The Art of Elegant Simplicity
When I was 14 or so, I found a beat-up copy of Somerset Maugham’s memoir, The Summing Up (1938). Halfway through the book, Maugham recalled his early days as a beginning author, in particular his...
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The Best Course
Splendor of Heart: Walter Jackson Bate and the Teaching of Literature, by Robert D. Richardson, with an interview by John Paul Russo, David R. Godine, 127 pp., $19.95 Walter Jackson Bate...
View ArticleA Positively, Final Appearance
As it happens, this will be—to borrow the title of the third installment of Alec Guinness’s autobiography—my “positively, final appearance,” at least as the Friday “Browsings” columnist. No doubt the...
View ArticleEnding Up
Over the past year I’ve enjoyed writing these “Browsings” essays, meditations, and rants. The time has quite sped by. I hope you—whoever you are—have enjoyed reading them. Some of them anyway. At all...
View ArticleBook Projects
Last week I made my annual pilgrimage to New York for the 2013 birthday weekend of The Baker Street Irregulars. The BSI, as many of this column’s readers probably know, is the 80-year-old literary...
View ArticleMoney
While reading the papers this past Monday, I paused over two stories. One was a Washington Post review by Patrick Anderson—who specializes in writing about crime fiction—of a new thriller by Dick...
View ArticleA Dreamer’s Tale
For those of us with an inward turn of mind, which is another name for melancholy introspection, the beginning of a new year inevitably leads to thoughts about both the future and the past. My father...
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Let Us Now Praise Dover Books
Last month my friend Tom Mann—author of The Oxford Guide to Library Research and, as Washington insiders know, the man to see at the reference desk of the Library of Congress—handed me a copy of a...
View ArticleBooks for the Holidays
Giving books for the holidays is always a crapshoot. Sometimes the recipient will gush, “Oh, just what I always wanted—a deluxe pigskin-bound copy of Lydgate’s Fall of Princes.” At other times, he or...
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Christmas Reading
’Tis the season when choral societies start practicing their “Hallelujahs” and theaters around the country stage A Christmas Carol. Readers have their December traditions too. To my mind there are...
View ArticleIn Praise of Small Presses
Books don’t only furnish a room, they also make the best holiday gifts. Note that I said “books.” Kindles and Nooks and iPads may offer texts, but word-pixels on a screen aren’t books. Come Christmas...
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Poe and Baudelaire
This past weekend, I wandered into downtown Silver Spring, Maryland, to attend a book arts festival sponsored by Pyramid Atlantic, a cooperative devoted to teaching and promoting every sort of...
View Article“I’m Done”
When Philip Roth recently announced his retirement from writing fiction, I was surprised and impressed. After all, one of the great artistic rules, less often observed than it should be, is knowing...
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Language Matters
As soon as I decided to write about language for this Browsings column, my sentences started to grow clumsy and fall all over one another. Nothing sounded right, and I questioned the grammar and...
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Thirteen for Halloween
Although The American Scholar’s 13 “spooktacular” titles are all unsettling works and well worth searching out, most are relatively modern books. Traditionalists might welcome a somewhat more classic...
View ArticleThe Art of Elegant Simplicity
When I was 14 or so, I found a beat-up copy of Somerset Maugham’s memoir, The Summing Up (1938). Halfway through the book, Maugham recalled his early days as a beginning author, in particular his...
View ArticleClik here to view.
The Best Course
Splendor of Heart: Walter Jackson Bate and the Teaching of Literature, by Robert D. Richardson, with an interview by John Paul Russo, David R. Godine, 127 pp., $19.95 Walter Jackson Bate...
View ArticleA Positively, Final Appearance
As it happens, this will be—to borrow the title of the third installment of Alec Guinness’s autobiography—my “positively, final appearance,” at least as the Friday “Browsings” columnist. No doubt the...
View ArticleEnding Up
Over the past year I’ve enjoyed writing these “Browsings” essays, meditations, and rants. The time has quite sped by. I hope you—whoever you are—have enjoyed reading them. Some of them anyway. At all...
View ArticleBook Projects
Last week I made my annual pilgrimage to New York for the 2013 birthday weekend of The Baker Street Irregulars. The BSI, as many of this column’s readers probably know, is the 80-year-old literary...
View Article
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