World Literature

The Screen Went Blank

One of the consistent pleasures of Don DeLillo’s fiction is the sense of its author’s being attuned to frequencies of catastrophe that hum beneath the…

World Literature

Rediscovered Territory

In a reimagined continuation of the Huckleberry Finn story, Huck is a reluctant witness to the march of ‘sivilization’ as it rampages across America. His…

World Art / Culture

It Looks Like You’re Writing a Novel

Home computing and word processing are now so taken for granted that it’s hard to recreate how big a deal their first appearance was. One…

World History

The Polish Rising

In August 1944, Germany was retreating before the Red Army while in the west the liberation of France had begun. Polish patriots thought the time…

World Literature

Lost in the Funhouse

Nabokov’s masterpiece still occasionally has to be defended against the charge that it uses a high-art modernist veneer to excuse pornographic pleasures. In fact it…

A Ghost is Born

In a new biography, David Foster Wallace mostly emerges as a sympathetic figure, a troubled man whose fearsome intelligence seemed only to exponentially increase his…

My Words, Your Words

It seems simplistic, though, to view the work simply as the act of a bullying editor taking advantage of a struggling writer; the evidence suggests…