had a most lovely sweet turn’d face, delicate darke browne haire . . . her face, a short oval, darke browne eie-browe: about which much sweetness, as also in the opening of her eie-lidds. The colour of her cheeks, was just that of a Damaske-rose: which is neither too hot, nor too pale.”

  [“Such idle fellows as I am”—writers can’t resist the chance to be self-aggrandizing and self-effacing at the same time. The artistic temperament is caught between the two.

  “Much sweetness . . . in the opening of her eie-lidds’: to read great writing is to be shamed for our comparative lack of attention. —Steve]

Reviews:

• Second, Declan Ryan reviews John Berryman’s unpublished Dream Songs (Only Sing: 152 Uncollected Dream Songs, edited by Shane McCrae, 2025) [An Upcoming book in WRB—Dec. 9, 2025; we linked to a piece by McCrae about the Dream Songs in WRB—Sept. 10, 2025.]:

  The poems here are immediately recognizable thematically, syntactically and in their means of address for anyone familiar with the original 77 Dream Songs (1964). In truth, there’s little to match the intensity or dazzle of those, but that same heartbreak note, wry self-scrutiny and bawdy romanticism are all present and correct, as well as some more occasional, elusive or private-­seeming work. These Songs retain the same blend of the Blues, Shakespearean phraseology and bar-room chatter, something Berryman comments on in one of the poems here: “He make their minds blur, with that syntax. Then / he abandon syntax and he count on tone. / Then he go underground.” This sort of exegetical turn isn’t a rarity. Throughout, Henry or his pal, who addresses him here as previously as “Mr. Bones,” annotates and explicates as he goes, foregrounding the poems’ making as much as their impact, either on his sanity or on his trophy cabinet: “One typewriter & very sharp pencils. / —Mr. Bones, take it easy”; “Star-showers of honors hesitated and then fell on Henry, / knocking him to his knees”; “every time most people praise me / I figure there must be something wrong with my style, / trudging away at perfection.”

• In our sister publication on the sweet Thames, David Trotter reviews Lydia Davis’ book about why she writes (Into the Weeds, 2025) [An Upcoming book in WRB—Sept. 13, 2025; we linked to an earlier review in WRB—Oct. 15, 2025.]:

  By Into the Weeds, any remaining reluctance to discuss the virtues of what we might call inadvertently long-form writing has long since disappeared. Witness the illuminating account Davis offers of the composition of “The Cows,” published as a pamphlet in 2011, and then in Can’t and Won’t. In this case, the raw material really was “found in a field”: the one just across the road from her house. Davis had no “overall plan” for her “observations,” which she entered in a notebook among other jottings. Days might go by, or weeks, or months, before she felt moved to add a further entry. “And so the set of 83 observations was written by accumulation over several years.” She has spoken in a recent interview of the “many, many, many, many pages” of her journals which “never were used in stories and never will be.” About halfway through Into the Weeds, she comes clean. Asked to write about why she writes, she eventually settled, she says, on a form that bears “some resemblance” to a diary. This text, too, has been allowed to accumulate. Its method is the enactment rather than the exposition of a motive.

  [A diary is an accumulation of impressions, but reducing all the impressions of a day to a couple sentences demands ruthless editing. Only these hard-edged synopses of a day—or, for those who use diaries as commonplace books, material selected from elsewhere—are allowed to accumulate, because they provide an understanding of the day that would not be possible if the diary entries were more diffuse. Trotter refers to Davis’ predilection for “the yield from pithiness and extreme brevity”; this also characterizes one kind of diary worth reading. —Steve]

• In The New Yorker, Sarah Chihaya reviews a new translation of Emi Yagi’s second novel (When the Museum is Closed, translated from the Japanese by Yuki Tejima, January):

  The world of Venus and Rika, though, is vague. They talk in an unnamed museum in an unnamed city. Venus is amusingly casual and surprisingly more street-smart than Rika, despite her centuries-long captivity; beyond the shock of her attitude, though, we learn very little about her. One might think that an ancient living statue might be the most interesting character in this story, but we never discover what motivates her, beyond a clichéd desire to get out and see the world. The novel’s villain is the handsome male curator Hashibami, who wants Venus for himself; a consummate collector, he thinks of female beauty as something that can be revealed and perfected only by the male gaze. Hashibami, who we find out lives in the museum, seems to want both to possess Venus’ timeless beauty and to embody it himself. There’s a rich commonality between him and Venus that could be explored here—who’s manipulating Rika more? But the novel ultimately retreats from these complicating questions. The final message is a little too clear; the fairy-tale setting makes the fairy-tale plot too easy.

  • Rilke: “you must change your life.”

  • Housman:

    I too survey that endless line

    Of men whose thoughts are not as mine.

    Years, ere you stood up from rest,

    On my neck the collar prest;

    Years, when you lay down your ill,

    I shall stand and bear it still.

N.B.:

• Mail clubs. [The subhead here says that “people still really love to get things in the mail”; if you’ve ever doubted this, look at all the junk mail that uses a font imitating human handwriting for the address. Even though people hardly ever get hand-addressed envelopes in the mail anymore, the sense that this is what mail should be lives on.

  Maybe I should start mailing out the Print Edition of the WRB. —Steve]

• The life and times of extremely annoying alarm clocks. [I pretty consistently wake up before my alarm; interesting to see how the other half lives. And I feel like we lost something when we went from alarm clocks named “the Rattler, the Slumber Stopper and the Tornado” to “Nuj” and “Alarmy.” We lost something before that when we went from the factory bell to the alarm clock. Make the whole town wake up early. Really, what they should do is ring the bells whenever a new WRB comes out. —Steve]

• “Last Wednesday, The Times officially launched the Midi, our new daily medium-size crossword.”

• “Is Post-Piece Silence a Recession Indicator?”

• “Staffers at Film at Lincoln Center keep a list of the incorrect movie titles they’ve heard from patrons. That list is very, very long.” [What about a list of incomprehensible plot summaries from which it is impossible to figure out what movie the person is talking about? —Steve]

• The Royal Mint is training its coin-makers to make jewelry.

• “Targeted Dream Incubation”

• New issues:

  • The Hedgehog Review Spring 2026 / Volume 28 / No. 1: Humanism in a Posthumanist Age

  • Literary Review March 2026 [As linked to above.]

Poem:

“A Vision Vpon This Conceipt of the Faery Queene” by Walter Raleigh

Me thought I saw the graue where Laura lay,
Within that Temple, where the vestall flame
Was wont to burne; and passing by that way,
To see that buried dust of liuing fame,
Whose tombe faire loue and fairer vertue kept;
All suddeinly I saw the Faery Queene:
At whose approch the soule of Petrarke wept;
And from thenceforth, those graces were not seene,
For they this Queene attended: in whose steed
Obliuion laid him downe on Lauras herse:
Hereat the hardest stones were seene to bleed,
And grones of buried ghostes the heuens did perse,
Where Homers spright did tremble all for griefe,
And curst th’ accesse of that celestiall theife.

[The WRB is, as always, a Spenser newsletter.

The first stanza introduces a paradox of poetic immortality—“buried dust of living fame”—and hints that poetic immortality is somehow inconsistent with life. The living fame granted by the poetry is only necessary because Laura is not, in fact, alive. But poetic immortality’s problems don’t end there; it turns out to be inconsistent with itself. The text of the poem says that the appearance of the Faery Queene causes Love and Virtue to desert Laura’s tomb; it might as well say that The Faerie Queene is going to take some portion of the attention and reputation Petrarch has. Human time and attention are limited resources; any new claim to artistic immortality is—has to be—made at the expense of the existing canon, and require us to revise our relationship to it. In “Tradition and the Individual Talent” T. S. Eliot says:

The existing order is complete before the new work arrives; for order to persist after the supervention of novelty, the whole existing order must be, if ever so slightly, altered; and so the relations, proportions, values of each work of art toward the whole are readjusted; and this is conformity between the old and the new.

Raleigh argues that Spenser’s poem, and the historical situation that gave rise to it, demand of us that we revisit Petrarch and reconsider his work. How does it change if Laura is no longer a moral exemplar? And the seemingly-unprompted reference to Homer in the penultimate line (and in a state somewhere between dead and alive—“spright”) pushes the question all the way back to the beginning. —Steve]

Upcoming books:

Out March 8:

ACMRS Press: Shakespeare and the Senses by Holly E. Dugan

Grove Press | March 10

The Quantity Theory of Morality: A Novel
by Will Self

From the publisher: In The Quantity Theory of Morality, Will Self’s unconventional new novel, his pen remains dipped in vitriol and elegance as ever. In this dark yet hilariously satirical “state-of-an-era novel,” Self’s target is a collective morality that is nothing more or less than pure sociability. His middle-class, middle-English characters appear trapped in a timeless go-round of polite chitchat in dinner parties that refract like a hall of mirrors as the novel progresses, until one day someone says something to the effect of, “This way to the gas chamber, please, ladies and gentlemen.” The Quantity Theory of Morality finally solves the equation of time and money that dominates our lives, in a way that is simultaneously deranging, destabilizing, and hilarious.

With recurring—if defeated—appearances from now-canonical characters like Zack Busner, the repetition of each chapter, or “Proposition” shows Will Self to be both a master of satire and slapstick humor and a sublime and thoughtful critic of the alienation of modern life. With The Quantity Theory of Morality, Self provides the sequel to his award-winning debut of 34 years ago: The Quantity Theory of Insanity. That literary psycho-surgery proved there wasn’t enough sanity go around—now he’s established what many of us fear to be the absolute truth: there isn’t enough good to go around, either.

Also out Tuesday:

Columbia University Press: The Traitor: A Novel by Abe Kōbō, translated from the Japanese by Mark Gibeau

Farrar, Straus and Giroux: Down Time: A Novel by Andrew Martin

G. P. Putnam’s Sons: Judy Blume: A Life by Mark Oppenheimer

Melville House: Still Talking: Stories by Lore Segal

Viking: The Complex: A Novel by Karan Mahajan

What we’re reading:

Steve read more of The Recognitions.

Critical notes:

• Moul on Gérard Bocholier and what we find in what we read:

  I taught language and literature (in English, Latin and Greek) for twenty years and for me teaching—whether it’s an elementary language class or a doctoral student—is mainly about helping both others and myself to read better. There are so many ways to do this, both as a reader and as a teacher, but one thing that comes up quite a lot is the difference between a purely personal response and a critical one. A line of a poem might move me because it reminds me, for example, of a nursery rhyme that my grandmother used to say to me. The particular memory of my grandmother and all that that brings with it is entirely personal to me; but the way that the line echoes a well-known nursery rhyme is not. On the other hand, if I am struck by a piece of writing because it happens to use a word that my grandfather or my first school teacher often used, that might make it very moving for me, but it probably does not have much relevance beyond myself.

  As sophisticated readers, we know that coincidences or echoes of this latter kind are not really critically significant in themselves. We teach students, and learn ourselves, to sift them out of formal writing. But all the same, these sorts of associations can be very important to us as readers, and are quite often part of what draws us into a work of literature, even if they are not what keep us there. And perhaps we can talk meaningfully about how literature may provoke such associations—the way that some kinds of poetry, for example, seems designed to elicit them.

• Patrick Kurp:

  Writing is a reliable antidote to boredom. A well-crafted sentence, an elegantly framed argument, a neatly arranged set-up and punchline focus our attention and feel substantial, even permanent, even when we know otherwise. In addition, every act of writing is a reply to a predecessor, one half of a conversation—a lesson taught by Guy Davenport. Literature is a vast kinship network of precursors. Readers and writers have no excuse for feeling alienated, apart from self-pity.

Links:

• In Harper’s, Nicole Krauss on Caravaggio, La Tour, and attention:

  What is it to live near to light, in sustained awareness of it? How does it braid itself into our sense of revelation, our communion with grace? Attending to it, where does it lead us? “We have all known moments in life when light appeared to transfigure a familiar scene and to make us feel what Wordsworth felt on Westminster Bridge,” Ernst Gombrich once wrote, referring to the moment of wonder brought on by noticing the spine-tingling peace of a city bathed in morning light. But a great artist doesn’t merely wait for such rare moments, Gombrich suggested; instead, he has the power to transfigure the commonplace by his imagining and handling of light. For Caravaggio, that handling was not just of light itself, but of the darkness that allows for its existence, and vice versa. This lesson transcends optics and speaks to the existential, to matters of the soul. It’s easy to describe Caravaggio as a genius of light, but he was an expert in darkness too, in life and in art, on how it also calls to us, how it can be soft or beckoning or another side of the story, and not just obscuring, or an absence, or the opposite of knowledge.

  [I was once in a class—I can’t remember what the class was actually about, since it certainly wasn’t Baroque painting—where we spent quite a lot of time looking at Caravaggio’s Calling of St. Matthew, and our teacher called our attention to the detail that, even as Matthew points at himself to question Christ’s decision, he seems to be positioning his legs and feet to stand up. He is responding before he knows he is responding. This is a statement about grace, but it is also a statement about art, which knows more than it first lets on and calls us into it. —Steve]

• In The Paris Review, Frances Lindemann on Virginia Woolf’s approach to reading:

  Rapture, for Woolf, is recognition. Recognition relies on something that already exists, and this is Woolf’s ideal of writing: it calls forth what already exists, but is not yet known, in the reader. You might call this a kind of emotional knowledge; you might call it the unconscious, a submerged level of sense that the conscious mind can register only as “random”-ness. It is worth noting here that Woolf’s Hogarth Press was Freud’s publisher in English, and she was reading his work around the time she drafted “Reading at Random.” One penciled margin note on a typescript passage of “Anon” conjures Woolf’s idea of reading as a recognitive process: “It brought to the surface the old hidden world.”

  In To the Lighthouse (1927), Mr. and Mrs. Ramsay sit together reading in the library after dinner. Each longs to communicate with the other, but neither can find the right words. Taking up a volume of poems, Mrs. Ramsay “began reading here and there at random.” The words resonate and echo in her mind, seamlessly interweaving with her thoughts, lulling her “like a person in a light sleep.” The book, though Woolf does not say so outright, is a collection of Shakespeare’s sonnets; and it can be no coincidence that Shakespeare, for Woolf, is the quintessence of anonymity in writing. In her “Reading at Random” notes, she writes, “About Shre: the person is consumed: Sre never breaks the envelope. We dont want to know about him: Completely expressed. When the incantation ceases, we see the person.” Who is “the person,” exactly—Shakespeare or his reader? For as long as the incantation lasts, both are “consumed” together.

  [Cf. the idea of the artist transforming the commonplace in Krauss’ piece above. —Steve]

Reviews:

• In our sister publication on the Hudson, Edward Mendelsohn reviews reissues of two books by Margaret Kennedy (The Feast, 1950, 2023; and Troy Chimneys, 1953, 2022):

  In the book’s unacknowledged autobiographical allegory, Pronto stands for the best-selling writer celebrated everywhere for what was taken to be the tear-jerking titillation of The Constant Nymph (1924), Miles for the same writer’s less visible probings into psychological and philosophical depths and linguistic complexities supposedly reserved for modernist masters. Simone de Beauvoir perceived Margaret Kennedy’s aspect as Miles; an English biographer of Beauvoir, Margaret Crosland, seeing only Kennedy’s Pronto aspect, was puzzled to find that Beauvoir “seems to have admired” The Constant Nymph “more than one might have expected.”

  Double portraits of the same person are fairly common in novels: Dickens typically portrays himself as both innocent victim and canny exploiter, David Copperfield and Uriah Heep; Mary Shelley portrays her husband, Percy, as both the grandiose Victor Frankenstein and the generous Henry Clerval. Troy Chimneys is a rare portrait of a novelist’s doubleness within herself. One hint of the hidden authorial allegory occurs when Miles Lufton names Emma and Mansfield Park as his favorite novels; Kennedy had published a book about Jane Austen two years before Troy Chimneys.

  [Since Mansfield Park is one of my favorite novels, I can confidently report that anyone who says Mansfield Park is one of their favorite novels is deeply disturbed. —Steve]

[Behind the paywall are even more links to the best and most interesting writing from the past few days, Upcoming books, What we’re reading, and Critical notes. Today’s specials:

• Life in various ruins (R.I.P. Michael Silverblatt, R.I.P. books coverage)

• The sources of Thom Gunn’s poetry, and his transformation of them

• K. T. on a poem by Maria Zoccola and body horror

If you’re interested in any of that, and if you want to support the WRB in making the lifelong task of literacy not take anyone’s entire day, please subscribe.

And if you’re already a subscriber, thank you very much. Why not share the WRB with your friends and acquaintances? The best way to support us is by subscribing, but the second-best is by sharing the WRB with other people. —Steve]

Read more

Links:

• In the New York Times, on love and Wuthering Heights:

  Whether or not we’d want to be around Heathcliff and Catherine in real life is irrelevant to whether or not we can be moved by their love story. And whether or not their story is one we’d want for ourselves is irrelevant to whether or not Wuthering Heights says something true about love.

