A Life Worth Living
‘It’s a dangerous way of looking at the world, which is partly what “The Rest of Our Lives” starts out with – Tom thinking you can measure a marriage and a life in terms of grades.’
-
-
The Rise of Eng Lit.
A monumental treatment of the rise of English literature as a university discipline in Britain from the 1860s to the 1960s.
-
Joyce and Parnell
A large and ambitious attempt to shed new light on Joyce’s work fails to convince.
-
Get Carter
Likening the editor’s role to that of a choirmaster seeking harmony from ‘all these disparate voices’, Graydon Carter courted a younger, brighter and more distinctive breed of writer. It worked. The new style sold.
-
The Devouring Mind
Maestros & Monsters: Days & Nights with Susan Sontag & George Steiner, by Robert Boyers, Mandel Vilar Press/Dryad Press, 256 pp, $24.95, ISBN: 978-1942134886 Many critics – and critics are my subject here – spend their lives adding tile after tile to the mosaic of a False Self. A university degree, a glittering essay, an…
-
Flashes of Gold
Memories of bohemian Dublin, the Grand Canal and ‘Baggotonia’
-
Cancelling Mailer
Norman Mailer meets the ‘fierce ladies’ and irretrievably loses the plot
-
German Lessons
Enda O’Doherty writes: Up to his death at the age of ninety-three in 2013, Marcel Reich-Ranicki had long been the most influential literary critic in Germany and the German-speaking lands (Sprachraum). Through his contributions to the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (FAZ) and later Der Spiegel, Reich-Ranicki provided his readers with authoritative judgments on what, in German…
-
Getting Known
A memoir of Patrick Kavanagh, the reflections of Thomas McCarthy
-
Boss Cupid
The warm, human despatches of a gay poet from Reagan’s America
