The Sardonic Inferno
At its best, Amis’s fiction broke open the locked door behind which our culture tries to keep its skeletons hidden.
Matt Hanson
· 7 min read
Books
A collection of 276 posts
The Dualism of Duluoz
An eagerly awaited new edition of Gerald Nicosia’s splendid Kerouac biography provides the definitive portrait of a great artist and a profoundly troubled man.
David S. Wills
· 15 min read
The Hammett and Chandler of Gay Detective Fiction
How the books of George Baxt and Joseph Hansen changed the genre.
Kevin Mims
· 17 min read
The Girl of the Endless Summer
How ‘Gidget’ helped to put surfing on the map.
Kevin Mims
· 20 min read
The Man Who Invented the Modern Cop Novel
Joseph Wambaugh’s crime fiction has been much imitated but seldom equalled.
Kevin Mims
· 20 min read
Orwell and Socialism
Reflections on the Western Left’s fragmented ideology.
Michael C. Anderson
· 7 min read
How Do We Define ‘Life’?
An excerpt from 'The Edge of Knowledge: Unsolved Mysteries of the Cosmos.'
Lawrence M. Krauss
· 6 min read
Remembering Rumpole
John Mortimer’s fictional barrister was—like his creator—a rogue redeemed by a fierce commitment to the presumption of innocence.
Kevin Mims
· 19 min read
A Jolly Good Scoundrel
Three Cheers for Harry Flashman!
Graham Daseler
· 15 min read
Hormones First. Research Later
A Review of Hannah Barnes’s ‘Time to Think: The Inside Story of the Collapse of the Tavistock’s Gender Service for Children’
Bernard Lane
· 13 min read
Do We Still Need a Women’s Prize for Fiction?
It is time to consider retiring awards segregated by the sex of the author.
Josh Allan
· 7 min read
The Eyes of Another
Dostoevsky’s masterpiece, ‘Crime and Punishment,’ offers a radical reinterpretation of guilt and redemption.
Marilyn Simon
· 8 min read
In Memoriam
A tribute to five pop fiction writers we lost in 2022.
Kevin Mims
· 12 min read
How Do They Know This?
An informative and apolitical new book reminds us that statistics are not always what they seem.
Christopher J. Snowdon
· 6 min read
Islamist Terror; Journalistic Error
In a valuable new book, historian Richard Landes argues that Western reporting on the Second Palestinian Intifada helped to seed a misunderstanding of terrorism.
Jeffrey Herf
· 19 min read