  For this pair, love is where you find your lost other half, your twin, something deeper than even a best friend, something as inextricably you as your own organs. (“Nelly, I am Heathcliff!” Catherine says.) In this story, sometimes love kills us and sometimes it frees us; sometimes it degrades us and sometimes it saves us. Sometimes it does both at the same time.

  Who can deny that love wears all these faces? The mechanisms through which Heathcliff and Catherine are eventually redeemed and reunited are dramatically satisfying because in real life obsessive love usually does not have such consequences.

  [I was initially afraid that I would have to take back all the mean things I said about the Times’ books section last week, but this piece is in Opinion, so I stand by what I said.

  Even in Wuthering Heights obsessive love does not really have these consequences. The story of the second generation is the story of people who had nothing to do with Heathcliff and Catherine’s love, and weren’t around for it, but whose lives are completely shaped by it anyway. That part of the story doesn’t have much of a dark glamor to it—it’s mostly just sad—but haven’t we all, at times, dreamed of a love that would shape lives for generations? —Steve]

• In The Guardian, an excerpt from from Namwali Serpell’s book on Toni Morrison (On Morrison, February 17) [The Upcoming book in WRB—Feb. 11, 2026.]:

  In a 1981 Vogue profile, Morrison spoke of a reader who had “told her how difficult it was to understand black culture in her books—it was so removed from his experience.” She had responded: “Boy, you must have had a hell of a time with Beowulf!” The Vogue interviewer, missing the wit in this retort, commented: “Morrison has no patience with people who plead ignorance; but then, she does not pride herself on being a patient woman. ‘I find myself being more and more difficult,’ she says. ‘It’s something I really relish.’” Morrison’s literary difficulty was often translated this way into a personal difficulty, a moral failing: How dare she be impatient! Well, wouldn’t you be?

  One reason for Morrison’s air of pique was surely the strain of trying to balance the demands of multiple careers simultaneously. She was an editor, a professor, a writer, a critic and a public intellectual. I have worked in these fields as well, so I know that extending many branches can be a way of distracting yourself from the core vocation. The commitment to writing over all else is often viewed as selfish; when gender is factored into the equation, the charge can carry the stigma of illegitimacy. “For a woman to say, ‘I am a writer’ is difficult,” Morrison noted succinctly.

  [“You must have had a hell of a time with Beowulf!” is a better version of the line everyone loves quoting:

  So much contemporary fiction, even when it’s well written, is sort of . . . self-referential. I used to teach creative writing at Princeton and I would say “Don’t do that. Don’t write about your little life.”

  The framing of “your little life” supplies its own context, but your own life being found wanting is not the same as you being found wanting by Beowulf. —Steve]

• In The Dispatch, A. M. Juster on Petrarch:

  Those sins, however, are an integral part of Petrarch’s greatness. His story begins with a traditional infatuation with Laura’s beauty, progresses to an appreciation of her spiritual qualities, then those qualities start drawing him to aspire to become closer to God. That aspiration leads him to the path of relentless self-examination laid out by Saint Augustine in his Confessions, thus one can view Petrarch as the godfather of both the sonnet and the confessional poetry tradition that exploded in the mid-twentieth century with the work of Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton, Robert Lowell, W. D. Snodgrass, John Berryman and many others. Petrarch’s Canzoniere is more than a collection of love poems—it is a record of a long and difficult spiritual journey.

  Despite the beauty of the text’s poems and its contributions to Western poetry, a declining number of people are reading Petrarch, even in our universities’ “great books” programs. There are undoubtedly many reasons for this sad phenomenon, but one factor is that early twentieth-century academic biases have been difficult to overcome. Unwilling in that era to deal with either the sensual or the Catholic, many academics presented Petrarch as a safe and foppish “troubadour” whose praise of Laura was merely courtly cosplay, and translations of that era tended to reflect that interpretation.

  [Juster has a new translation of Petrarch’s lyric poetry coming out in April, which I am very much looking forward to. As with anyone who produces a new translation, he is obligated to be dismissive of earlier attempts; he says of Robert Durling’s literal translation of the Rime Sparse that it “has been extraordinarily helpful to scholars, but no one reads it for pleasure.” The nice thing about Durling’s edition, though, is that it has the Italian on the facing page, and this non-reader of Italian can manage to magic eye it. Perhaps this is closer to scholarship than pleasure, but I like it.

  It would be difficult to imagine a more comprehensive misunderstanding of Petrarch than as a “troubadour.” (Or perhaps a more comprehensive misunderstanding of the troubadours than to think they were engaged in the same thing as Petrarch.) The troubadours were writing songs to, and for, actual women, in the same way that a later generation would pick up the guitar to get chicks. The Petrarchan project is not that; it is more interior, mysterious, self-aware as an artistic enterprise.

  John Freccero, putting Petrarch in conversation with Augustine and determining that he is very consciously committing idolatry, concludes:

  In germ, it suggests that all the fictions of courtly love have their semiotic justifications: the love must be idolatrous for its poetic expression to be autonomous; the idolatry cannot be unconflicted, any more than a sign can be completely nonreferential if it is to communicate anything at all. Spiritual struggle stands for the dialectic of literary creation, somewhere between opaque carnality and transparent transcendency. Finally, it might be suggested that the illicit or even adulterous nature of the passion has its counterpart in the “anxiety of influence”: communication demands that our signs be appropriated; poetic creation often requires that they be stolen. Petrarch’s prodigious originality is that he was entirely self-conscious about the principles of which his predecessors were only dimly aware. By transforming the Augustinian analysis of sin into a new aesthetic, he made self-alienation in life the mark of self-creation in literature and so established a literary tradition that has yet to be exhausted.

  Freccero also notes that Dante’s Beatrice is always pointing beyond herself, like a good Augustinian: “God the Word is at once the end of all desire and the ultimate meaning of all discourse.” “Beatrice” points towards the one doing the blessing; “Laura” points to the empty air—l’aura—and poetic immortality—lauro. Whose laurel is it? Not hers, but Petrarch’s; it points back to him.

  The Rime Sparse is, after a fashion, an extremely lengthy commentary on Catullus 85 (which Petrarch knew):

  I hate and love. Why? You may ask but

  It beats me. I feel it done to me, and ache.

  (Ezra Pound’s translation; I don’t love it but I don’t love any others I know either.) It’s a poem about a woman’s effect on the poet—and it never mentions her at all. —Steve]

  And it has long been the position of the managing editor that Berryman is at his most interesting when most explicitly engaging with Thomas Wyatt and Philip Sidney and, through them, Petrarch. (One such sonnet of Berryman’s was the Poem in WRB—Nov. 26, 2025.) —Steve]

• In Bookforum, interviews A. S. Hamrah:

  Lorentzen: What are the damaging legacies of Entertainment Weekly?

  Hamrah: Consumer guide thinking. Herd mentality. A certain kind of smugness. Slavish interest in famous people in the industry. The hope that someday you’ll maybe be the Toluca Lake bureau chief of The Wall Street Journal entertainment section, and also writing very big, long, thick biographies about famous people in the film industry. Those are the legacies of Entertainment Weekly, which is not weekly anymore, but it’s still called Entertainment Weekly. Yeah, I don’t know why they still call it that. They insist on Entertainment Weekly.

  Lorentzen: That’s the brand.

  Hamrah: Who cares? Nobody cares.

  Lorentzen: The Atlantic got rid of Monthly.

  Hamrah: But what would it be called without Weekly, just Entertainment? That’s not a magazine, it’s a Gang of Four album. So I remember when I really started to dislike Entertainment Weekly as a vehicle for film criticism. It was when I saw a guy I knew had started in zines, and now he was reviewing films for Entertainment Weekly. He gave the Godard film Two or Three Things I Know About Her a B-plus when it came out on VHS. It’s a one-paragraph review of a Godard film from 1967, and it gets a B-plus. That is no way to live.

  [Maybe I should rebrand this thing. “Please. The WRB was my father. Call me Washington.” Or perhaps “Books.” One of those names so obvious you wonder how nobody else claimed it before. Like “Society of Jesus.” —Steve]

  Another note: I don’t know how old I thought Hamrah was, but I was sure it was not old enough to be reading reviews of VHS releases in Entertainment Weekly. —Steve]

Reviews:

• In our sister publication on the Thames, James Wolcott reviews Updike’s letters (Selected Letters of John Updike, edited by James Schiff, 2025) [An Upcoming book in WRB—Oct. 18, 2025; we linked to earlier reviews in WRB—Nov. 26, 2025, WRB—Dec. 13, 2025, and WRB—Jan. 14, 2026.]

  The letter continues as Updike makes fifteen additional numbered notes, running through the pad of Hotel Australia stationery helpfully provided by management. Number 15: “My cock is yours—up or limp, your toy and acolyte and (sometimes timid) explorer.” The next letter, composed on the same stationery on the same day, is addressed to his estranged wife, Mary: “In the plane from Honolulu I had to watch The Way We Were (1973) again and found myself crying over the way we were (and are).” What an operator.

  [The Way We Were is a tedious movie that could only have been taken seriously in the mid-’70s, when having mixed feelings about one’s life and conduct was in itself proof of emotional sophistication. All the sex writing in Updike’s letters is awful (Wolcott, like most of the other reviewers, provides the—choicest—excerpts for our delectation), but in its shamelessness at least it isn’t self-congratulatory. —Steve]

• In The New Statesman, reviews George Saunders’ latest novel (Vigil, January) [An Upcoming book in WRB—Jan. 21, 2026.]

  As her erstwhile self, Jill was “limited” in view, “constricted” in pity. “One judged,” she tells us, “one preferred.” None of this is true of “elevation”—or of Chekhov, who, according to Saunders, is unburdened by “a political or moral stance,” remains “open” and “perpetually curious” and used the short story “to move beyond opinions.” Saunders claims that as the reader watches Chekhov doubt all conclusions, we feel “comforted.” At one point, Jill notes that remembering her mortal life “always caused me to become less powerful and effective.” Hearing Tobias Wolff read aloud from a trio of Chekhov stories, Saunders realised that fiction was “the most effective mode of mind-to-mind communication . . . a powerful form of entertainment.” The novel’s heroine is a paragon of wisdom, acceptance and freedom from vanity whose only terrestrial counterpart, with the exception of certain spiritual leaders, is a great fiction writer while at work. In this analogy, Boone—whose own strength has been to make companies “profitable” and “efficient”—is equivalent to a character, whose inner world Jill inhabits, and a reader, beneficiary of comfort and communication.

  [“The most effective mode of mind-to-mind communication” and “a powerful form of entertainment” are rather different things. And who is reading Chekhov to feel comforted? (Cf. on Saunders and other male writers of his generation, as linked to in WRB—Jan. 29, 2025.) —Steve]

N.B.:

• “Two months into what was quickly becoming known as the Great War, the Financial Times asked its readers to predict the impact the conflict would have on the map of Europe. As a game. With cash prizes.” [Should the WRB start running contests? —Steve]

• Götterdämmerung during the Winter Olympics.

• [I don’t have a good place to put it, but I want to give Dan Neil at the Journal some kind of award for opening a review of the new Ford F-250 with this paragraph:

  Russell Crowe’s portrayal of Nazi leader Hermann Göring in the film Nuremberg (2025) is brilliant but incomplete. Little is made of Göring’s outrageous personal style: the power-blue Reichsmarschall’s uniform, the fur-lined capes, the diamond encrusted badges and batons, the face makeup. Göring’s sartorial choices raised suspicions among both the Allies and Nazi high command that he was homosexual.

  Who said the review as public service is dead? —Steve]

• Van Gogh truthers.

• “Constant Sexual Aggression Drives Female Tortoises to Walk Off Cliffs”

• Foucault’s old car.

• New issue: Bookforum Winter 2026 [As linked to above.]

• Robert Duvall died on Sunday, February 15. R.I.P.

• Frederick Wiseman died on Monday, February 16. R.I.P.

Poem:

“Helen of Troy Calls Her Sister” by Maria Zoccola

Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when published

    cly, you remember when it was us and the boys
                     and mom and dad and we all drove up to
                     chincoteague for the summer and the car just
—collapsed—
                     —just broke down, and dad took the hood up
                     and put his head in the engine and hollered
                     for mom to keep turning the key and the sky—
—like fire—
                     —record heat, air-con kaput with the rest
                     and the sun crushing down like a mouthful
                     of lemon peels, like the inside of a deer’s gut—
—and castor wouldn’t—
                     —wouldn’t get out of the car, he was afraid
                     of the snakes, you remember the snakes,
                     buckets of them wiggling around the trees—
—rising up—
                     —leaping up to strike, and i said momma don’t
                     you see what’s happening, but that’s when dad
                     all punked on motor oil snatched up a rock—
—a boulder—
                     —biggest one he could find, and he smashed
                     that thing down on the engine so hard i thought
                     the earth had split, sound like a plane crash—
—like a death—
                     —but damned if that engine didn’t roll right
                     over for him, just spread its legs and purred,
                     and there was nothing sweeter than pulling out—
—past the trucks—
                     —past the men, none of whom had stopped
                     to help, and castor, poor kid, didn’t he throw up?
                     all over the back seat, smelled like milk and rot—
—all the way to virginia—
                     —all the way to the big house, you remember
                     the hurricane? you remember the hydrangeas,
                     how they looked so bright inside the storm?

[Zoccola lays out some more great similes here: “the sun crushing down like a mouthful / of lemon peels, like the inside of a deer’s gut” though my favorite phrase is “dad / all punked on motor oil.” The affection and admiration, still slyly amused; the knowledge of his potential for failure, here blessedly unrealized; and maybe a twinge of fear.

Beyond the standout phrases, this is another poem as conversation—not quite a contrapuntal poem but nearly—located firmly in the States, in the near past, all invention besides the names. The two voices give way to a certain escalation, but also a validation of narrative, a mixed up memory reinforcing itself in sisterhood. It’s the knowledge of the referenced story’s arc that gives the poem its bite. We know how Helen will alter to Clytemnestra’s life, foreshadowed perhaps by Clytemnestra’s interjection — “like a death” and the final image of the hurricane, to which Clytemnestra makes no rejoinder. Helen remembers alone, the flowers, their blinding beauty. —K. T.]

Upcoming books:

Carnegie Mellon University Press | February 19

Killing Orpheus
by Forester McClatchey

From the publisher: A book that holds death in one hand and wonder in the other, Killing Orpheus explores the horror of mortality, the brutality of history, and the gentle miracles of love. Using received forms, especially the sonnet, this collection cycles through various speakers, including an aging Penelope, Frankenstein’s monster, Isaac beneath Abraham’s blade, and an elephant in Hannibal’s army. Here are sprays of flowers and hungry alligators, lethal snakes, and a baby’s first breath. Here are poems that reckon with death, but for the sake of life. Here is a poetic consciousness that shows us we must dare to make “a truce with loss” in order to go “spinning into love’s bizarre abyss.”

Out February 24:

Belt Publishing: The Trouble with Loving Poets and Other Essays on Failure by Elizabeth Zaleski

Farrar, Straus and Giroux: I Give You My Silence: A Novel by Mario Vargas Llosa, translated from the Spanish by Adrian Nathan West

Knopf: The Distance of a Shout: Selected Poems by Michael Ondaatje

What we’re reading:

Steve read a bunch of articles about Petrarch.

Critical notes:

• Charles Lamb on Valentine’s Day (h/t Patrick Kurp):

  In other words, this is the day on which those charming little missives, ycleped Valentines, cross and intercross each other at every street and turning. The weary and all for-spent twopenny postman sinks beneath a load of delicate embarrassments, not his own. It is scarcely credible to what an extent this ephemeral courtship is carried on in this loving town, to the great enrichment of porters, and detriment of knockers and bell-wires. In these little visual interpretations, no emblem is so common as the heart,—that little three-cornered exponent of all our hopes and fears,—the bestuck and bleeding heart; it is twisted and tortured into more allegories and affectations than an opera hat. What authority we have in history or mythology for placing the head-quarters and metropolis of God Cupid in this anatomical seat rather than in any other, is not very clear; but we have got it, and it will serve as well as any other. Else we might easily imagine, upon some other system which might have prevailed for any thing which our pathology knows to the contrary, a lover addressing his mistress, in perfect simplicity of feeling, “Madam, my liver and fortune are entirely at your disposal;” or putting a delicate question, “Amanda, have you a midriff to bestow?” But custom has settled these things, and awarded the seat of sentiment to the aforesaid triangle, while its less fortunate neighbors wait at animal and anatomical distance.

