Blogspot - dgmyers.blogspot.com - A Commonplace Blog
General Information:
Latest News:
Nick Carraway’s fiction 23 Aug 2013 | 09:25 pm
The discussion of The Great Gatsby begins today in my course on it—an entire course devoted to a 180-page book—and in rereading it, I was struck for the first time by the apparent irrelevance of the o...
J. F. Powers and Elmore Leonard 22 Aug 2013 | 07:10 pm
My review of Katherine A. Powers’s edition of her father’s letters, Suitable Accommodations, appeared yesterday—publication day for the book—in the Daily Beast. The book’s publication was overshadowed...
Casual slander and reckless clichés 13 Aug 2013 | 09:25 pm
A “warped ex-faculty member of Texas A&M that enables Johnny Manziel”—according to the Washington Post sportswriter Mike Wise, that’s what I deserve to be called for crying foul when he says in a colu...
No one left to whack 13 Aug 2013 | 12:51 am
Just recently, in homage to the late James Gandolfini, I watched all six seasons of HBO’s crime drama The Sopranos for the first time. Originally running from 1999 to 2007, The Sopranos was the first ...
The babble of literary gossip 7 Aug 2013 | 02:05 am
Over at Gawker this morning J. K. Trotter dishes the dirt on Philip Roth’s The Human Stain. Or, rather, its dust jacket. Trotter reports that the sliver of the anonymous letter pictured on the cover, ...
Down and out in Newport 31 Jul 2013 | 11:17 pm
Allison Lynn, The Exiles (Boston: New Harvest/Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2013). 336 pages. Perhaps no famous quotation from literature is more contested than F. Scott Fitzgerald’s remark that there a...
10 worst prize-winning American novels of all time 2 Jul 2013 | 05:25 am
I’ve compiled so many list of best books—best Jewish books, best New York books, best baseball books, best Reagan books, best literary histories, best memoirs—that I am in danger of losing touch with ...
Two thrillers 20 Jun 2013 | 12:24 am
Donald Hamilton, Death of a Citizen (London: Titan Books, 2013). 227 pages. Charles McCarry, The Shanghai Factor (New York: Mysterious Press, 2013). 292 pages. The thriller may be the only literary ...
The audacity of revenge 14 Jun 2013 | 03:26 am
Scott G. F. Bailey, The Astrologer (Moses Lake, Wash.: Rhemalda, 2013). 253 pages. Tycho Brahe, the Danish astronomer who was among the great figures of the Renaissance, died suddenly in Prague on Oc...
On writing a memoir 13 Jun 2013 | 05:40 am
With the sound of time’s wingèd chariot at my back, I have cautiously begun a memoir. I am no novelist. My peculiar talent, such as it is, is for phrase and argument, not for invention. Besides, I hav...
