WRB—Apr. 15, 2026

“criticized without being read”

When I’m asked (as I frequently am) what I consider to be the most frightening thing I’ve ever written, the answer I give comes easily and with no hesitation: this issue of the WRB.

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:

• Victoria Moul and Jeremy Wikeley (Jem) 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]

• Phil Christman 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!”