  [As far as I can tell nobody knows why the heart symbol is shaped like that (instead of being a pulsing fist of flesh). And as always I encourage people to send letters in the mail. (Maybe not Updike. But everyone else.) —Steve]

Links:

• In our sister publication on the sweet Thames, Seamus Perry on pluralism and modernism:

  “And” is a conjunction, so one might think there is some purpose in placing it in so awkward a position in lines that are, after all, about discovering a sad disjunction between people. The Friar inquires at the aborted wedding service in Much Ado about Nothing if there is “any inward impediment why you should not be conjoined”; The Waste Land is all about inward impediments to conjoining of one kind or another. Well, okay; but I nurse another thought, which, I admit, is the reason I chose that passage. For the word “and” is a hallmark pluralist word: a thought that is not my own fancy, but what James tells us in the closing lecture of A Pluralistic Universe—“The word ‘and’ trails along after every sentence.” And, he might have added, every sentence effectively begins with an “and” as well. Remember the wonderful opening lines of Pound’s Cantos: “And then went down to the ship . . . ” Every sentence in the pluralistic universe enters in on some previous, unfinished business.

  In “And,” an essay collected in Habitations of the Word (1984), William H. Gass writes: “If we were suddenly to speak of the “andness” of things, we would be rather readily understood to refer to that aspect of life which consists of just one damned thing ‘and’ after another.”

  [I recall reading in something about Milton, which I cannot now find, that in his work “or” frequently means, in effect, “and.” (I’m sure one of you will write in with the source; the WRB is Milton Weekly, after all.) I also recall once being given the writing advice that, if you have written “but” to combine two clauses or sentences, you should see if you can replace it with “and,” since they mean basically the same thing and “and” flows better. From this I conclude that there is only one conjunction. —Steve]

• In The Lamp, Jaspreet Singh Boparai on Éric Rohmer’s classicism:

  Rohmer developed his early vision further in his first essay for the Cahiers du cinéma, “Vanité que la peinture,” in which he claimed that cinema was not merely the art form of the future but that the other arts, including literature and painting, were exhausted, and increasingly inadequate in their current form for dealing with reality. He asserted that in breaking off from nature, modern art degraded man, whereas it ought to elevate him. Now that modern art and literature had run out of things to say, and had unsatisfying means of saying them, we should turn to a “classicism” within the cinema.

  According to Rohmer’s provisional definition in 1951, in a classical art, the artist serves the transparency of nature instead of sticking “critically” out of it. Here, for the first time, he spelled out what he saw as the classical virtues: elegance, efficacy, naturalness, and sobriety. Like the French classicist critics of the early twentieth century, Rohmer identified classicism with the capacity to represent, with a detached serenity, the intricate, contradictory obscurities of human beings; he associated it with a sense of measure, of balance, of order, and of unadorned simplicity. Yet instead of building on the precedents of Sophocles, Pheidias, and Aristotle’s Poetics, Rohmer extrapolated his classicism from the films of Howard Hawks and Hitchcock.

  [Rohmer was a subject of Movies across the decades in WRB—May 2023 Film Supplement. (It was a different time; my feelings on Whit Stillman have changed some since then.)

  When Rohmer said all this he had written a novel (coming out in English translation later this year). His suggestion that this novel served as the “matrix” for the Six Moral Tales, then, seems like an indication on his part that the novel did not succeed in depicting life as he wanted, and he needed to use another art form in order to do so. —Steve]

Reviews:

• In the TLS, Thomas Keymer reviews two books about publishing in the eighteenth century (Periodicals, Fiction and the Novel, 1700–1760: Ecologies of Print, by Jennifer Buckley, 2025; and The Novel and the Blank: A Literary History of the Book Trades in Eighteenth-Century British America, by Matthew P. Brown, 2025):

  Among the bracing provocations of The Novel and the Blank is Brown’s insistence that the arrival of print in any given community needn’t change very much. What matters is “the presence of a second printer”—the upstart player whose rivalry ushers in a new world of competition, controversy and contestation. A rich cast of incumbents and insurgents fleshes out the point: Samuel Keimer, Franklin’s “knavish” associate and later adversary, who never lived down his fanatical past with the Camisards, a millenarian sect notorious for their “violent and strange Agitations or Shakings of Body”; George Whitefield, celebrity preacher (and favorite theologian of Fielding’s Shamela), who berated bishops as infidels and idolaters, and wrote an autobiography at the age of twenty-five; Robert Bell of Philadelphia, self-styled “Provedore to the Sentimentalists” and “Professor of BOOK-AUCTIONEERING,” whose wares included everything “Old or new, that is come-at-able, in the American World of Books”; William Goddard, the Rhode Island stationer who invited female customers to send in their underwear, “and he will cause it to be wrought into the finest Paper, so that it may be returned to them in Letters, from kind Correspondents who are abroad.” Goddard may in fact have taken this play from a rare moment of sauciness in Addison’s Spectator.

  [From this review I learned the word “colporteur,” which refers not to a writer of such songs as “I Get a Kick Out Of You” and “Anything Goes” but to “an itinerant hawker of cheap print, especially religious.”

  Really unsure why I gave myself the title “Managing Editor” when I could have gone with “Provedore to the Sentimentalists.” You live and you learn. —Steve]

[Behind the paywall are even more links to the best and most interesting writing from the past few days, Upcoming books, What we’re reading, and Critical notes. Today’s specials:

• The end of the local Post’s book section, the teachers I owe the most to, and why I put this thing together

• Love in the ruins of the monoculture

• K. T. on a poem by Maria Zoccola and weird images

If you’re interested in any of that, and if you want to support the WRB in making the lifelong task of literacy not take anyone’s entire day, please subscribe.

And if you’re already a subscriber, thank you very much. Why not share the WRB with your friends and acquaintances? The best way to support us is by subscribing, but the second-best is by sharing the WRB with other people. —Steve]

Read more

Links:

• In Engelsberg Ideas, Alastair Benn on “hyper-literacy”:

  Many modernist novelists sought to impose discipline on the sprawling realism of the Victorian novel. They were intensely aware of the potential risks in doing so. In E. M. Forster’s A Room with a View, George describes Lucy Cavendish’s fiancé Cecil as “the sort who are all right so long as they keep to things—books, pictures—but kill when they come to people.” The drama of the novel turns on precisely this fault line. Aesthetic refinement can lead to moral weakness if precision and discernment are used to avoid the messiness of real human encounters. Robert Louis Stevenson, a consummate stylist who nevertheless experienced a persistent sense of inadequacy even after achieving worldwide commercial success, found himself wanting against his forebears—men who had built the first lighthouses along the Scottish coastline: “Books are good enough in their own way, but they are a mighty bloodless substitute for life,” he wrote.

  • Ezra Pound [In arguing that Chaucer is superior to Shakespeare, strangely enough. —Steve]:

    Men do not understand BOOKS until they have had a certain amount of life. Or at any rate no man understands a deep book, until he has seen and lived at least part of its contents. The prejudice against books has grown from observing the stupidity of men who have merely read books.

  • Gilbert Highet:

    The poetry of T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound is full of similar abrupt transitions from the present to the distant or mythical past. In The Waste Land, among scenes and speeches from contemporary London, the figures of Tiresias, the old blind seer of Thebes, and Philomela, the ravished princess who became a nightingale, appear several times, in order to add dignity to the modern themes, or perhaps, by contrast, to emphasize the squalor of today. A poet like Eliot or Propertius, who is deeply read, and who lives as much in the world of the imagination as in reality, cannot record his own emotions without at the same time recalling the mythical parallels which intensify his experience. So also the great painters often portrayed the women they loved, not simply as contemporaries in the dress of their time, but as saints, goddesses, nymphs, and madonnas.

    [“The mythical parallels that intensify his experience are a load of crap,” I think my father, Philip Larkin (not actually my father), said. —Steve]

Reviews:

• In our sister publication on the Thames, reviews a biography of Peter Matthiessen (True Nature: The Pilgrimage of Peter Matthiessen, by Lance Richardson, 2025) [An Upcoming book in WRB—Oct. 11, 2025.]:

  After the split​ from Patsy, Matthiessen stopped playing at being a fisherman and started freelancing for magazines, turning in pieces that he would then expand into or collect in books. More than twenty of these appeared over fifty years, most of which can be categorized as travel and nature writing, always with a shade of political advocacy. Richardson calls him the New Yorker’s “gentleman naturalist.” The job description no longer exists, certainly not the “gentleman” bit. He ventured into the wilderness with anthropologists, zoologists, oceanographers, paleontologists and occasionally crackpots, a few of whom he threw in with during his decades-long search for Bigfoot, a quest that never yielded what he was looking for but introduced him to the landscapes and people that inspired his books on Native Americans as well as his trilogy of novels about the Everglades. He wrote about auks, cranes, peafowl, gulls, condors, sharks, whales, turtles, crabs, otters, beavers, badgers, bears, wolves, lions, cougars, tigers, wildebeest, elephants and zebras. Air travel was now making travel writing simpler in terms of logistics, but globalization was rendering it both obsolete and politically suspect—however noble Matthiessen’s conservationist intentions. The tendency to romanticize “traditional people” (his preferred term later in life) as noble innocents, especially in their relationship to landscape and wildlife, never quite left him. He was taken to task for it in this paper: “His specialty is to articulate that sense of innocent wonder at the natural world usually assumed to be the prerogative of primitive peoples,” Kathryn Tidrick wrote in the LRB of February 25, 1993. Indeed, innocence, its absence and its possible reclamation is the theme that unifies Matthiessen’s fiction and non-fiction, for better and worse.

  [“We are stardust, we are golden / And we’ve got to get back to innocence, its absence, and its possible reclamation,” I think Joni Mitchell said. And hanging out with “traditional people” to get your innocent wonder at the natural world is like going to a restaurant because you can’t cook the dish yourself. Fishermen don’t have an innocent wonder at the natural world anyway. Especially not the ones who do it for a living. —Steve]

• Two in Literary Review:

  • First, Felicity Brown reviews a book about love (In Love With Love: The Persistence and Joy of Romantic Fiction, by Ella Risbridger, 2025 in the UK):

    Risbridger’s self-proclaimed resistance to serious scrutiny of her subject reads as more defensive than liberating. George Eliot’s essay “Silly Novels by Lady Novelists” is not an example of cool-girl disdain for the genre, as is implied. It is a playful polemic on the ethical demands of fiction in a gendered marketplace. And Austen’s novels—on the page as opposed to the screen—do not float along on fond feelings, but are propelled by a ferocious satirical intelligence. Irony is not a rejection of love, nor is expertise. They are its conditions: ways of ensuring that attachment is earned rather than merely asserted. To mistake critique for contempt, as Risbridger repeatedly does, is to underestimate quite how robust romance can afford to be, in literature as in life.

    [“What has romantic fiction to do with love?” I think Tertullian said. (“Fiction” is in the name! “None of it really happened, it’s all made up by the author.”) Critique is not identical to contempt, but I would go further: critique is not even necessarily negative. Being a critic, like being a lover, is to choose a particular way of being in the world, a way of orienting oneself towards the other things in it. For me, at least, it’s basically the same—wanting to understand, whether it’s the lover or the world (each of which reflect the other.) . —Steve]

  • Second, Jonathan Keates reviews a collection of essays by Patrick McGuinness (Ghost Stations: Essays and Branchlines, 2025 in the UK):

    Movement, for McGuinness, paradoxically implies a chance to find balance and stillness where the rest of us grow fretful, muddled or merely exhausted. Throughout this collection of essays and sketches the railway station takes on a positively numinous significance, linked to the author’s absorption with worlds in a state of flux. “Anything on the spectrum of terminality, from the freshly stricken to the fully decomposed, interests me,” he tells a journal interviewer. “I think things reach their apogee just as they’re about to collapse.” He likes crossings, bridges and hinterlands, a world of becoming as opposed to just being.

    [“The owl of Minerva flies just as things are about to collapse,” I think Hegel said. “In the railway station the women come and go / Talking of Michelangelo,” I think T. S. Eliot said. Having spent more hours in my life than I care to recall in railway stations due to the vagaries of Amtrak, I think the idea of them as being places in flux is precisely wrong. People pass in and out of them; they remain the same. You might as well say a dentist’s waiting room is a place in flux. It’s the trains themselves where things change. —Steve]

• In the Literary Review of Canada, reviews a verse novel by Daniel Cowper (Kingdom of the Clock, 2025):

  At the same time, Cowper offers the sensuous pleasures and insights of verse. His metaphors fuse nature, technology, and human life: a nervous mother’s “thumbnails click / her fingernails like a sequence of switches.” Elsewhere, he harmonizes the city’s sounds through internal rhyme and assonance. At breakfast, “toasters ding when their springs release,  // bowls flecked with cereal clink in sinks / and seagulls keen.”

  Cowper has a gift for arresting images that also develop the story. As the sun rises, Connor eats breakfast at his window, looking at “his bleary, slowly self-erasing / likeness on the glass.” It is a perfect snapshot of a man who has already lost himself. A bus drives by “glittering sheets of condo curtain wall // that show, like screensavers, gliding icons / of innumerable gulls.” The suggestion might be that the people inside those condos have become machinery as well. Visual motifs echo one another, adding more beams to the poem’s structural frame. In one scene, Viró throws a cigarette filter from her bedroom and “watches it flitter // like a de‑winged moth” into the alley below. The moment is told in slow motion, so it can seep in. Many things in the book will follow that falling arc.

• In The New Yorker, Katy Waldman reviews Daniel Poppick’s new novel (The Copywriter, February 3) [An Upcoming book in WRB—Jan. 28, 2026.]:

  Like all believers, D__ must also grapple with the problem of doubt. How do you keep something alive when you’re not sure what it is or if it even exists? Poetry makes nothing happen, poets like to intone. In The Copywriter, D__ experiences his art as invisible, ineffable, lacking the numerical markers of value possessed by, say, a commercially successful novel or a viral social-media post. He writes Lucy an anniversary pantoum; she breaks up with him anyway. He writes a eulogy for Ashbery, and the guy’s still dead. (Given his friend group’s protracted mourning period, it’s unclear that he can raise any spirits at all.) At one point, he buys his twenty-four-year-old boss a used copy of The Gift: Imagination and the Erotic Life of Property, by Lewis Hyde, passing it off as a cherished keepsake. He explains that the text reenchants online shopping, revealing the “invisible webs of relationality” behind digital transactions; it’s a naked attempt to keep his job. The ploy fails, delaying but not averting D__’s scheduled termination. Poetry, he concludes, is “labor’s ash.”

  [Do poets really like to intone “poetry makes nothing happen,” or do they do so because whatever the ancient connection between poetry and magic was has been lost? (Maybe the wave of poets experimenting with writing novels should instead experiment with rhyming rats to death.) Maybe Yeats knew it, or at least wanted to seem like he did. Auden didn’t, hence the line. —Steve]

N.B.:

• on Homer’s “wine-dark sea”: “The perhaps over-obvious explanation (Homer was blind, and didn’t know shit about colors) does not seem to have been part of the critical debate.” [Imagine a world where οἶνοψ πόντος went over like “bag of sand” in The 40-Year-Old Virgin (2005). This would, however, deprive me of substituting in “wine-dark” for metrically identical descriptions of the sea. My favorite is in “Nova Scotia Farewell”: “For a poor simple sailor just like me / Must be tossed and driven on the wine-dark sea.” (Perhaps the Mediterranean is wine-dark—I don’t think the North Atlantic is.) —Steve]

• The lack of trash cans in Japan.

• Epistolary novels and love letters. [“Every thinkpiece about epistolary novels that is written and every thinkpiece about love letters written signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who are lonely and not consoled,” I think Dwight Eisenhower said. —Steve]

• New issues:

  • Literary Review February 2026 [As linked to above.]

  • Literary Review of Canada March 2026 [As linked to above.]

  • The London Magazine February/March 2026 [As linked to below. Can somebody please figure out what month it is? Thank you. —Steve]

  • n+1 Issue 52

  • The Point Winter 2026 | Issue 36

Poem:

“helen of troy on the affair (vii)” by Maria Zoccola

Musée National Gustave Moreau: Helen at the Scaean Gate, Gustave Moreau

on the night i knew was our last, we sat down to a feast
in the smoking section of the perkins beside the city walls,
which differed from the perkins in my town only in the number
of dead men who ate there. the air con was running pretty good,
stiffing up the hair on my shins and souping the windows
thick enough to hide what the sky was doing outside,
a mean mess of clouds tinting themselves yellow and gray
and yellow again, galloping above a world pre-flinched
for its next bruising. he lit a cigarette and passed it to me,
which was a new thing i was doing, another small light
flashing frenetically in the background. i was so hungry
in my body. i wanted more than the glut on the laminated menu,
identical in every offering to the one at the perkins back home,
the same meals exhumed from a walk-in’s dark freeze.
columns of smoke rose from every table. the booth heaved
with plates of grease and blood. when the hail began
at last to hurl itself downward, it struck against
the wood paneling with a hollow call i felt in my belly,
a pounding that signaled the end of what we were eating,
whatever it was we were putting in our mouths.

