So long as discontent and unrest make themselves but dumbly felt within a limited social class, the powers of reaction may often succeed in suppressing such manifestations.
Read MoreElizabeth Bisland at the time of her trip, from the frontispiece to In Seven Stages by Matthew Goodman Piece originally published at Public Domain Review. On the morning of November 14, 1889, John Brisben Walker, the wealthy publisher of the monthly magazine The Cosmopolitan, boarded a New Jersey ferry bound for New York City. Like…
Read Moreby Oliver Farry Baz Luhrmann adapts Fitzgerald and the result is pretty much as you might expect. There are no surprises here. You have a continual sense that you have seen this film before. That is largely because you have – if, that is, you happened to chance upon any of Luhrmann’s previous four features.…
Read MoreL-R: Fyodor Dostoevsky and Charles Dickens From The Times Literary Supplement: Late in 2011, Michiko Kakutani opened her New York Times review of Claire Tomalin’s biography of Charles Dickens with “a remarkable account” she had found in its pages. In London for a few days in 1862, Fyodor Dostoevsky had dropped in on Dickens’s editorial…
Read MoreVladimir Nabokov From The New York Times: The Russian Revolution upended the lives of Vladimir Nabokov and his family. Leaving behind an aristocratic world of colossal wealth and privilege (a world about which he could speak of “the smallest and oldest of our gardeners”), Nabokov would become an exile in Berlin, where he supported himself…
Read MoreFrom Sunday Night/Overthrow: The weather changed Sunday and became clear and perfect, in the 70’s, as if it knew people would need to call upon their highest potential of energy. Throughout the week, the weather would hold this way—truly beautiful, unusual in Chicago—weather where you can feel yourself spun with the sight of your eyes…
Read Moreby Justin E. H. Smith Different people, different closets. I don’t quite know how to say it delicately so I’m just going to come right out and say it. I believe in God. Apart from periodic spells of foolish pride, I have believed in God all my life. Even during these spells, I did not…
Read Moreby Elias Tezapsidis Freedom: A Novel, by Jonathan Franzen, Picador, 608 pp. Infinite Jest, by David Foster Wallace, Back Bay Books, 1104 pp. The maternal figures of David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest and Jonathan Franzen’s Freedom are antithetical characters. Avril Incandenza, the imperious OCD-ridden mother figure in Infinite Jest, raises insecure children despite her profound…
Read MoreThe Reading Girl, Theodore Roussel, 1886 by Bill Benzon This post includes major sections from two posts I wrote in 2005 when I first began writing for The Valve: Learning to Read & the Need for Theory and Beyond Reading. The first generated extensive discussion that’s worth reading if you want to puzzle through the…
Read MoreFrom The Little Dog of Fo by Rosemary Harris, 1976. Illustration by Errol Le Cain From A Proper Death: Dying Like a Dog “A dog should die like a dog,” writes Richard Klein, “not cruelly, but with a respectful matter-of-factness, unaccompanied by the rituals of human mourning.” Writing against what he sees as a dangerous…
Read MoreMicha Josef Berdyczewski by Talia Lavin Introduction: the birth of Modern Hebrew The resurrection of Hebrew from a “dead,” [1] liturgical language into a living tongue remains dazzling, even a half-century after its initial establishment as an official state language. Once a purely literary language of Scripture and holy songs, Hebrew is now the native…
Read MoreFrom the cover of Last letters From Hav, by Jan Morris, 1985 edition From Full Stop: Hav is a fictional travel narrative and in it, Morris mixes fact into fiction like mushrooms into scrambled eggs – if you look for the bits of mushroom, you can pick them out of the eggs, but unless you spend a lot…
Read MoreSoviet invasion of Prague, Czechoslovakia, 1968 by James Warner A recurring idea in the work of Milan Kundera is that the spirit of totalitarianism lives on in our mass media. In a world without privacy, will we all be perpetually on trial? In his 1994 essay “Blacklists, or Divertimento in Homage to Anatole France,” Kundera…
Read MoreFrom Tanya Savicheva’s diary From Sign and Sight: My use of the word “hell” in relation to besieged Leningrad, and particularly the first siege in the winter of 1941-1942, is in no way metaphorical. If hell exists anywhere, then it must literally be that: eternal coldness, darkness, unrecognisable scraps of music and news emerging from loudspeakers,…
Read MoreGuy Aldred, c.1912 by Ruth Kinna Guy Aldred is an obscure but important figure in the history of socialist thought. He sometimes crops up in histories of British socialism, syndicalist and labour organisation, but rarely in discussions of socialist theory. His uncompromising commitment to activism perhaps explains this neglect: as Aldred himself argued in a…
Read MoreMany Russian officers transformed their exile into an adventure…
Read Moreby Barbara Alpern Engel I have always been fascinated by the personal dimensions of social and historical change, but never have been able to explore them as broadly, deeply and intimately as I am able to do in Breaking the Ties that Bound. The project began with a stroke of sheer luck: In 1991…
Read MoreFrom Bookforum: In Making The List, his 2001 book about best sellers, former Simon & Schuster editor in chief Michael Korda recalls that the publishing house once commissioned a study of which books made the most money. After a detailed presentation, the consultant said to the editors, “Do you guys realize how much money the…
Read MoreStag at Sharkey’s, George Bellows, 1909 From Triple Canopy: On May 18, 2002, Arturo Gatti fought Micky Ward in a ten-round nontitle bout. If that means something to you now, realize that at the time it meant very little beyond the promise of an entertaining scrap. Gatti was thirty years old with four losses and Ward…
Read MoreFyodor Dostoevsky (The Possessed), Fritz Eichenberg, 1959 by Amelia Atlas It is often said that one is either a Tolstoy person or a Dostoevsky person, in the same way that one is either a cat person or a dog person. I used to want to be a Dostoevsky person, just as I wanted to be…
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