Category: Literary

  • Gopnik & Compagnon Talk Marcel Proust

    I discovered this wonderful video of a discussion between The New Yorker writer Adam Gopnik and Marcel Proust scholar Antoine Compagnon at Columbia University’s Maison Française. Gopnik is a well-known Francophile whose essay collection From Paris to the Moon chronicles his experience living in Paris for five years. Compagnon is a Proust scholar and a professor of French…

  • Keeping Up with Karl Ove Knausgård

    The Norwegian novelist Karl Ove Knausgård (born 1968) is a writer worth paying attention to. His six-volume memoir/novel My Struggle has been a sensation in his native country (in a way that no such literary work could be in a country as large and as fractured as the U.S). Right now, only the first two volumes…

  • What is Stuff? (or How to Survive Exile in France)

    The French have the peculiar habit of referring to American and Brits collectively as “Anglo Saxons,” which isn’t exactly a racial or cultural description, but more a way of classifying a people oddly attached in their estimation to both hyper-commerce and 17th Century modes of Puritanism. To make matters worse, we Anglophones fail to observe the…

  • Another Take on Catholic Literature & Writers

    In 2011 I wrote an essay in The Millions titled “Where Have All the Catholic Writers Gone?” Little did I know that the topic would interest a great number of people, and that the piece would continue to pop-up in online discussions. Earlier this week the essay surfaced again when Nick Ripatrazone penned an article…

  • Some Fun with Novelist Gary Shteyngart

    Today my friend Roman Tsivkin and I had some fun with the Russian-born novelist Gary Shteyngart on Twitter. My friend Roman and Shteyngart share a very similar background–both are Russian Jews, about 40, live in NYC, both were born in what used to be Leningrad, and they both look VERY MUCH alike. Roman recently posted a new…

  • Kerouac’s ‘Big Sur’ Now a Movie

    When asked about the novels of Jack Kerouac Truman Capote quipped: “That’s not writing, it’s typing.” His famed comment underscores Kerouac’s mixed reputation as a writer, both then and now. Kerouac’s output was certainly uneven, but his ambition for the novel and his vision for a new American prose was both genuine and compelling; Kerouac’s…