[Like Sebree, Zoccola has written a collection of persona poems. Hers is a reimagining of Helen of Troy, set in 1993, often in conversation with other works referencing the Iliad, such as Helen at the Scaean Gate.

I like what this poem is doing with verbs: “stiffing up the hair on my shins and souping the windows”, “galloping above a world pre-flinched for its next bruising,” “hail began at last to hurl itself downward.” I enjoyed less the choices made in “the booth heaved with plates of grease and blood” or “clouds tinting themselves” but those are the exceptions. In each instance, even the less successful, Zoccala’s pairing of active verbs with inanimate objects gave a sense of unreality to the poem, adding texture to its aura of malaise. And, while it might be because the story here is so well known to me, I was nonetheless impressed by how effectively this poem was able to capture that story—yet make it a little new. Helen of Troy, whose new thing is cigarettes, knows the boredom of sameness, that the menu has never been good and will never change. —K. T.]

Upcoming books:

Pantheon | February 10

The Boundless Deep: Young Tennyson, Science, and the Crisis of Belief
by Richard Holmes

From the publisher: Tennyson rose to eminence as rapid and revolutionary discoveries were being made in the fields of biology, astronomy, geology, and marine science. It was a period of immense change akin to our own. For the first time, people were pursuing answers to questions that had felt previously unknowable—about biological evolution, the notion of a godless, unpitying universe, and of planetary extinction. These were as terrifying to Tennyson as climate catastrophe is to us today. It forced many to grapple with their understanding of the known world and their place within it and fostered a growing tension between religion and science.

Tennyson’s work during these years is suffused with strangely modern magic, and in Holmes’ extraordinary biography, we witness Tennyson wrestling with mind-altering ideas about geology and deep time, the vastness, beauty, and terror of the new cosmology, and the challenges of social revolution. Tennyson’s wild imagination and deep engagement with these concepts helped him emerge as the poetic voice of his generation—and he remains an inspiration for our own age.

[We linked to a profile of Holmes in WRB—Sept. 27, 2025. You can find my abortive career as a rapper by looking up “Young Tennyson.” —Steve]

Also out Tuesday:

Archipelago: A Parish Chronicle by Halldór Laxness, translated from the Icelandic by Philip Roughton

Celadon Books: The Last Kings of Hollywood: Coppola, Lucas, Spielberg—and the Battle for the Soul of American Cinema by Paul Fischer

Duke University Press: Ocean, as Much as Rain: Stories, Lyrical Prose, and Poems from Tibet by Tsering Woeser, edited and translated from the Tibetan by Fiona Sze-Lorrain and Dechen Pemba

Farrar, Straus and Giroux: Frog: And Other Essays by Anne Fadiman

Out Wednesday:

University of Michigan Press: Robert Altman’s “Nashville”: An Archival Exploration by Justin Wyatt

What we’re reading:

Steve didn’t really read anything. [Sorry. —Steve]

Critical notes:

• In The London Magazine, Zoe Guttenplan on style as message:

  Publicity budgets have been slashed and authors are often expected to promote not just their books but themselves on social media. Surely related is the fact that, despite some claims to the contrary, the first-person essay still dominates the glossy and pixellated pages of periodicals. In 1946, George Orwell proposed that “one can write nothing readable unless one constantly struggles to efface one’s own personality.” But personality is the hottest commodity on the internet.

  Orwell’s next sentence is one of his most famous lines: “Good prose is like a windowpane.” Like Warde before him, he saw his craft as best when invisible, when it doesn’t get in the way of the real meat: the idea, or the truth, depending on how worthy you’re feeling. It’s possible he was influenced in this by the radical writer William Hazlitt, who, a little over two centuries prior, wrote “On the Prose Style of Poets.” Hazlitt claims that poets’ writing is often too concerned with beauty to arrive at truth. In good prose, he contends, “nothing can be admitted by way of ornament or relief that does not add new force or clearness to the original conception.” Here, too, extraneous decoration is the enemy. Clarity is the goal.

  [In the first line Guttenplan quotes, Orwell is cribbing T. S. Eliot:

  In fact, the bad poet is usually unconscious where he ought to be conscious, and conscious where he ought to be unconscious. Both errors tend to make him “personal.” Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion; it is not the expression of personality, but an escape from personality. But, of course, only those who have personality and emotions know what it means to want to escape from these things.

  “One can write nothing readable unless one constantly struggles to efface one’s own personality” is, more or less, “In fact, the bad writer is usually unconscious where he ought to be conscious.” (“In fact, the bad editor is running personal essays that he ought to kill”?) Personality is pretty easily changed into content, but art requires a bit more craft. —Steve]

• Moul on compasses (both kinds) in seventeenth-century poetry:

  Moreover, Borough’s image, though clearly of a navigational compass, seems to be slightly infected by or mixed up with the much better-established poetic image of the mathematical compass. Line 5—“Yet doth the constant compasse quiet stand,” surely the best single line of the poem—draws on the contrast between constancy or fixity on the one hand and movement on the other (“the moving barke”) which is the standard set of associations with the mathematical compass, as we saw in Jonson’s poem.

  One other element similarly seems to fit the mathematical compass better than the navigational one, and that’s Borough’s striking phrase “howe’er . . . my forked body move.” I thought immediately of Shakespeare again, especially King Lear (“unaccommodated man is no more but such a poor, bare, forked animal as thou art”). A person is “forked” because he or she has two legs. But when you think about it, the image of the “fork” of a man’s legs works much better for a mathematical compass—the prongs of which are indeed often described as “legs” or “feet”—than it does for a navigational compass, the needle of which is a straight, not forked, piece of metal.

  [The most famous compass in English poetry, I think, is Donne’s:

  Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when published

  If they be two, they are two so
  As stiff twin compasses are two;
  Thy soul, the fixed foot, makes no show
  To move, but doth, if the other do.
  
  And though it in the center sit,
  Yet when the other far doth roam,
  It leans and hearkens after it,
  And grows erect, as that comes home.
  
  Such wilt thou be to me, who must,
  Like th’ other foot, obliquely run;
  Thy firmness makes my circle just,
  And makes me end where I begun.

  There is motion here, but motion in the service of constancy; so that the poet’s foot of the compass returns to where it started, the other “leans and hearkens after it.” And there is also constancy in the service of motion; both legs of the compass are “stiff,” and the last two lines explain that this stiffness is necessary to make a circle. What at first seems opposed is revealed to be unified. The stanza before this conceit, employing a frankly even stranger conceit, works similarly:

  Our two souls therefore, which are one,

  Though I must go, endure not yet

  A breach, but an expansion,

  Like gold to airy thinness beat.

  Just as the compass is both moving and constant, the two souls are both separated and united. In fact, their seeming separation creates a broader unity than was previously possible, like the gold that becomes impossibly thin in order to spread out—“not yet / A breach, but an expansion.” —Steve]

Links:

• In Harper’s, an essay adapted from Katie Kadue’s contribution to a recent book about close reading (Close Reading for the Twenty-First Century, edited by Dan Sinykin and Johanna Winant, 2025) [An Upcoming book in WRB—Oct. 18, 2025; we linked to an essay by Winant about teaching students how to close read in WRB—Nov. 29, 2025.]:

  We often write under the influence of others, and of language itself. Our train of thought turns into a runaway locomotive, words plowing through the page by means of their own internal combustion. We weave others’ words with our own until we start to forget our own voice, become complicit, even when we quarantine sentiments in quotation marks. This metaphor of close reading as interweaving is barely a metaphor at all; it’s a dead metaphor, a kind of cliché, such a common way of describing the integration of textual evidence that the picture of strands of fiber interlaced at right angles on a loom is hardly present in our minds. This uninspired image is inspired by Ricks’ writing on the seventeenth-­century poet Andrew Marvell, famous for a stylistic technique that another critic, William Empson, referred to as the “self-­inwoven simile”: a practice of defamiliarization in which a familiar image is enfolded upon itself, like a mill that is also its own grist. “Grist to the mill”: itself a phrase so overused as to have been ground down to almost nothing. This cliché works as an image of the manufacture of cliché: an unthinking machine taking the raw material of language and overworking it into a homogenous slurry. But the proverbial mill’s grinding of grist might also be analogous to what certain authors can do with clichés when they process unremarkable material into a refined final product.

  [“A mill that is also its own grist” reminds me of the central idea of Robert Southwell’s “The Burning Babe,” which (as I discussed in WRB—Dec. 10, 2025), picks up on a suggestion in the Biblical source material and portrays the babe as both the fire and subject to the fire’s heat. But Southwell was writing before the metaphysicals, when this kind of thing was fresh. Marvell, writing at the end of a poetic tradition that had extracted everything possible from the most bizarre conceits, needed a new means of defamiliarization and employed comparing things to slightly altered versions of themselves, as in “The Garden,” where the imagination employed in said garden leads “to a green thought in a green shade,” or in “The Mower’s Song,” where

  My mind was once the true survey

  Of all these meadows fresh and gay,

  . . .

  When Juliana came, and she

  What I do to the grass, does to my thoughts and me.

  My mind is like the meadows, which are like my mind. Maybe the clearest example is found in “On a Drop of Dew,” where the titular drop

  But gazing back upon the skies,

  Shines with a mournful light,

  Like its own tear,

  The drop is now a tear, but it is still itself. (Kadue mentions this one in an essay of her own on Marvell.) Later in that poem Marvell refers to the drop’s “pure and circling thoughts,” working off multiple meanings of that second adjective. The drop is round, of course, but the image of the circle also implies endlessness. The drop looks back on the skies, but the skies are the source of the light the drop reflects, and so they look at the drop, which looks at the skies, which look . . . And even more fundamentally, the drop is like itself, which is like itself, which is like itself . . . —Steve]

  • Ralph Waldo Emerson: “All minds quote.”

  • T. S. Eliot:

    Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal; bad poets deface what they take, and good poets make it into something better, or at least something different. The good poet welds his theft into a whole of feeling which is unique, utterly different from that from which it was torn; the bad poet throws it into something which has no cohesion. A good poet will usually borrow from authors remote in time, or alien in language, or diverse in interest.

    [For as often as these lines get quoted you never see discussion of what happens next, which is Eliot walking through a bunch of lines from Philip Massinger and comparing them unfavorably to lines from Shakespeare and Webster (the Shakespeare is supplied by the book Eliot is reviewing, and the Webster he adds himself). The alternation—the interweaving—of Massinger and the other playwrights is close reading by quotation; close reading one text requires being able to quote many others. —Steve]

  • Wyatt Guyon [“Wyatt” from Thomas Wyatt, bringing the sonnet into English by imitation of Petrarch, and “Guyon” from The Faerie Queene, who keeps getting distracted by beauty as he’s supposed to be destroying the Bower of Bliss. —Steve], quoting his teacher in William Gaddis’ The Recognitions (1955):

    That romantic disease, originality, all around us we see originality of incompetent idiots, they could draw nothing, paint nothing, just so the mess they make is original . . . Even two hundred years ago who wanted to be original, to be original was to admit that you could not a do a thing the right way, so you could only do it your own way.

  • David Bowie: “You know the music comes out better on a stolen guitar.”

• In The New Yorker, Hermoine Hoby on Infinite Jest at 30:

  We understand Don to be one of the bewildered young fish, although, owing to Mr. Death in the unlikely role of sage, perhaps a young fish now coming to terms with the water in which he swims, learning to pay attention to what merits attention. Wallace’s piscine material is much more successful in this rambunctious, dynamic, take-it-or-leave-it novelistic form than in his fish-out-of-water public performance, years later, before the class of 2005. Wallace gave a commencement speech for the ages, but homily was not his métier. His great novel proposed that the compulsive, addictive character of America, not least its addiction to entertainment, could best be resisted through the engaged reading of fiction. Here is a book about addiction that offers itself as a kind of counter-addiction, an example of the compounding value of sustained attention. The infamous length of Infinite Jest is, in this sense, a central feature of its ethic: not bigness as brag but duration as discipline. In a distractible age, Wallace made an argument for the long novel that is won simply by being heard.

  [I figure we have probably ten or fifteen years until Infinite Jest can be evaluated as a novel instead of a cultural totem. Wallace’s essays are already there; Infinite Jest will get there too. In his “brodernism” essay Federico Perelmuter says that group views it as “rather too mainstream and easily read,” which is in its way promising—it’s a reaction against the novel not rooted in feelings about Wallace or what the figure of Wallace symbolizes. (While going through that essay to pull the quote I noticed that Hugh Kenner’s The Pound Era makes the “brodernism canon” but Pound’s Cantos don’t; that seems somehow important.) —Steve]

Reviews:

• In the TLS, reviews an anthology of sonnets (Scanty Plot of Ground: A Book of Sonnets, edited by Paul Muldoon, 2025):

  Such departures—and more radical ones, too—are only meaningful if the reader retains a sense of where the boundaries are, and Scanty Plot of Ground is full of reminders. Not only do most of the poets at least in large part abide by Petrarchan or Elizabethan rules (with the recently departed Tony Harrison sticking close to the Meredithian sixteen-line model in his quietly piercing “Long Distance II”), but we even get a primer, albeit in unruly verse, from Billy Collins’s “Sonnet”: “All we need is fourteen lines, well, thirteen now, / and after this one just a dozen . . . ” Other self-referential sonnets, including Robert Burns’ “A Sonnet upon Sonnets” and Wordsworth’s “Nuns fret not at their convent’s narrow room”, from which the book’s title is taken, pepper the pages. My personal favorite of these is Edna St. Vincent Millay’s “I will put Chaos into fourteen lines,” in which the speaker holds the personified mess of her life “in the strict confines / Of this sweet Order, where, in pious rape” he is reduced to “nothing more nor less / Than something simply not yet understood.” It is as if Yeats’ Leda, whose appearance in “Leda and the Swan” closes Muldoon’s selection, had turned the tables on the divine Swan, pinned him down and forcefully “put on his knowledge with his power.”

  [The strict formalism of the sonnet subjects the twin frenzies of love and poetry to restraint. And because, as the old Lay’s slogan goes, you can’t write just one sonnet, poets end up thinking a lot about why they keep coming back to write more. —Steve]

[Behind the paywall are even more links to the best and most interesting writing from the past few days, Upcoming books, What we’re reading, and Critical notes. Today’s specials:

• Even more about the compulsion to write sonnets (this time John Berryman’s)

• The best thing to put on a cheeseburger

• K. T. on a poem by Chet’la Sebree and the dangers of invoking The Waste Land

If you’re interested in any of that, and if you want to support the WRB in making the lifelong task of literacy not take anyone’s entire day, please subscribe.

And if you’re already a subscriber, thank you very much. Why not share the WRB with your friends and acquaintances? The best way to support us is by subscribing, but the second-best is by sharing the WRB with other people. —Steve]

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Links:

• In our sister publication in Tinseltown, Nyuol Lueth Tong on László Krasznahorkai’s sentences:

  In a White Review interview, Krasznahorkai reflected that a continuous sentence permits what we might call—lacking a better term—the exactness of hesitation. The remark sounds paradoxical, yet it turns out to be true. The unbroken sentence becomes a grammar of scruple. It traces the mental footwork by which assertion shades into doubt and returns as a more provisional assertion, giving the reader not only room to inhabit thought but also time to recognize what thinking actually feels like. These sentences do not aspire to opacity; they aspire to accuracy. These are sentences that reject the consolation of manageability, that press against the reader’s instinct for reduction and instead ask for narrative stamina—an openness to experience rendered at its actual scale.

  [Krasznahorkai doesn’t mention him in that interview, but when I read something like this I think of Henry James. Then again I suppose Henry James isn’t the kind of writer I would expect Krasznahorkai to mention. The commitment to accuracy creates its own opacity. So much of everyday thought and perception is an opaque and impressionistic (I mean both to compare it to capital-I Impressionism and to describe it literally as a series of impressions), and to record it accurately as it is, as it feels in the moment, is to depict everything through a haze of endless contextualization and recontextualization.

