Ellen Willis was a no-nonsense, resolutely feminist, always engaging rock critic and essayist who wrote for publications including Rolling Stone, the Nation, the Village Voice, and the New Yorker (where she was the first rock critic). Her voice is sophisticated—maybe savvy is the better word—but always real. She dances to [...]
My essay on Adam Phillips is up at The Bookslut.
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“Echoes of The Jazz Age”
What F. Scott Fitzgerald knew best, and wrote about with unsurpassed style and insight, was himself. The Crack-Up, a series of seven personal essays he published in Esquire (then published posthumously as part of a collection edited by his friend Edmund Wilson), marked [...]
Continued →My review of Unpacking My Library, edited by Leah Price, is up at The Rumpus. I call it “coffee-table fodder for the nerd set.”
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In the 1950s, three esteemed critics, Jacques Barzun, W.H. Auden, and Lionel Trilling formed the editorial board of the Readers’ Subscription Book Club. That Club and its successor, The Mid-Century Book Club, had as their missions to bring sophisticated new and classic books to a general public. The essays these critics wrote individually as introductions [...]
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Before she was Pauline Kael, New Yorker movie critic, Pauline Kael was one of many young American writers in the sway of the great critics of the 1930s. In his recently published biography, Pauline Kael: A Life in the Dark, Brian Kellow singles out R.P. Blackmur as a [...]
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Asked about a common thread in her early stories, Ann Beattie answered that they were “filled with my personal worry beads: music, more music, dogs, digs at Nixon.” Now, as if to do penance for all of those digs, she has written a book about Mrs. Nixon. Not Pat Nixon, [...]
Continued →My essay on rereading is up at The Millions.
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The deluge of praise heaped on Joan Didion’s Blue Nights has been excessive, bordering on sycophantic. The New York Times has run three pieces about the book (a daily review, a Sunday review, and an essay about Didion as a “polarizing force”). The Los Angeles Review of Books ran a whole [...]
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A blog by Lisa Levy about dead critics, a few live critics, and the nature of critical inquiry
