WRB—Jan. 7, 2026
“world republic of letters”
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, Sam Kriss 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 Gnocchic Apocryphon (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.):
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]
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
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.
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 BDM 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]
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