  The long sentence as described here, with its hesitations and loops back and modifications and clarifications all accumulating, has more in common with speech than with “writing” as we have tended to understand it. This appears to be the result of compositional technique; Krasznahorkai isn’t quite clear in the White Review interview, but he makes it seem as though his method involves talking to himself until he has a good sentence and only then writing anything down, and James’ novels most associated with this approach to the sentence were dictated. It’s “narrative stamina,” but narratives exist in forms beyond writing. —Steve]

• Two in our sister publication on the sweet Thames: first, Colm Tóibín on Auden and Eliot reckoning with the death of Yeats:

  “Of course, I had met Yeats many times,” Eliot wrote to the poet Donald Hall. “Yeats was always very gracious when one met him and had the art of treating younger writers as if they were his equals and contemporaries.” In his Abbey lecture, Eliot teased out this idea of Yeats as a poet for the young: “For the young can see him as a poet who in his work remained in the best sense always young, who even in one sense became young as he aged.” Now, two years after his death, Yeats, or some version of him, speaks to Eliot, almost a quarter of a century his junior. The address is direct, intimate and alert to the ideas of shame and regret that Yeats deals with in “The Man and the Echo” and “Vacillation.” The ghost speaks of “the rending pain of re-enactment.” Eliot wrote about these lines to Hayward: “I mean not simply something not questioned but something consciously approved.” He wished to blame himself for what he had done at a time when he presumed, erroneously, that he was right.

  [The modernists were lucky that Yeats (and also Ford Madox Ford) was so gracious and supportive.

  The early Yeats I think of as a poet for the young, although I admit that by “the young” I might mean merely “Steve Larkin at eighteen.” There’s a simple freshness to it. And the older Yeats, in the poem he opens with “That is no country for old men,” is aware of his age and aware that he is no longer young. If his age has allowed him not to “neglect / Monuments of unageing intellect,” it has also revealed to him that the thing he seeks is the same that the young seek in the first stanza. The poem opens with a juxtaposition of “The young / In one another’s arms, birds in the trees” both “at their song” and ends with the poet describing himself as “set upon a golden bough to sing.” What sings on a bough? A bird. In age the poet returns to youth. —Steve]

Reviews:

• Second, Michael Kulikowski reviews a book about Cicero (Cicero: The Man and His Works, by Andrew R. Dyck, 2025):

  For a Roman statesman, Cicero’s aversion to provincial command and military glory was almost unseemly; he was only happy when his finger was on the pulse of life at Rome. Away from it, he was desolate, and to Atticus he confessed contemplating suicide. Trying to psychoanalyze historical figures is rarely productive, but Cicero was a type we can all recognize. He had a huge but exceedingly brittle ego which could seesaw from self-regard to self-loathing, and from elation to despondency, with alarming speed. We know this because so much of his correspondence has survived that it is at times possible to watch his mood, and with it his political calculus, change day by day, or even within the same day. (It is of course true that Cicero curated even his most intimate seeming letters, but they were curated for his interlocutor, not for posterity, and they humanize their author in a way that few ancient texts do.) When his recall was engineered in 57, he rebounded from despair, landing at Brindisi to mass adulation and conducting his slow progress back to Rome as if it were a triumphal procession. A vote of the Senate restored his properties and ordered that reparations be made for his losses. The father of his country gloried in the prospect of reclaiming his position at the center of affairs.

• In The New Statesman, Jonathan Bate on Hamnet (2025) and past inclusions of Shakespeare as a character:

  The problem is not that Shakespeare is assumed to have felt grief—of course he did—but that Hamnet reduces him to grief, as though a single emotional note could account for the riotous variety of 38 plays. Here genius is something that happens to Shakespeare, not something he actively does. The film flatters our desire for emotional uplift while evacuating the sharp intelligence, irony, and sheer mischief that pulse through the work. One of the greatest readers of the plays, Dr. Samuel Johnson in the eighteenth century, believed that Shakespeare’s natural disposition led him to comedy, not tragedy.

  [If Anne finds Hamlet moving because it is a play about her dead son, I have to wonder—did she notice that Hamlet’s mother is a character in the play? And that its portrayal of her is not positive? Especially when compared to Hamlet’s father. —Steve]

• In , reviews a collection of modern Hindi poetry (Perennial: The Red River Book of Twenty-First Century Hindi Poetry, edited by Sourav Roy and Tuhin Bhowal, 2025):

  The poet who left the deepest mark on me was Ramashankar Yadav Vidrohi (translated by Abhimanyu Kumar). Vidrohi’s poems are burning in a cauldron of rage. In the poem “New Harvest,” he writes: “If god could grow on earth, / surely, paddy can take root in the sky.”

  These lines serve as commentary on the commodified form of faith in India today. But they speak contemporary, relevant political matters with a poet’s subtle weaponry. Vidrohi manages in an agrarian imagery of “paddy”—one that draws out some primary quality of a timeless India wherein, suddenly, he springs amid a whimsical poem about a paddy—a scathing line about faith and religion. Men for whom this rage poem is written, are not interpellated, their deeds are taken for granted—as though he were saying, “we live in a world where manipulation of gods on earth is a regular, mundane affair.” Credit is, of course, due to the translator for letting Vidrohi roar out into the contours of the English language. I can’t help, as a reader of Bangla, but think of the connections with the Bengali poet Kazi Nazrul Islam whose poem “Vidrohi” is most famous.

• In the local Post, Mark Athitakis reviews Chuck Klosterman’s book about football (Football, January 20) [An Upcoming book in WRB—Jan. 13, 2026.]:

  The strategy has its virtues. Klosterman knows a lot about the game, and his command of esoterica generally serves the meatier questions that football engenders—about race, greatness, obsession, risk. And the pages are infused with a sense that the game is profoundly odd, starting with a name that suggests it privileges kicking over running and passing. “There are many, many things that could serve as bell cow of the U.S. monoculture,” he writes. “Why has society coalesced around a sport that wrecks people’s brains?”

  The strongest essay is an attempt to explain why football is so popular, concluding that the game fits television like a nest in a tree—its action, its lulls, its militaristic but not overtly violent nature. Indeed, Klosterman suggests that the extreme athleticism of the game in recent years—see quarterback Patrick Mahomes or running back Christian McCaffrey—is evidence of a game striving to catch up with its video game version, instead of the other way around.

  [As someone who once tried to write about the appeal of football, I can tell you that it’s hard. (“Of all the unimportant things in life, writing about football is the most important.”) The suitability of the game for television is an aspect I hadn’t considered, but it’s definitely there—the shift from baseball to football as the nation’s most popular sport is probably the shift from radio to TV as the dominant in-home entertainment medium by another name.

  Calling football the “bell cow of the U.S. monoculture” isn’t really right, though; it’s just the only piece of the monoculture left, and its status looks all the more impressive since its competitors have more or less disappeared. Monday Night Football was putting up Nielsen ratings in the 1970s and 1980s better than Sunday Night Football is now (the process by which the NFL’s “game of the week” switched from Monday to Sunday is beyond the scope of this newsletter), but those ratings only made Monday Night Football a top-25 TV program then. The NFL has made a lot of money off every other way to advertise to so many people at once going away, but not even it is immune to broader cultural trends. (More about the monoculture in Critical notes below.) —Steve]

N.B.:

• The time Ronald Knox did a radio hoax.

• A new restoration of Erich von Stroheim’s Queen Kelly (1929).

• The world of oboe manufacturing. [Some quotes: “a fare put a knife to his throat,” “the damn instrument was invented by a sadist,” “you sound like a wild duck for at least the first three years, “the International Double Reed Society, also known as the International Double Nerd Society,” “a high school band director whose distaste for authority led to frequent relocations and a nervous breakdown.” As someone who—I can’t really say “played the oboe” so I will say “I’m pretty sure there is still an oboe in my parents’ basement somewhere”—all of this seems accurate. —Steve]

• Interesting rocks.

• “A cube of one’s own.”

• Black bears and fire tower lookouts. [I thought that was the coolest possible job as a kid. I kind of still do. —Steve]

Poem:

“An End” by Chet’la Sebree

I once told a love they only loved
the beginnings of things, and I wonder
now, years after our end, if that was
a reflection, projection, for I love
the slip and grip of an unfamiliar
pen in my hand, the crisp white or
pale beige of a new notebook page,
the first key flip in an apartment
ready to be smudged, ready for a new
configuration of my altar—singing bowl
and sandstone, selenite incense holder
to honor my fresh dead; for I am
intrigued when a centrifuge spins
my blood 3,000 revolutions per minute
to render me perhaps anew to me again—
better able to feed me the correct
concoction of controlled toxins to
reregulate, so my heart lumps my throat
for the right reasons when there is
a swell of cells becoming spinal filaments
spindle-stringing themselves;
for I know I’ll be eager-eared for
your first yelp before I am keen to
your cues and calls for help; for
in the beginning, I can be calm
like a buoyant body floating
in gentle wind-roiled water
push-pulling me away and toward
the shore of knowing what is
to come—which pressure
causes metamorphoses,
protostar pre-nucleosynthesis,
and which pressure produces fissures,
fault-lining matrix-lodged turquoise and jade
for there’s knowledge I don’t want
so I scramble search my way
back to the water, the garden, the egg.

[This poem is as lively as it is introspective, full of movement—“a buoyant body floating / in gentle wind-roiled water / push-pulling me away and toward” and sudden, still clarity—“there’s knowledge I don’t want.” In this poem too, there are flashes of alliteration and interior rhyme that drive the poem forward, “singing bowl / and sandstone, selenite incense holder” and lend it musicality, “I’ll be eager-eared for / your first yelp before I am keen to / your cues and calls for help.” This poem also happens to close Sebree’s collection, Blue Opening, which contemplates motherhood and health, subjects extremely susceptible to optimization creep. I sensed none of that here, blessedly. In an effort to embrace imperfection along different lines, Sebree has said she “desired an ending that didn’t feel weighted with finality, craved one that felt expansive, like a beginning, an opening,” and I think she has largely succeeded. —K. T.]

Upcoming books:

Random House | January 27

Vigil: A Novel
by George Saunders

From the publisher: Not for the first time, Jill “Doll” Blaine finds herself hurtling toward earth, reconstituting as she falls, right down to her favorite black pumps. She plummets towards her newest charge, yet another soul she must usher into the afterlife, and lands headfirst in the circular drive of his ornate mansion.

She has performed this sacred duty 343 times since her own death. Her charges, as a rule, have been greatly comforted in their final moments. But this charge, she soon discovers, isn’t like the others. The powerful K. J. Boone will not be consoled, because he has nothing to regret. He lived a big, bold, epic life, and the world is better for it. Isn’t it?

Vigil transports us, careening, through the wild final evening of a complicated man. Visitors begin to arrive (worldly and otherworldly, alive and dead), clamoring for a reckoning. Birds swarm the dying man’s room; a black calf grazes on the love seat; a man from a distant, drought-ravaged village materializes; two oil-business cronies from decades past show up with chilling plans for Boone’s postdeath future.

With the wisdom, playfulness, and explosive imagination we’ve come to expect, George Saunders takes on the gravest issues of our time—the menace of corporate greed, the toll of capitalism, the environmental perils of progress—and, in the process, spins a tale that encompasses life and death, good and evil, and the thorny question of absolution.

Also out Tuesday:

Liveright: After the Flood: Inside Bob Dylan’s Memory Palace by Robert Polito

New York Review Books: Trilce by César Vallejo, translated from the Spanish and with glosses by William Rowe and Helen Dimos

What we’re reading:

Steve read a little bit more of The Recognitions. He also read some of Béla Bartók’s essays. [More about that in Critical notes below. —Steve]

Critical notes:

• [I had intended to mention Richard Lovelace’s “La Bella Bona-Roba” (a poem that keeps getting mentioned in the WRB) in connection with K. T.’s notes on last week’s Poem about comparing the female body to edible animal tissue, but I forgot. —Steve]

• In the Journal, Ben Fritz on the rise and fall of American monoculture:

  The growth of the American monoculture was, like so much of our nation’s history, a product of geopolitics, economics and technology.

  Until the early 1900s, the U.S. was relatively poor, geographically dispersed, and without the technological means to share media with everyone. Newspapers and pamphlets have been a part of the country since our founding, but because each copy had to be physically created and then transported to be read by at most a few people, they reached only a fraction of the populace.

  To see anyone act, you literally had to be in the room where it happened.

  [A lot of discussion of the end of the monoculture (I’m not picking a bone with Fritz; he just made me think about it) and the return to something fractured and variegated makes the same mistake that commentary about the end of a literate culture and the return to an oral culture does: not understanding that the dying culture destroyed the traditional resources associated with the culture we’re supposedly returning to. No one now has memorized the Iliad; no one now has three thousand proverbs and a thousand and five songs. In the same way, what is replacing—has replaced, really—the monoculture will not be able to fall back on the traditional expectation that most art and music you actually experienced would be made by people in your community, including yourself. The gentry needed their daughters to play the piano because record players didn’t exist yet, for example. Communal singing, which used to be a common form of music-making, is basically extinct except at a few churches. Art can’t just be something you experience on a screen. It has to be something you support and participate in and help create. (Subscribe to the Washington Review of Books!) —Steve]

• In the Times, Evan Shinners on introducing people to classical music:

  In the 1980s, Neil Postman argued that Sesame Street wasn’t teaching kids to love math, only to love television. Whatever you think of Big Bird, Postman’s thinking applies just as well to the modern approach to classical music. When symphonies entice new audiences with concerts full of popular film music, the audience may rediscover their love for the films but they won’t magically develop a love for Beethoven. An audience that’s lured in to sit through an abridged version of an opera has not learned how to listen to an opera. These tactics might bring new audiences to see the symphony, but they don’t bring them to the music.

  For classical music to endure, we need to demonstrate to a new audience that the form is not similar to modern music but actually very different in important and—once you acquire a taste for it—enjoyable ways. In execution, this theory works very simply: Don’t change the music; change the way you deliver it. Do the opposite of what institutions are doing when they offer radically shortened operas or watered-down symphonies.

  [Postman was right about Sesame Street. The tactics Shinners describes reveal that the people using them have no confidence in the music itself. —Steve]

• Béla Bartók (in “Liszt Problems”):

  How did Liszt fit these contradictory elements into a unified whole? First of all, it must be said that whatever Liszt touched, whether it was Hungarian art song, folk song, Italian aria or anything else, he so transformed and so stamped with his own individuality that it became like something of his own. What he created from these foreign elements became unmistakably Liszt’s music. Still more important, however, is the fact that he mixed with these foreign elements so many more that were genuinely drawn from himself that there is no work in which we can doubt the greatness of his creative power. We can say that he was eclectic in the best sense of the word; one who took from all foreign sources, but gave still more from himself.

  [Wild essay. Bartók goes on to argue that Liszt was more influential on the development of music than Wagner because Wagner solved every problem he set himself, leaving room for nothing but inferior imitation, while Liszt “touched upon so many new possibilities in his works, without being able to exhaust them utterly.” (I suppose that if you asked me what Liszt’s main influence on culture was, I would say something about music, and if you asked me about Wagner’s, I would say something about the idea of the Gesamtkunstwerk. So maybe Bartok has a point.) He also says that Liszt has more in common with the French composers of his time than the German, which is either an interesting reexamination of the “war of the Romantics” or a way of saying that Liszt wasn’t extremely self-serious in his work.

  I excerpt this paragraph, though, because I hope to be described this way one day. —Steve]

Who in the rainbow can draw the line where the violet tint ends and the orange tint begins? Distinctly we see the difference of the colors, but where exactly does the one first blendingly enter into the other? So with Washington and New York.

Links:

• In our sister publication in Tinseltown, an excerpt from Gayle Feldman’s biography of Bennett Cerf (Nothing Random: Bennett Cerf and the Publishing House He Built, January 13) [An Upcoming book in WRB—Jan. 7, 2026.] about his trip to William Faulkner’s funeral:

  Later, when the extended kin and very few outsiders—Bennett; Donald; Faulkner’s friend Shelby Foote (deep into writing his Civil War history for Random House); Linton Massey, a devoted scholar and collector of all things Faulkner; and a couple of others—gathered in the parlor with the immediate family, Estelle recalled that Bennett had told her about Styron. She beckoned him, one more outsider, in. They listened as an Episcopalian minister slowly intoned a 10-minute service over the coffin: a few Bible selections, the Lord’s Prayer, no eulogy, as simple as Bill would have wanted. Afterward, they got into the Chevy, part of a crocodile of cars behind the black-finned Cadillac hearse heading toward the square and then the cemetery.

  Bennett looked at the battered old cars and could only sniff and shake his head at such a clapped-out cortege. Yet peering again from inside the blessed air-conditioning, he found himself jolted anew, the big city slicker brought short by a sudden transformation in the queer hick town. It was as though a spell had been cast: nothing moved, every shop was closed, and the residents stood—about a third of the folks were Black—in the square or on balconies, silent, watching, erect, respectful. Police covered their hearts with their caps. All motion and sound ceased, except for the snap-and-flash of photographers’ cameras and scratching of pens on reporters’ pads; waiting on a knoll above the gravesite, they had converged from all over, ants to a picnic.

