For The Book Obsessed
[ad_1] Is liberalism dead? Has that dewy-eyed, woke, overly optimistic beast of limited eyesight, enlarged heart, and dangerously underdeveloped brain, this Jabberwocky of the geopolitical wood finally been slain? More to the point, can we at last acknowledge that there are no such things as universal values, no inherently reliable truth to language, and that … Read more
[ad_1] On the “wine-dark” Aegean seas of Homer’s Odyssey, the merchants of Tyre and Sidon, of Byblos and Carthage, put out from their home ports—busy hives of activity crammed with merchants from all over the ancient world—in order to, like free-flowing dolphins, traverse the waterways of the Mediterranean. This ease of connection was not only … Read more
[ad_1] The work of Pulitzer Prize-winning writer Steven Millhauser demands to be read seriously since, at its often disarming core, it is about serious matters: time, memory, seeing the world as it is (reminiscent of Wallace Stevens’s “One must have a mind of winter to regard / the frost…”), the painful, inevitable divisions between human … Read more
[ad_1] A book that will unquestionably stand among the more poignant investigations of Mozart and his genius, Mozart and Motion: His Work and His World in Pieces, by poet and former Harvard visiting fellow Patrick Mackie, is a serious study of the composer’s character and music as it fits within the context of European manners … Read more
[ad_1] Short story author and novelist Elizabeth McCracken has just published a book, The Hero of This Story, in which the main character is Natalie Jacobson McCracken, educator, writer, and former editor-in-chief of Boston University alumni magazine, Bostonia. Elizabeth herself is the narrator of this novel. And, also, the daughter of Natalie. In the novel. … Read more
[ad_1] “And now,” writes George Prochnik in his new memoir, I Dream with Open Eyes, “I have left America because the country became alien to me, or because I believe that somewhere out there in the great beyond I might still find a place that sings home?” On that subtle “or” hangs an inquiry. After … Read more
[ad_1] When I was a liminal fifteen in Reagan’s dire 1980s, my desperately-needed imaginative transport took the form of cable reruns of The Twilight Zone. Having been met at the departure terminal of the fantastic some years earlier by Ray Bradbury’s The Martian Chronicles, I quickly discovered that Rod Serling’s “land of both shadow and … Read more
[ad_1] There is an inarguable ephemerality about Dante Alighieri, the author of the Divine Comedy (in Italian, Commedia—the “Divine” was a publisher’s later addition). C.S. Lewis put it well in Studies in Medieval and Renaissance Literature (1966): “There is a curious feeling that [the Commedia] is writing itself, or at most, that the tiny figure … Read more
[ad_1] Oxford Professor of English Literature Joe Moshenska has done something arguably long overdue in Milton studies. Approaching the Olympian of English letters from a mix of new historical and reader-response positions, Moshenska buries himself deeply into an imagined psyche of the poet and polemicist, propagandist and Latinist, John Milton while also digging down into … Read more
[ad_1] The experience of reading, like any intimately subjective experience, is a challenge to fathom, perhaps as tricky for us as it was for Augustine, staring in wonder at his Milanese mentor Ambrose seeming to read without speaking the text aloud. What actually occurs in a reading mind? What goes on in that spooky, liminal … Read more