The Purpose of Imaginative Fiction
“What’s it about?” is usually the first question we ask when someone recommends a new book, and it’s the wrong question.
Elena Shalneva
· 9 min read
Books
A collection of 203 posts
Easy Rider: 50 Years Looking for America—A Review
Bingen is right about one thing, though: Easy Rider really is an important movie—much more important than a simple measure of its quality would suggest—which is probably why the American Film Institute, among others, continues to rate it so highly.
Graham Daseler
· 14 min read
Woody Allen's 'Apropos of Nothing'—A Review
He cannot help being true to himself. In this calm, blithe, and objective memoir, Allen emerges, at wild odds with his comedic persona, as a very tough, independent artist, a passionate lover of women, avowing his innocence of the one and only charge ever leveled against him in 84 years.
David Evanier
· 12 min read
Lessons in Death and Life from the Diaries of Samuel Pepys
In Pepys’s time a scarlet cross on the door denoted an infected household and sentinels stood guard outside to keep people inside.
Colin Fleming
· 8 min read
Farewell, My Lovely
Chinatown is a remarkable blend of screenwriter Robert Towne and director Roman Polanski’s antipodal sensibilities.
Graham Daseler
· 14 min read
Immigration and Inequality
For people without a foothold in the new service and financial businesses, it was harder to make ends meet.
Christopher Caldwell
· 8 min read
Romance and Retribution
As institutions grow and evolve, they inevitably require reform, but that task can only be entrusted to those who have its best interests at heart.
Jamie Palmer
· 34 min read
The Decline of the Great American Family Saga
In February, the Atlantic published a much discussed essay by David Brooks entitled “The Nuclear Family Was a Mistake.” Brooks noted that the conditions that once made nuclear families viable—strong unions, plenty of jobs that paid living wages, inexpensive housing and transportation and education costs, stay-at-home mothers, high numbers
Kevin Mims
· 13 min read
On the Study of Great Books
Great books require intelligence and judgment, and the exploration of sometimes quite fundamental disagreement, from the outset.
Andrew Gleeson
· 18 min read
The Decadent Society—A Review
Writing about decadence can be symptomatic of the condition.
Ben Sixsmith
· 7 min read
Margaret Atwood Wrote a Great Novel. Unfortunately, Her Fans Turned It Into a Cult
Atwood’s innovation is to give this dystopian nightmare the distinctly female framing of domestic and sexual enslavement—as experienced by “Offred,” a “Handmaid” assigned to a man named Fred and his wife for surrogate motherhood via monthly copulation.
Cathy Young
· 16 min read
The National Book Foundation Defines Diversity Down
Last month the Huffington Post published an essay by Claire Fallon entitled “Was this Decade the Beginning of the End of the Great White Male Writer?” Fallon celebrated the notion that white men are losing their prominence in contemporary American literature and that the best books being published in America
Kevin Mims
· 11 min read
The Million-Petalled Flower
He had the gift of producing them by inverting or adapting cliché to give it new life.
Andrew Gleeson
· 15 min read
Corbynite Economics
In many ways, it is a book that feels badly out of date, and it is unlikely to be of interest to many people beyond those who already agree.
Sam Bowman
· 11 min read
Science Fiction Purges its Problematic Past
Instead, as speculative fiction becomes more diverse, the sense that it must be corrected grows, and author and art are evaluated together.
Craig DeLancey
· 9 min read