  Funerals “are a big thing around here,” one laconic onlooker told Styron.

  [As described here this feels like a Wes Anderson scene, which somehow I doubt it actually was. But then Anderson at his best heightens the emotion by heightening the mannerism. —Steve]

Reviews:

• In The Nation, Vivian Gornick reviews John Updike’s letters (Selected Letters of John Updike, edited by James Schiff, 2025) [An Upcoming book in WRB—Oct. 18, 2025; we linked to earlier reviews in WRB—Nov. 26, 2025 and WRB—Dec. 13, 2025.]

  In the main, Updike’s work belongs to the Howells class of American writers—these are definitely his people—but Updike himself, hardly a Protestant patrician, was something of an intermediary between the suburban liberals of whom he usually wrote and the working stiffs he incarnated as Harry “Rabbit” Angstrom. Readers long suspected that deep within, in a place he didn’t visit openly, Updike not only sympathized with Harry; he was Harry, possessed of those same primitive feelings of rage and resentment, scorn and deprivation, the same loudmouthed patriotism that drove the Rabbit. And, indeed, the Berthoff letter confirms the suspicion. Angstrom is that part of Updike that the rest of his work papered over, the part that allowed him to dive as deep as he could go as a writer. The bloodlessness—that is, the lack of felt life—that characterizes Updike’s New Yorker stories and suburban novels disappears in the Rabbit books, and the writing sinks to the level required for literary depth. Selected Letters of John Updike needed more of Harry Angstrom and less of William Dean Howells to become memorable.

  [I can only speak as someone who writes letters in 2025, and if you’re doing that nothing you do in a letter can be more stylized or more artificial than the choice to write a letter. No doubt people sent raw, unfiltered letters once upon a time, but if we want to do that now we can text.

  One of the more clarifying things I’ve read about Updike was a piece on ’ Substack about his early work (as linked to and discussed in WRB—Dec. 14, 2024): “America is, in other words, a superannuated adolescent, inhabiting a big and powerful body, and with considerable charm and sex appeal, but lacking self-discipline and commitment to duty.” For “America” read “Harry Angstrom.” Read “John Updike,” too, for that matter. Attempting to figure out what America is has always been something Americans going through a life crisis do. This is why no one who approaches the question ever concludes that things are going pretty well. America instead becomes a source of interior and exterior corruptions, historical errors, grave misunderstandings, and—really, when you get down to it—potential unactualized, a lofty dream pulled down into the muck.

  The question then becomes, what is the dream? To quote Roberts:

  What makes this kind of deliberately vivified style different from the technically similar, differently focused other kind of vivified style for which Updike is famous, or infamous—I mean his baroquely cod-Keatsian descriptions of fucking and vaginas, the “Malfunctioning Sex Robot” stuff Patricia Lockwood so brilliantly critiqued, in the essay quoted above—is that this stuff is clearer, actually, on the way an individual like Rabbit can only conceptualize religious transcendence in quasi-erotic terms.

  Codpiece-Keatsian, surely. And this goes for Rabbit’s creator, too, who was (I learn from Gornick) capable of writing the phrase “your cunt is somehow your soul.” Updike’s wish in that letter to be transformed into a massive penis is somehow touching, a version of “we shall all be changed, in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trump” that suggests instead that everything can go on pretty much as it is and that the only dream worth having is that of sensual pleasure uncomplicated by the rest of life. There’s a whole kind of prose fiction devoted to exploring the lives of people who think like this. It’s called the novel. A lot of them are about adultery. —Steve]

• In 4Columns, Brian Dillon reviews a poem by Matthew Rice (plastic: A Poem, January 13):

  Before it was a thing, before it was a noun, plastic was an adjective (see the plastic arts) meaning shaping or shaped, having the power to give form, or being formed in turn. (Henry James, in The Portrait of a Lady, notes the aesthete Rosier’s “fine sense of the plastic.”) Outside the realms of myth and religion, has a substance ever seemed so miraculous but abject, mundane and full of potential? Roland Barthes in Mythologies (1957) calls it a “disgraced” material: “lost between the effusiveness of rubber and the flat hardness of metal; it embodies none of the genuine produce of the mineral world: foam, fibres, strata.” In Alain Resnais’s short film Le chant du styrène (1958)—with poetic text by Raymond Queneau—plastic has arrived from a colorful future of both fantastic and natural forms, but the most extraordinary sight is its production: the fusion and transmutation of particles into something apparently infinite, creamily self-same and cheaply sensuous. Admired and despised at mid-century for its ubiquity, plastic is now of course the very image of poisonous insinuation and latency. Plastic becomes plastics and in turn microplastics, and those are never going away.

  • Ray Davies:

    He’s got plastic flowers growing up the walls

    He eats plastic food with a plastic knife and fork

    He likes plastic cups and saucers ’cause they never break

    And he likes to lick his gravy off a plastic plate

    [One of the best Kinks songs, but even Kinks fans are too scared to wholeheartedly embrace the band at its goofiest and most music hall. In a related story, their best song is “Mr. Pleasant.” No one will tell you this but me. —Steve]

  • The Graduate (1967): “I want to say one word to you. Just one word. . . . Plastics.”

  • [There is also that meme where dinosaurs get turned into oil, oil gets turned into plastic, and plastic gets turned into plastic dinosaurs, which makes explicit the idea of plastic as ersatz immortality behind both the Kinks song and the line from The Graduate. —Steve]

[Behind the paywall are even more links to the best and most interesting writing from the past few days, Upcoming books, What we’re reading, and Critical notes. Today’s specials:

• I attempt to remember that the second half of the twentieth century happened

• Taste and orientalism

• K. T. on a Poem by Chet’la Sebree and etymology

If you’re interested in any of that, and if you want to support the WRB in making the lifelong task of literacy not take anyone’s entire day, please subscribe.

And if you’re already a subscriber, thank you very much. Why not share the WRB with your friends and acquaintances? The best way to support us is by subscribing, but the second-best is by sharing the WRB with other people. —Steve]

Read more

It is not the critic who counts: not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles or where the doer of deeds could have done better. The credit belongs to the managing editor of the Washington Review of Books.

N.B.:

[For any readers who missed Saturday’s announcement: the WRB will now come out once a week, and the price of an annual subscription has been reduced to $30/year. We go on. The books aren’t going to review themselves, after all.

And one thing I didn’t say there that I meant to: if you enjoy the WRB or get something about it, please spread the word. Tell a friend about us. (Or an enemy, if that’s how you feel.) This newsletter depends on you, its audience—a very fit one, and, I hope, with your help, not that few. —Steve]

Links:

• In New Left Review, Ryan Ruby on “Wikipedia novels”:

  Not too long ago, it was considered high praise to compare a novel to an encyclopedia. In 1976, Columbia’s Edward Mendelson proposed the term “encyclopedic narrative” to describe a genre that occupies “a special historical position” in its national culture. Among their formal and thematic qualities, Mendelson suggests that encyclopedic narratives gesture toward social and epistemic totality, even if, he admits, “they necessarily make extensive use of synecdoche” because “the world’s knowledge is vastly greater than any one person can encompass.” In this “small and exclusive genre” Mendelson identifies just seven texts: The Divine Comedy, Gargantua and Pantagruel, Don Quixote, Faust, Moby-Dick, Ulysses and Gravity’s Rainbow. The inclusion of Pynchon’s 1973 novel is interesting for historical reasons. Gravity’s Rainbow appears in the imperial core at a moment when the organizing category of “national literature” is giving way to what Pascale Casanova calls the “world republic of letters” and what Adam Kirsch calls “the global novel.” Relatedly, it appears at a moment when the ability of literature to gesture at the epistemic totality of the encyclopedic by way of synecdoche is being stretched beyond its representational breaking point by “information technology,” which is why Mark McGurl instead classifies the novel as “technomodernism.” Fifty years on, developments in information technology, including the rise of Wikipedia, have allowed us to see something that has been true since at least Benjamin’s day, namely, that no amount of information transmitted in the format of a book, whether fiction or nonfiction, can stand in a meaningful synecdochic relationship to the totality of extant information, without the further mediation of a curatorial subject who selects and processes the information for the reader.

  • In Commonweal, George Scialabba:

    Depth is not the only dimension in which our aesthetic and intellectual reach exceeds our grasp. An aspiration to breadth or universality—to “all-sidedness,” to assimilate the best that has been thought and said and be one of those on whom nothing is lost—only became a cultural ideal in modern times, just as its realization began to be impossible. The impulse to master the still (barely) masterable corpus of mid-eighteenth-century knowledge produced the Encyclopédie, which is, in respect of this ideal, the high tide of modernity. After the confidence of the philosophes comes the titanism (and ultimate resignation) of Goethe, the exquisite melancholy of Matthew Arnold and Henry James, the delirium of Ezra Pound and the high modernists, and the white noise of postmodernism.

  [“A novel containing history,” as it were. As Pound says in I Gather the Limbs of Osiris:

  The artist seeks out the luminous detail and presents it. He does not comment. His work remains the permanent basis of psychology and metaphysics. Each historian will “have ideas”—presumably different from other historians—imperfect inductions, varying as the fashions, but the luminous details remain unaltered. As scholarship has erred in presenting all detail as if of equal import, so also in literature, in a present school of writing we see a similar tendency.

  It is no longer possible to master all knowledge, if it ever was, but it was always impossible to include all knowledge in a work of art. Depiction is always curation. Implicit in the choice to draw attention to one thing is always a choice not to draw attention to another. Steve]

• In Lit Hub, an excerpt from David Berry’s book about artists and money (How Artists Make Money and How Money Makes Artists, 2025):

  However scattered his life, Baudelaire’s professional work has a gem-like unity. There is profound sympathy between his criticism and his poetry—including an almost fanatical obsession with drawing out the beauty of this thing in front of him, life or art, regardless of prevailing opinion—but his ability to push both of those forms in new directions seems almost impossible, with the vantage of hindsight. Art and criticism are not quite as spiritually opposed as some artists in particular like to imagine: they are at base attempts to pin down something ineffable, and as Baudelaire himself shows, a sharp and careful eye, a historical knowledge, and a gift for descriptive detail, in whatever medium, serve both very well.

  [The Parisian Scenes in Les fleurs du mal are almost explicitly cultural criticism in verse; that such a fusion is possible is probably the biggest thing Eliot got from Baudelaire.

  And, as Tom Townsend says in Metropolitan (1990), “I don’t read novels. I prefer good literary criticism.” —Steve]

• Two in UnHerd; first, Terry Eagleton on Jane Austen:

  One might also claim that she invented the typical English prose style. Reading her work, the bluff, hearty tones of Henry Fielding now seem antiquated, along with the sanctimonious moralizing of Samuel Richardson. In their place, we have a style of writing which is good-humored but not quite genial, reasonable and temperate yet also quietly devastating. It’s this supple, self-assured prose, laden with ironies and obliquities, which descends from Jane Austen to George Eliot, Henry James and E. M. Forster, and which even finds a resonance as late as John Le Carré. Fiction of this kind is mannered but not elaborate; sharply satirical, yet intent on keeping its cool. The very shape of Austen’s sentences, with their delicate equipoise and complex symmetry, reflects the social and moral values she upholds. Previous novelists tended to deal in epic characters and events, but Austen is one of the first English writers to find moral significance in such minor but critical matters as remembering to light a fire for someone in their bedchamber, or failing to wait for a companion who has gone off to fetch you a key. What the Henry Fieldings of this world would scarcely have noticed becomes of momentous importance to an author on whom nothing is lost.

  [Perhaps one reason why things Austen did first get attributed to Flaubert is that the casual and off-handed devastation of many of her sentences is a style associated in American cultural stereotypes with the French and not the English.

  And I think it makes more sense to say of Austen that she perfected the typical English prose style; the reason so many novelists have imitated it and built on it and tweaked it is that nobody has really figured out how to do it better. The other main approach to English prose literature has its roots not in novelists but in Shakespeare and Milton, after all. —Steve]

Reviews:

• Second, reviews J R by William Gaddis (1975):

  More fundamentally, though, I think Franzen has managed to totally miss the point. The message of J R isn’t that all our human relations have been poisoned by money; it’s precisely the other way round. For almost all our characters, money means something important: love, power, sex, artistic fulfilment, revenge. The straightforward pursuit of wealth has been polluted with these messy libidinal drives. But not for JR Vansant. Unlike almost everyone else in the book, JR is a blank. We don’t ever see his home life. We learn nothing about his wants or desires. He doesn’t really seem to want anything at all; he takes over the world for essentially no reason. At one point the J R Family of Companies (well, technically the J R Foundation) ends up buying the middle school where its head has lessons every day. But the only thing he wants to do with his newfound power is organize more school trips to New York, so he can surreptitiously hold business meetings there. JR is a monster, totally indifferent to everything good and beautiful in the world, but in the end it’s very hard to dislike him. Unlike all the messy cynics around him, he is pure. An innocent of the world.

  [I didn’t really understand Franzen’s essay about Gaddis until a comment by (about something unrelated, as I recall) made me think of it as the work of a cornball at heart reacting to the work of an author who is—whatever the opposite of a cornball is. Even Franzen’s attempts in the essay to play a normal and reasonable man are completely alien to Gaddis, who is almost always too angry for that. This preference for corn also explains what links the rather diverse list of books Franzen says in that essay that he’s never been able to finish. What such seemingly disparate novels as Moby-Dick, Don Quixote, and The Golden Bowl share is having non-cornball authors.

  Kriss, I think correctly, calls J R the first internet novel. The technology isn’t quite there, of course; JR has to use the telephone to manage his affairs, and his attempts to disguise his voice and seem like an adult are never completely successful. On the internet, though, everyone’s words look the same. The unending unattributed speech aimed at no one that makes up most of the novel is like the internet, but so too is a horrible apartment that many of the characters frequently stay at or visit. It has a radio that is always on because the apartment is so filled with clutter that it can’t be found and a broken faucet that never gets turned off. Several characters have their mail sent to the apartment and never pick it up; JR also lists the address as his headquarters, and everything sent to the J R Family of Companies piles up there too. JR is also in the habit of doing the ’70s equivalent of online shopping and buys Edward Bast, his former music teacher and current adult representative at business meetings, all kinds of junk that will supposedly make him a more effective businessman; these purchases also accumulate in the apartment. It is a scene of unending noise, but it is also a scene of unending clutter, in which finding anything you might actually want to find is near-impossible.

  But what really sold me as J R as novel of the internet was page 699 of the NYRB edition. On this one page JR copes with the ongoing collapse of his business empire by raving to Bast that symphonies are too long, that putting ads in textbooks is a good idea, that painting a water tower to look like a roll of toilet paper is funny, and that it doesn’t really matter if encyclopedias contain made-up entries. What really seems ahead of its time, though, is JR’s attitude towards the whole thing: “Is it my fault if I do something first which if I don’t do it somebody else is going to do it anyway? I mean how come everybody’s always getting mad at me!” Say what you will about Gilded Age tycoons, they understood that everybody always getting mad at them was part of the deal. JR’s attempt at self-effacing in the service of self-aggrandizement foreshadows a new kind of tycoon, one who believes that the solution to people getting mad at them is to post a lot on social media. —Steve]

• In the TLS, Kate Hext reviews two collections of Aesthetic and Decadent plays (Aesthetic Movement Satire: A Dramatic Anthology, edited by Devon Cox, 2024; and Decadent Plays: 1890–1930, edited by Adam Alston and Jane Desmarais, 2024):

  These plays sought to influence the future of drama. Their reach exceeded their grasp. They were visionary in realizing that the map of experience offered by realism no longer described the territory of the modern world; they were brave in trying to define a new mode with which to capture this territory. In practice, the experiment fails not because the plays were over the top—though they were. It is because their slow pace and circularity, mournful tone and arcane references produce the cloistered atmosphere of the college and chapel. They were fugues for the past, not overtures to modernity. The only play collected here likely to trouble the West End today is Salome, which came to the Theatre Royal Haymarket this autumn, and which producers have been sexing up ever since Maud Allan toured in the early 1900s with a version that eliminated the ponderous dialogue to leave the climactic dance.

  [The contrast made here between aestheticism (which is about jokes) and decadence (which is not) was immensely clarifying for me. —Steve]

N.B. (cont.):

• on getting Your Name Here (2025) published.

• E. B. White’s letter signoffs. [Personally, I usually don’t bother—I don’t like any of the standard ones and I don’t like having to come up with one on the spot. —Steve]

• Lobster crime.

• Tasting notes from a water sommelier.

• Pizza sales are declining.

• Master tailors in Cairo.

• Learning how to be an auctioneer.

• New issues:

  • Literary Review of Canada January | February 2026

  • New Left Review 156•Nov/Dec 2025 [As linked to above.]

