Anecdotal Evidence

“[S]uddenly the clouds would part, and his satiric joie de vivre would reassert itself, and he’d break me up laughing; he had an almost ten...

A young woman has written to say she is thinking about starting a book blog, a charmingly old-fashioned endeavor. The Golden Age of Blogging...

“As he never tired of saying, he mocked what he loved.”   Who but a lover has the right, the privilege, to mock the beloved? A mere critic...

A handy, unscientific gauge of literary worth, one most readers can endorse, is pleasure: does this book (poem, story, essay, play) please m...

A longtime reader and I met for the first time on Monday and had dinner together. A retired aid worker who spent years in Africa, he lives i...

In last weekend’s Wall Street Journal , Joseph Epstein celebrated one of the major publishing events of the twenty-first century, the eight-...

“I should confess here that there are some books, in every genre and in every period, that I find too daunting because too dazzling, in inte...