Books - Quillette (Page 2)

Céline, Literary Antichrist

If we demand that our artists be angels, we will not have any art left to appreciate.

RJ Smith

11 Jul 2022 · 9 min read

Has Olivia Manning’s ‘Fortunes of War’ Finally Found Its Moment?

The Ukrainian war has made Manning’s writing more relevant now than at any time since it was written.

Robin Ashenden

2 Jun 2022 · 11 min read

Roya Hakakian and How to Speak About What No One Wants to Hear

I. Roya Hakakian is an American writer from Iran who commands a distinctive ability to speak about large and horrific events in a chipper tone that appears to underplay the horrific quality and, by apparently underplaying, ends up subtly underlining. It is an artful tone. It is cagey, charming, disarming,

Paul Berman

27 May 2022 · 33 min read

Hofstadter’s Paranoid Style Revisited

Hofstadter argued that McCarthyism was simply the latest iteration of a longstanding American tradition.

Michael J. Totten

16 May 2022 · 9 min read

Get Ready for the Return of the Abortion Novel

The abortion novels that proliferated in the late 1960s were filled with characters who are forced by carelessness and circumstance to make the most agonizing of personal choices.

Kevin Mims

5 May 2022 · 26 min read

The Western Reinvented. Again.

It has been 30 years since a Western last won the Best Picture Oscar at the Academy Awards. That was in 1992 and the film was Unforgiven [https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0105695/], directed by Clint Eastwood, who also starred in it alongside Morgan Freeman, Gene Hackman, and Richard Harris.

Kevin Mims

25 Mar 2022 · 8 min read

Heading Into the Atom Age—Pat Frank’s Perpetually Relevant Novels

NOTE: The following essay contains spoilers. British journalist Ed West recently published an excellent essay [https://edwest.substack.com/p/children-of-men-is-really-happening?s=r] entitled “Children of Men Is Really Happening,” in which he tied together the shrinking fertility rate wreaking demographic havoc across the globe and the Russian invasion of

Kevin Mims

22 Mar 2022 · 11 min read

Against De-Materialization: Tom Wolfe in the Age of NFTs

You cannot lose, you cannot win: the present includes the past and the future. ~Marshall McLuhan I In the summer of 1970, TV-Ontario filmed Tom Wolfe in conversation with Marshall McLuhan on the lawn of McLuhan’s home in Toronto’s Wychwood Park. Towards the end of their amicable chat,

Julia Friedman and David Hawkes

9 Mar 2022 · 14 min read

Authentic Immediacy—A Tribute to the Political Fiction of Frederick Forsyth

When the Berlin Wall fell and the USSR collapsed, one might have assumed that Cold War fiction would become irrelevant. That hasn’t turned out to be the case with Frederick Forsyth’s work. Consider, for instance, this passage from his 1979 novel, The Devil’s Alternative [https://www.amazon.

Kevin Mims

18 Feb 2022 · 12 min read

PJ O’Rourke—A Tribute

The thing about PJ O’Rourke, who passed away on Tuesday at the age of 74, was that everyone wanted to be around him. By “everyone,” I don’t just mean the right-wingers I hang out with, most of whom share PJ’s classical-liberal politics, but also neoconservatives like Bill

Charles Murray

16 Feb 2022 · 2 min read

“A Pleasure to Burn”: We Are Closer to Bradbury’s Dystopia Than Orwell’s or Huxley’s

For decades, it has been common to call authoritarian new laws, norms, or government actions “Orwellian.” In 1984 [https://www.amazon.com/1984-Signet-Classics-George-Orwell/dp/0451524934/], George Orwell so brilliantly portrayed a nightmarish future that his name became synonymous with almost anything one wishes to describe as oppressive. Aldous Huxley’s

David S. Wills

12 Feb 2022 · 9 min read

Didion in El Salvador

There is a special kind of practical information that the visitor to El Salvador acquires immediately, the way visitors to other places acquire information about the currency rates, the hours for the museums. In El Salvador one learns that vultures go first for the soft tissue, for the eyes, the

Charlotte Allen

11 Feb 2022 · 16 min read

The Maus That Roared

A lot of foolishness has been written about McMinn County’s decision to remove Maus [https://www.amazon.com/Complete-MAUS-Art-Spiegelman/dp/0141014083] from the middle-school Holocaust curriculum. Headlines from across the political spectrum bellowed that Art Spiegelman’s Pulitzer Prize-winning graphic novel had been “banned” and outraged commentary duly followed:

Thomas Balazs

4 Feb 2022 · 8 min read

A World of Waste, Stripped of Transcendence: James Joyce’s ‘Ulysses’ at 100

Few novels become institutions, to have departments rigged up around them, whole constituencies and spheres of scholarship, as works of lifelong study, fascination and confusion. Ulysses [https://www.amazon.com/Ulysses-Modern-Library-Best-Novels/dp/0679600116/ref=sr_1_4?crid=NG7V10N9NCDB&keywords=ulysses&qid=1643218547&sprefix=ulysses%2Caps%2C75&sr=8-4] , whose

Jared Marcel Pollen

31 Jan 2022 · 13 min read

George Makari's ‘Of Fear and Strangers’—A Review

Zaid Jilani

8 Dec 2021 · 5 min read