• [I had intended to mention this in the Film Supplement, but since the Film Supplement is on indefinite hiatus I’ll mention it here: Brigitte Bardot died on Sunday, December 28. R.I.P. The best piece I read on her was by Muriel Zagha in Engelsberg Ideas:

  Bardot may not have been an Existentialist but she did express her sense of personal freedom by not dressing either like a respectable lady or like a glamorous film star. At a time when young women, once out of pinafores, began to dress like their mothers, this was quite new. The young Bardot habitually wore polo necks, slacks and ballet shoes, though she also liked to go barefoot. With her carefully teased mane of hair (which she called her “choucroute”) and enthusiastic embrace of sunbathing, she began the invention of youthful French “naturalness,” in itself a sophisticated—and enduring—form of artifice.

  And Contempt (1963) was the subject of Movies across the decades in WRB—Jan. 2024 Film Supplement. —Steve]

Poem:

“North & South Twin Lakes” by Chet’la Sebree

Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when published

You haven’t washed
your underwear,
                        You want to preserve
                        the wilderness
the ones you wore
the last time
                        of uncured emotion,
                        remember everything
you were with him,
you’ve smelled them
                        as it was—so you don’t
                        remove splinters.
each morning—
your excitement,
                        You thumb bruises and
                        split the seams of wounds
his vestigial—
since you slid them on,
                        so that back on your coast
                        you still have to ask
left the lake, the state,
his side of the country.
                        about what you already know.

[Last year, I began my tenure providing poetry commentary in the WRB with a contrapuntal poem, so I thought it’d be appropriate to do so again in 2026. I am also going to try to intentionally intersperse some more local poets into my selections; Sebree is a professor at George Washington University.

This poem quarrels with itself—on one hand vulgar, the other vulnerable. But it is the longing that wins out in the end. On the left-hand side of the poem, the wash of desire and desperation still gives way to mourning, ending with the departure of the second-person subject from her beloved. The status of that absence is sharper on the right-hand side of the poem, painful in triplicate fashion, like splinters, pressed bruises, and split open wounds. In a piece that overshoots eroticism and approaches discomfort in its sexual candor, the use of the second person mellows the blade of personal exposure, as does the ambiguity of certain phrases. “You want to preserve / the wilderness // of uncured emotion” asks the reader to consider the dual meaning of cure: emotion as ailment and live matter. But the ambiguity primarily resides in the final line of the poem. The subject may know—that the liaison is doomed or eternal—but the reader does not. —K. T.]

Upcoming books:

Out yesterday:

Duke University Press: Into the Loop: An Ethnography of Compulsive Repetition by Samuele Collu

University of Michigan Press: The Lives of Cato the Younger from Ancient Rome to Modern America by Thomas E. Strunk

Yale University Press: Converts: From Oscar Wilde to Muriel Spark, Why So Many Became Catholic in the 20th Century by Melanie McDonagh [We linked to a review in WRB—Nov. 29, 2025.]

Out tomorrow, from Cambridge University Press:

Strikingly Similar: Plagiarism and Appropriation from Chaucer to Chatbots
by Roger Kreuz

From the publisher: Plagiarism and appropriation are hot topics when they appear in the news. A politician copies a section of a speech, a section of music sounds familiar, the plot of a novel follows the same pattern as an older story, a piece of scientific research is attributed to the wrong researcher . . . The list is endless. Allegations and convictions of such incidents can easily ruin a career and inspire gossip. People report worrying about unconsciously appropriating someone else’s work. But why do people plagiarize? How many claims of unconscious plagiarism are truthful? How is plagiarism detected, and what are the outcomes for the perpetrators and victims? Strikingly Similar uncovers the deeper psychology behind this controversial human behavior, as well as a cultural history that is far wider and more interesting than sensationalized news stories.

[As the man says:

In one word he told me secret of success in mathematics: Plagiarize! / Plagiarize! / Let no one else’s work evade your eyes! / Remember why the good Lord made your eyes! / So don’t shade your eyes, / But plagiarize, plagiarize, plagiarize—only be sure always to call it please, “research.”

—Steve]

Out January 13:

Knopf: This Is Where the Serpent Lives by Daniyal Mueenuddin

Penguin Press: The School of Night: A Novel by Karl Ove Knausgaard, translated from the Norwegian by Martin Aitken

Random House: Nothing Random: Bennett Cerf and the Publishing House He Built by Gayle Feldman

Seven Stories Press: Writing, the Other Life by Annie Ernaux, translated from the French by Ros Schwartz, Alison L. Strayer, et al., edited by Pierre-Louis Fort

Slant Books: James Baldwin Smoking a Cigarette and Other Poems by Baron Wormser

University of Minnesota Press: The Luminous Fairies and Mothra by Takehiko Fukunaga, Yoshie Hotta and Shin’ichiro Nakamura, translated from the Japanese by Jeffrey Angles

What we’re reading:

Steve read a little bit of The Recognitions. [As I said on Saturday, I’ve been very busy. —Steve]

Critical notes:

• In the New York Times, Carlos Lozada on bad podcast questions:

  The second question I wish we’d stop asking will not surprise you: What has surprised you the most about [fill in the blank]?

  . . .

  The trouble with this question is that it removes the focus from the substance of whatever event or debate is being discussed, redirecting it to the speaker’s or writer’s personal perceptions or expectations about it—away from facts and toward idiosyncrasy. It’s barely better than the “What was going through your mind?” or “How does it feel?” questions in sports interviews after an athlete makes the shot, catches the touchdown pass, wins the championship. (The answer to “how does it feel,” by the way, is almost always that it feels “surreal.”)

  [One of the more valuable things I read last year was a piece by about critics’ refusal to assert authority. (I’ve discussed it and similar ideas a few times here.) Apparently it’s part of a broader trend. —Steve]

• In the Journal, Matthew Continetti on the legacy of the Beatles:

  These products may strike a casual observer as evidence of the Fab Four’s staying power. On the contrary, look closer and you see that the band has taken one too many bites out of Apple Records. Only the core remains. Beatles literature, for instance, is both exhaustive and exhausting—an endless recapitulation of the group mythos and creative process.

  [I have been of the opinion for a while that the only rock music that will remain in the popular historical consciousness in a century was made by the Beatles and Bob Dylan, in much the same way that “Johann Sebastian Bach” means something to the man on the street now and “Dieterich Buxtehude” does not. But the reevaluations of the rock canon over the past couple decades—people used to talk as if the Who, a band whose entire output is worth less than, I don’t know, “Mustang Sally,” were on the same level as the Beatles and the Stones—have all been about the relative merits of recordings. And recordings are a relatively recent technology.

  If, historically, you wished to advocate for a neglected composer, you had the sheet music, but you got to play it how you wanted, finding in it whatever struck you and performing it in accordance with that vision. (And, on the flip side, being influenced by your own time and what you had heard that the composer had not.) No one attentive was under the impression that you were playing it precisely as the composer imagined; that would be impossible. But you were making it new, whether you intended to or not. No doubt the originators of the historically informed performance movement were trying their best to recreate the Baroque as it was, but its dryness and simplicity were—and had to be—a reaction against the lugubrious, gloopy, and Romantic approaches popular at the time.

  Recordings, though, are frozen. There are no “new approaches to the Beatles.” There are only covers. The band’s reputation will depend on the specific recordings they made, a situation unprecedented in music. I have no idea how to evaluate it. Imagine if Bach had made recordings; imagine if Homer had. —Steve]

I have been working long and strenuous hours at my day job, and the time and effort it requires have made it impossible for me to maintain the existing twice-a-week WRB schedule. To ensure that the WRB maintains the quality you have come to expect and to avoid me running myself into the ground, the WRB will now come out once a week, on Wednesdays, and the Film Supplement will be on an indefinite hiatus. To make up for this reduction in the WRB to our paid subscribers, I have reduced the annual rate to $30/year. (I would reduce the monthly rate as well, but it already sits at Substack’s lower limit of $5/month; my apologies for that.)

It brings me no pleasure to make these changes, but I fear that, if I am going to avoid imminent burnout, I need to. If I felt that there was any way for me to keep the WRB on its previous schedule, I would. You, our readers, mean a lot to me, and I know many of you have come to expect and look forward to the WRB on Wednesday and Saturday mornings. I hope that the WRB continues to play a role in your intellectual lives.

And perhaps it is bad form to do this right after announcing a reduction in the newsletter, but: please sign up for a paid subscription. The WRB is and always has been a labor of love, one that I cobble together in my spare time because the work is important and because something like it should exist. We’re all busy, we’re all tired, and we all—I hope—benefit from a newsletter that makes keeping up with what’s new and interesting in the world of books and culture easier. The support the WRB gets from you, its readers, and especially those of you who pay to subscribe, helps make it possible. I really can’t thank you enough.

—Steve]

It is in order to help the young who are entering on careers, and those of all ages who desire to extend those delights and spiritual developments of their lives, that I have managed to edit the Washington Review of Books.

[A note on scheduling: this will be the last WRB of 2025. The first WRB of 2026 will come out on Saturday, January 3.

As always, thank you for reading, and a special thank you to the WRB’s paid subscribers; your support helps keep this newsletter going, and I am moved by your generosity. The WRB is a collective enterprise—not just between me and the other contributors, but between us and everyone whose work we feature, and between us and everyone who reads it. Thinking, too, is a collective enterprise. We think on our own, but we think with the aid of what we have read and heard and seen, and we think sometimes by collaborating of other people (as anyone who has had the misfortune of receiving texts and DMs and emails and letters from me will know). I hope the WRB has helped your thinking this year. Knowing that all of you are out there—especially those of you who were already my friends and those of you who have become my friends due to the WRB—has helped mine. You are all clearly a most learnèd and discerning audience; after all, you have the taste to subscribe to America’s only newsletter. Here’s to another year of thinking in 2026.

Merry Christmas and happy holidays. I especially commend for my own sake St. Stephen’s Day, which commemorates a man martyred for delivering a long and hectoring speech accusing people who disagree with him of being moral reprobates who can’t read. Where do I get it from? Nominative determinism, maybe. —Steve]

Links:

Reviews:

• In Engelsberg Ideas, Jeremy Wikeley () reviews The Less Deceived by Philip Larkin (1955):

  What those same reviews often avoided—though it looks, 70 years on, like the collection’s overriding preoccupation—was Larkin’s frank, and often frankly hostile, attitude to sex and relationships. Even now, summaries tend to dwell on death, loss and diminishment, as though the collection’s sexual politics were marginal rather than central. Roy Fuller, writing in the London Magazine, was one of the few to notice it immediately: The Less Deceived contains an extraordinary number of “not exactly love poems.” Larkin himself suspected the book was “too sexy” for one small Irish publisher, who turned it down.

  That central focus is expressed with remarkable stylistic range: the grim symbolism of “Dry-Point” and “Whatever Happened?”; the uneasy charm of “Lines on a Young Lady’s Photograph Album”; the unsettlingly clinical portrayal of a sexual assault in “Deceptions.” The vocabulary is exact throughout, and often violent: dancers “maul” to and fro; a “swivel eye” “hungers from pose to pose.” We are miles away, here, from the abstract, idealized lovers of The North Ship (1945), with their chaste kisses and anxious farewells.

  [My father (not actually my father) hated The North Ship, but it’s not as distinct from his later work as he might have liked to think. A few years ago Jude Russo wrote about its explicit classical references, with a focus on the Horatian. In that piece he quotes D. S. Carne-Ross:

  We may however find qualities that seem genuinely Horatian—the tough reasonableness beneath the lyric grace, the alliance of levity and seriousness by which the seriousness is intensified—in poets who show no interest in Horace and may not even have had any Latin.

  After the juvenilia of The North Ship Larkin went on to internalize what he had earlier explicitly referenced. Horace can be grim and uneasy, and he can be tough-minded and nasty about sex, but what defines Horace (and Larkin too) is that combination of levity and seriousness. The biggest difference is that Horace’s usual reaction to himself is to laugh. Larkin is too bitter for that. In Odes 1.22 Horace can laugh about being a poet—Larkin writes “books are a load of crap.” —Steve]

• In our sister publication in Tinseltown, Annie Berke reviews two novels of choices not made (The Ten Year Affair, by Erin Somers, October; and Wreck, by Catherine Newman, October):

  Is it any surprise that, mired as she is in this tastefully oppressive homogeneity, Cora envisions alternate designs for living? The extent to which their lives are not only comfortable but also interchangeable comes up around halfway through the novel, at a party at Sam’s house. Eliot’s boss mistakes the home for Eliot’s; he and Cora play along. After all, “he wasn’t lying because it was how they lived. Broadly speaking. They lived in a house like this. [ . . . ] But they didn’t, you know, actually live there.” In the same exchange, Cora accepts compliments about photographs of children who are not her own. Again, they do have children, broadly speaking—just not, you know, those kids.

  In such an environment of swappable, good-enough objects, people, and dynamics, infidelity is pointless—the two men are appealing and annoying in basically the same ways—but still enticing. Sam offers the promise of something different, if not necessarily better, than Eliot: he is the path (as of yet) untaken. Cora is only lightly interested in her own motivations, more invested, instead, in her libidinal fixation on Sam’s toothpick-chewing habit. In a rare moment of introspection, she admits to herself that “she had designed [her life], wanted it, set it into place, expected it to have meaning, and then it hadn’t.”

  [The Ten Year Affair was an Upcoming book in WRB—Oct. 18, 2025.

  Adultery, historically, has been of interest to novelists because it lets novelists move a character from one life into a different one. (Think of the difference between Karenin and Vronsky, or between Charles Bovary and Léon and Rodolphe.) And, in a world where all that is solid melts into air, the marriage vow had—in theory—not melted. But a novelistic world in which the potential affair partners are more or less identical to the spouse is a further move into melting. Or maybe not: Marx also says that “our bourgeois . . . take the greatest pleasure in seducing each other’s wives. Bourgeois marriage is, in reality, a system of wives in common,” and for that to be the case they must all be interchangeable.

  The Ten Year Affair has to explain all of this to its readers. Cora can’t quite believe that people still have affairs, and the novel can’t quite believe that people still write novels about adultery, which it takes as the concern of an earlier literary age. To this end, it expresses with a thudding literality what the earlier novel of adultery could hint at. Anna Karenina, for example, has frequent references to shadows and doubles at important moments, but the twin timelines of The Ten Year Affair make the idea as clear as possible. —Steve]

• In our sister publication on the sweet Thames, Nick Richardson reviews a book about alchemy (Alchemy: An Illustrated History of Elixirs, Experiments, and the Birth of Modern Science, by Philip Ball, September):

  Alchemical art and literature was influential even in its time. Hieronymus Bosch borrowed from the pictorial language of alchemy, stuffing his Garden of Earthly Delights with its instruments and symbols: eggs and pelicans, glass tubes, a young couple pleasure-cruising in a glass sphere. The closed doors of the triptych show the Earth inside a transparent globe, with clouds condensing at the top of it. His Adoration of the Magi also alludes to alchemical themes: a small gold sculpture of the sacrifice of Isaac rests on three black toads, symbols of nigredo, while the buildings in the background look unlike those in any Dutch city but resemble contemporary drawings of the athanor. These references would have been recognized by many of Bosch’s audience, some of whom would have had experience of the tools and symbols of alchemy. Whether Bosch wanted to convey some kind of Hermetic-Platonic subtext, or playfully suggest it, or whether like van Helmont he simply enjoyed the shape and shimmer of alchemical equipment, we can’t be sure.

  [The human-sized hamster ball is an attempt to replicate the feeling of pleasure-cruising in a glass sphere. —Steve]

• In the Journal, Sam Sacks reviews the new edition of Merriam-Webster’s (Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary, 12th Edition, November):

  Such stature is perhaps what is lost with online dictionaries and what the new Collegiate hopes to regain. As with most things on the internet, the online Merriam-Webster improves efficiency and functionality while collapsing the sense of significance around the endeavor. But there is a reason that people haul their old, careworn dictionaries around with them for decades, and why even now they can be seen splayed open on a lectern in the living room like a family Bible. We are—or at least I am—still primed to treat dictionaries like the secular equivalent of holy books, vessels of crucial information that have been compiled with a care and expertise that is legible in ways the profusion of data online tends to obscure.

  And because we can learn from it, the authority we bestow on the dictionary is gratifyingly reciprocal. Martin Amis, who said that he checked on meanings dozens of times every day, explained, “when you look up a word in the dictionary, you own it in a way you didn’t before.” He was speaking to the fortifying feeling of confidence and control that comes from knowing why we use the words that we do. Our language is our own; it makes sense to want to possess it in a physical form.

  [The real shame in the decline of the dictionary is the decline of reviews of the dictionary. The best are Dwight Macdonald’s of Webster’s Third (“Lexicographers may still be drudges, but they are certainly not harmless. They have untuned the string, made a sop of the solid structure of English, and encouraged the language to eat up himself”) and Guy Davenport’s of The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language (“But the art of definition seems to have died with Samuel Johnson, whose stern clarities can still be detected behind the graceless mangles of modern lexicography”). Both of these, though, take for granted that the dictionary—the big physical book—is an authority and not a curiosity. Reviewing a dictionary used to be a means of opining on the English language; now it’s a means of opining on reference books. As Sacks notes, for an up-to-date equivalent of Macdonald’s and Davenport’s reviews you’d have to review “what Google turns up when you search specific words.” —Steve]

N.B.:

• The New Yorker has digitized its entire archive.

• Sales of nonfiction are down. [Several people quoted in this article suggest that podcasts are replacing nonfiction as a source of information; this makes instinctive sense but I’m not sure it lines up with what the most popular podcasts are. You have to go way down the podcast charts to get to anything with much of an equivalent in nonfiction publishing. If podcasts are a substitute for nonfiction, it’s because listening to podcasts takes up lots of time, and that time has to come from somewhere. (I will say, because this colors my commentary, that the only podcasts I ever listen to are Odd Lots and various college football podcasts, and what I get from those doesn’t exist in nonfiction publishing.) —Steve]

• Photos from old publishing holiday parties.

• Controversies in Canadian English.

• Updates to museum security.

• New issues:

  • Harper’s Magazine January 2026

  • The New Criterion Volume 44, Number 5 / January 2026

Poem:

“The last day on earth” by Rewa Zeinati

will be short. It will be quick. The car engines will suck back
their toxic fumes. The shepherds will put down their sticks. The
phones will ring all at once and then all at once will stop ringing and
no one will pick up. Everyone will be sitting on something. A flat
rock. A dirty pavement. The edge of a ruffled bed. Everyone will be
looking to the left. Kitchens will smell of burned sage and soldiers
will abandon their sleeves to the heat of a broken field. The field will
cover the dead with daisies and the desert will turn into a single
grain of salt. Everyone will be thirsty. A child will switch off the TV.
A river will remember itself. Women will run outside on younger
feet and lovers will call their lovers to the window to show them how
all the barbed wires had turned into threads of wind. Everyone will
be looking at what’s left. And you and I might talk again on the last
day on earth. You might still have something to say to me. You
might still want to show me how much I was wrong.

[While a little grim, this seemed like an appropriate selection for the end of the year. I particularly like the echo between the lines, “Everyone will be / looking to the left” and “Everyone will / be looking at what’s left.” Its form also reminds me a little of an earlier selection, “Critique of Paradise” by Michael Lavers, with its unfolding catalogue of vignettes, off-kilter but evocative: “Kitchens will smell of burned sage and soldiers / will abandon their sleeves to the heat of a broken field.” The final thought in the poem is ambiguous to me, the entrance of a second person, who may still tell the author she was wrong: does Zeinati simmer with resentment at this confrontation, set on the eve of annihilation, or does she acquiesce to a secondary perspective, knowing that it’s true? —K. T.]

Upcoming books:

University of Chicago Press | December 26

Realism after the Individual: Women, Desire, and the Modern American Novel
by Rafael Walker

From the publisher: Realism after the Individual offers a new theoretical paradigm for understanding realist novels published in the United States between 1900 and 1920, a period that has been described wrongheadedly as a “gulf” or a “valley” in American literary history. In this generation of writers, only three have remained in favor among critics: Kate Chopin, Edith Wharton, and Theodore Dreiser. Others have disappeared from view altogether—writers such as Robert Grant, Robert Herrick, and Booth Tarkington, all of whom were critically acclaimed bestsellers in their day.

As Rafael Walker shows, this generation of writers deserves new attention for the way they revised many core facets of the nineteenth-century novel in response to the historical shifts around it. This generation of novelists not only rejected liberal individualism but also formulated alternative paradigms for conceptualizing selfhood. The result was a slew of woman-centered realist novels that broke with literary precedent: The novels punish characters not for desiring too much but for failing to desire enough, they depict subjectivity not as private and interior but as outward-facing, and they view closure not as the novel’s aim but as a convention to flout. Realism after the Individual both revises prevailing views of American realism and lays the foundation for an alternative account of the development of literary modernism, one that illuminates the continuity between realism and the modernism that followed it.

[I don’t think Tarkington has disappeared from view altogether, but only because Orson Welles adapted one of his novels for The Magnificent Ambersons (1942). —Steve]

Out January 1:

University of Nebraska Press: The Complete Letters of Henry James, 1888–1891: Volume 2 edited by Michael Anesko, Greg W. Zacharias and Katie Sommer

What we’re reading:

Steve read more of The Recognitions by William Gaddis (1955).

[In lieu of a big round-up about the best things I read for the first time this year, I’ll just list them (in no particular order): Anna Karenina, The Faerie Queene, The Geography of the Imagination by Guy Davenport (1981), J R by William Gaddis (1975), Parade’s End by Ford Madox Ford (1924–1928), and big chunks of poetry by Petrarch, Thomas Wyatt, Philip Sidney, Fulke Greville, and John Berryman. —Steve]

Critical notes:

• on Susan Sontag:

  She wanted to be a major novelist. If that didn’t work out, she wanted to be Eliot or Matthew Arnold—a black-clad gatekeeper at the portcullis of Culture. Yet the way in which her example inspires brings to mind neither of those two, nor does it bring to mind Benjamin or Canetti or Adorno or any of her other European models. Instead it makes me think of Oscar Wilde, to whom she dedicated “Notes on Camp.” Wilde’s literary output was wonderful, but his greatest work of art was his life and his myth. So too with Sontag. She created herself so that we might know what a life lived her way would entail, in all its glory and its difficulty. She would have been furious to hear me define her this way; she would have protested that the work alone was what mattered. The tragedy is she wouldn’t have realized the compliment. They still leave flowers at Wilde’s statue in Dublin, and plant kisses on his stone mouth. Who the hell reads Matthew Arnold?

  [It might be impossible to be Eliot or Arnold now thanks to, in part, “Notes on Camp.” We expect our critics to bounce between high and low, a fashion inconsistent with the lofty seriousness (self-seriousness, to the uncharitable) of figures like those two or of Adorno. Or, as Sontag puts it in that essay, “The old-style dandy hated vulgarity. The new-style dandy, the lover of Camp, appreciates vulgarity.” To be fair, the origin of this bounce between high and low goes back to the modernists, but they employ it for very different purposes. When Eliot juxtaposes high and low in The Waste Land he does not aim to find anything valuable in the low, and his real purpose in praising the music-hall star Marie Lloyd upon her death was to use her as a stick with which to beat the middlebrow. Begler talks about “Notes on Camp” shaking up the “rabbinically serious Partisan Review.” Those “black-clad gatekeepers at the portcullis of Culture” Sontag wanted to be were not “rabbinically” serious, of course, but it was similar.

  And Matthew Arnold is worth reading. —Steve]

• reviews Maggie Nelson’s book about Sylvia Plath and Taylor Swift (The Slicks, November):

  And it is a problem when I can write responses to art, as Nelson says, in my sleep; if I already know without reading a text, or reading the first couple lines, precisely what somebody will say and how they’ll say it, I don’t want to spend any time with that work. If it happens often, I cease to respect the critic. The reason this becomes so visible with Taylor is not because of her or the ways people find her irritating, but because everybody wants a slice of the attention constantly directed her way. Thus there is a large volume of writing, mostly bad, mostly careless.

  [I’ll say it: comparing Swift to Plath is an insult to Swift.

  The problem of critics slumming it when talking about pop music is, I think, unsolvable. (The only real exception coming to mind is Christopher Ricks’ Dylan’s Visions of Sin (2004), and that’s a great book. But I wouldn’t recommend it to anyone on the fence about Bob Dylan or trying to learn about him. It’s exclusively for huge Dylan fans who want to watch another huge Dylan fan who has read everything associate everything he has read with Dylan’s lyrics.) That high-low bounce discussed above is difficult to handle tonally; at its best it’s cheeky and playful, but more often it’s either slumming it, as I mentioned, or undermining the authority of the critic, as if the presence of pop lyrics is a sign that the whole thing shouldn’t be taken too seriously. —Steve]

• Moul on Christmas poetry (in English and Latin) in early modern England:

  In fact, Southwell’s “The Burning Babe” is quite a similar poem, and its early date—Southwell was executed in 1595—helps to explain why Jonson was so astounded by it. For anyone who’s read a lot of seventeenth-century religious poetry, Southwell’s poem is very good, but not really surprising. But if you try to forget your knowledge of seventeenth century poetry and immerse yourself only in the vernacular lyric of the 1580s and 1590s, you start to see what Jonson meant. Southwell, certainly influenced by Jesuit poetics as it was developing rapidly on the continent, had written something which was quite unlike much else in English at the time, or indeed in Anglo-Latin (Latin written in England).

  [“The Burning Babe” was the Poem in WRB—Dec. 10, 2025. One difference between Southwell’s poem and some of the best seventeenth-century religious poetry is that Southwell does a bit of scene-setting before introducing the bizarre image at the center of his poem and then explaining it. Later poems are willing to get right to it in the very first line—“Love bade me welcome, yet my soul drew back,” “A broken Altar, Lord, thy servant rears,” “I am a little world made cunningly,” “Let mans Soule be a Spheare, and then, in this,” and so on. (That last one might be the most audacious first line of any poem I know.) In comparison to such bluntness Southwell’s poem eases the reader into it. —Steve]

• Patrick Kurp on Ford Madox Ford:

  Like Anton Chekhov, Ford is one of literature’s blessed ones, almost saintly in his service to letters and fellow writers, though a highly fallible man. In the introduction to the last of his more than eighty books, The March of Literature (1938), he describes himself as “an old man mad about writing—in the sense that Hokusai called himself an old man mad about painting,” and the book as “an attempt to induce a larger and always larger number of my fellows to taste the pleasure that comes from always more and more reading.”

  • Robert Lowell:

    Largeness is the key word for Ford. He liked to say that genius is memory. His own was like an elephant’s. No one admired more of his elders, or discovered more of his juniors, and so went on admiring and discovering till the end. He seemed to like nothing that was mediocre, and miss nothing that was good. His humility was edged with a mumbling insolence. His fanatical life-and-death dedication to the arts was messy, British, and amused. As if his heart were physically too large for his body, his stamina, imperfection, and generosity were extreme.

    [There are worse ways to live life than to aim at someone saying this about you after you die. —Steve]

Between my finger and my thumb
The WRB rests.
I’ll dig with it.

Links:

• In The New Statesman, Lou Selfridge on Christmas crime:

  When a police constable suggests that “Christmas time is an unlikely season for crime,” Poirot disagrees. “Families who have been separated throughout the year,” he observes in Hercule Poirot’s Christmas (1938), “assemble once more together. Now under these conditions, my friend, you must admit that there will occur a great amount of strain . . . There is at Christmas time a great deal of hypocrisy, honorable hypocrisy, hypocrisy undertaken pour le bon motif, c’est entendu, but nevertheless hypocrisy!” The appeal for crime writers isn’t hard to see: Christmas is the perfect time to knock someone off. Moncrieff’s Murder Most Festive (2020) is set in 1938 at the country estate of the Westbury family. Tensions are, as is often the case during large family gatherings, high; the novel’s first line of dialogue is: “Must you be quite so incessantly unbearable?” Janice Hallett stages The Christmas Appeal (2023) amid an amateur-dramatic troupe’s annual pantomime; you get the feeling that everyone could have a motive for killing anyone. And in Hercule Poirot’s Christmas, an aging patriarch invites his estranged children for Christmas, providing the perfect excuse for Christie to gather a group of characters who have a great deal of bad blood—and kill at least one of them.

  [In WRB—Dec. 10, 2025 we linked to and discussed on the appeal of sad Christmas music; if you’re happy, it brings out the cheer by comparison, and if you’re sad, it lets you embrace it. There’s a similar dynamic to the Christmas crime novel. If you’re enjoying your family and friends, it reinforces that; if you’re not, it allows you to share in murderous rage.

  But the Christmas crime novel is also a manifestation of the link between Christmas and death. In one sense this connection goes all the way back to the massacre of the innocents and has been sustained in part by art centering it—the Coventry carol, for example. But some of the most beloved Christmas stories, like A Christmas Carol and It’s a Wonderful Life, force characters to explicitly reckon with death and, once faced with it, decide what they will do with life. Christmas is a time of heightened—theatrical, even—emotion, and people will do all kinds of things in those situations, —Steve]

• In our sister publication on the Cuyahoga, R. K. Hegelman on César Vallejo:

  Like poetry, hiccups are an anomaly of breath. Just as poetry is an audit upon the nexus of spirit and matter, the hiccup is a brunt intrusion of the body upon language, a glitching register of alterity: the automatic belying intention, the spasmodic instant piercing the drawl of experience, the animal in the human. It embodies Bergson’s definition of comedy as the “mechanical encrusted upon the organic”: its abiding irony is that as a convulsion of the diaphragm, its cause is also prime mover of the speech it afflicts. Language tripping over its own shoelaces. It encapsulates the twining of paroxysm and bathos that is one of Vallejo’s signatures: “I want to write but only foam comes out, / I want to say so many things, but I get stuck [ . . . ] I want to be crowned with laurels, but I’m stewing in onions.”

Reviews:

• In The Lamp, Matthew Walther reviews a reissue of some early sketches by Virginia Woolf (The Life of Violet: Three Early Stories, edited by Urmila Seshagiri, October):

  It is not difficult to see why Woolf failed to publish these pieces in her lifetime, and why Leonard kept them from posthumous collections, even as he made a point of bringing out her biography of Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s dog. They are, for one thing, a series of in-jokes, scarcely legible to strangers, especially at the remove of several decades. They are also very slight (the actual text runs only thirty-six pages in the Princeton edition).

  Still, I cannot help but think that they deserve more readers. Apart from Woolf’s fans and historians of modernism, the stories here should hold a certain amount of interest for actual biographers. At a time when formal experiment is not only encouraged but increasingly demanded in life writing, Woolf’s unconventional narrative structure—a wayward and ultimately inconclusive account of youth and early adulthood punctuated by hallucinatory interludes of social history—offers an interesting model, especially in situations where similar decisions are already dictated by a chronologically uneven distribution of primary sources. Even the Japan section suggests the sometimes unguessed value of throwing a subject into a radically different cultural context; at a more fundamental level, it also shows up the unavoidable pretense inherent in all biography: the mythologization of subjects, however ordinary their beginnings. After all the careful show of objectivity and the avoidance of anachronisms, we end up inevitably telling what are ultimately ludicrous stories about taming beasts from the sea.

  [Most biographies are actually translations of works by the great Arab historian Cid Hamete Benengeli. Big Biography (Big Life?) doesn’t want you to know this.

  As for the practice of life writing, Holden Caulfield isn’t wrong, exactly:

  If you really want to hear about it, the first thing you’ll probably want to know is where I was born, and what my lousy childhood was like, and how my parents were occupied and all before they had me, and all that David Copperfield kind of crap, but I don’t feel like going into it, if you want to know the truth.

  The more you think about the convention the less sense it makes. Who, after all, would respond to the questions “tell me about yourself” or “tell me about this person” with a description of a birth? Perhaps biographers could take a page from Tristram Shandy by opening with the moment of the subject’s conception and getting to a number of other items of interest in the intervening nine months. And if the point of opening biographies with childhoods is to find out how the subject’s origin shaped them into the biography-worthy person they became, surely it would make more sense to first describe the subject as an adult before digging around in childhood for the source of this or that. That way the reader knows what to look for.

  My invocations of novels here reveal the real problem biographers face, though; we already perfected the art of life-writing there. Madame Bovary is a better biography of Emma Bovary than any biography of any actual person has ever been. Flaubert just had the advantage of getting to make it all up—and if the biographers cannot follow the novelist there they can steal other techniques. Personally, I’d like to see a biography with the equivalent of the whale facts chapters in Moby-Dick. —Steve]

[The rest of today’s WRB has even more links to the best and most interesting writing from the past few days, as well as Upcoming books, What we’re reading, and going deeper on the state of criticism and other niche interests of mine in Critical notes. Today, from my desk and the desks of other WRB contributors:

• Jane Austen’s 250th birthday

• Generational warfare

• K. T. on a Poem by Leila Chatti and similes involving the moon

If you’re interested in any of that, and if you want to support the WRB in making the lifelong task of literacy not take anyone’s entire day, please subscribe below.

And if you’re already a subscriber, thank you very much. Why not share the WRB with your friends and acquaintances? The best way to support us is by subscribing, but the second-best is by sharing the WRB with other people. —Steve]

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