I love Henry James with the same kind of love that one might feel for one's slippers or one's cozy armchair. I am sorry about the vulgarity of the comparison but the mental comfort his novels usually bring me shares in this type of domestic, safe physicality. I usually classify the books by the places, time of the day, and position in which I find them fit for reading. There are books, for example, to be read only while standing in a crowded s...

In the introduction to her collection of novellas Wangran ji (Collection of What Have Never Been There, 1983), Eileen Chang (1920-95) cites a couplet from the poem “Jin se” (Majestic Zither) by the Tang poet Li Shangyin (813-58): . . . . . . .

I don’t know about you but for me, Oedipus at Colonus has always been the most striking and unsettling, even distressing, of all Sophocles’ plays. I would even say that it is the most terrifying of all ancient Greek plays that I read. It might seem puzzling at first if you consider that this is also the least dramatic of the old Greek tragedies. There is hardly any action here, hardly any conflict, and for sure not the usual tragic conflict be...

As a Russian saying goes, the new is just the well-forgotten old. Let us look at a relatively current debate on universalism. A case in point is Judith Butler's contribution “Restaging the Universal: Hegemony and the Limits of Formalism” in her exchange with Ernest Laclau and Slavoj Žižek entitled Contingency, Hegemony, Universality (Verso, 2000). Traditionally conceived as a pure tool of white supremacy and colonial domination, u...

Okay, so how many of us who are not professionally committed have read all of The Story of the Stone (I refer to the five volumes in David Hawkes and John Minford's translation, published by Penguin)? If you read Chinese, you probably read it all long ago, but I'm surveying the English-speakers today. I have an issue of conscience about this book. I hate to teach snippets, and in this case, the overall architecture of the 120-chapter version ...

The social sciences, when they get quantitative, often seem to be taking the long way round to express a perfectly obvious observation with percentages and verbiage—“A stitch in time shown to save 8.7 stitches,” and the like. Or such was my first take on reading this piece about emotional contagion: of course, if you’re always in the company of a complaining, negative, passive person, you will begin to feel that life is tiresome and you probab...

A series in which I retell from memory the plot of some film, novel, or other narrative sequence. ---------- These were my favorite books when I was young. I don't exactly remember how young, but somewhere between 8 and 12, I suspect. Along with Tolkien, they set me off on a lifelong love of Dungeons & Dragons-style fantasy literature, one that probably culminated in the period of time I spent playing EverQuest. I remember them fondly.

A series in which I retell from memory the plot of some film, novel, or other narrative sequence. ---------- The “oeuvre” of Judy Blume because I can't, honestly, remember enough about the plot of any single Judy Blume novel to spoil it for you. What follows are memories of highly memorable sequences from a few of her novels, all of which I read at least twenty years ago (and by twenty years ago, of course, I mean, last week).

A series in which I retell from memory the plot of some film, novel, or other narrative sequence. ---------- (Last week's part 1). As I said, the rabbits have adventures. They are fleeing, and searching for a new warren. At a certain point they find shelter in a warren populated by sleek, healthy rabbits. These rabbits behave profoundly unnaturally.

A series in which I retell from memory the plot of some film, novel, or other narrative sequence. ---------- I read this novel seven or eight times between the ages of 11 and 14. In my memory now it is condensed to two or three scenes, only one of which I ever think of regularly, and which has become a weirdly recurring part of my intellectual life. The story begins with men gassing the rabbit warrens inhabited by the protagonists. Fiver, the ...

Alain Robbe-Grillet died about a month ago at the age of 86. Sadly, I learned of the event only by reading an embarrassing piece by novelist Stephen Marche on salon.com. Once again the American press has seized on the occasion of a French writer’s death to shake up that peculiar cocktail of smugness and injury that all things French seem, these days, to permit and even require. The upshot: Robbe-Grillet “was a disaster for innovative novels.” ...

In a recent post and a comment in response to the Michael Vick dog fighting scandal, E Hayot raised the question of animal suffering, and the way that the contradiction between the sentimentalizing of household pets and the ignorance of, and consequent indifference to, the suffering of farm animals is a reflection of the fundamental contradictions that define our relationship to animals. This reference to the treatment of the animals we eat ha...

Cathy said she would buy the bread herself. Leaving the children with Rosa she escaped into the corridor, which felt cold, dark, and sterile after the noise, heat, and familiar banana-and-soap smell of her apartment. Her feet padding on the carpet as she walked towards the elevator, pulling her coat around her, she thought again that stepping out was like the prequel to swimming: standing alone and without the protection of clothes, shivering,...

A 2002 feature on the French author Michel Houllebecq in The Guardian describes him as “a particularly unstunning, monosyllabic, frequently drunk fortysomething-year-old who has been known to make passes at interviewers” (enough to make me a bit sad I'm not interviewing him). In The New Yorker, John Updike calls his recent novel The Possibility of an Island “90% hateful”; eight days before September 11, 2001, the Morocc...

Pictures of Nothing: Abstract Art Since Pollock is the lightly edited book version of the six Andrew Mellon lectures Kirk Varnedoe gave in 2003 at the National Gallery, just a few months before he died of cancer at the age of 57. After 12 or 13 years as the director of painting and sculpture at MoMA, Varnedoe left the post in 2001 for a position at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, NJ to devote his time to writing.

My enduring memory of my grandmother: stooped and frail, unreliable bladder, fading eyesight, tendency to repeat the same things over and over, but so intent upon the conservation of water and electricity that she’d leave the door open while using the bathroom (to avoid turning on the light) and purposefully neglect to flush. This drove my mom crazy, as my grandma had to stay on the ground floor when she visited and would often do this in the ...

Time-out time. I kneel down in front of W (age 6), eye to eye, naming my emotions and trying to foster empathy in him. “Let me explain why I am frustrated. I am frustrated because... blah blah blah...” His eyes wander, he wiggles around, his arms, searching for activity, automatically run through the taekwondo forms. Or his nervous habits appear: biting his nails, picking his fingers, blowing spit bubbles. This drives me nuts. Can’t you listen...

As I start this list, I can’t be sure what it will look like. Reader, you are seeing me examine my conscience and memory in real-time. I was going to list my ten favorite books of 2006, but a few other things began to obtrude that weren’t books, but had become part of my thinking during this year. So I assimilate them all, in the spirit of multimedia, to things “ripped” to my operating memory: scans lodged on the hard disk, items of mental fur...

Or: “What traveling means to me” I have returned home from my trip and am unpacking. Home’s familiar textures and smells are comforting and reassuring if a little dull. After three weeks of imposing on people with more real estate our apartment feels smaller than I remember but my hands, with memory of their own, can still find the light switches in the dark. Each trip is an emotional journey, beginning with excitement, anticipatio...

About a month ago Salon featured a review, by Gary Kamiya, of Robert Irwin’s Dangerous Knowledge: Orientalism and Its Discontents. Accompanying the review --entitled “How Edward Said Took Intellectuals for a Ride” –was an image of Said on a magic carpet. Folks, you can’t make this stuff up.

It sounds like a job for Franco Moretti, champion of “distanced reading” (see his “Conjectures on World Literature”): what do blurbs tell us about the institutions of world literature? Who has described the poetics of the blurb? Its interpellation of an implied reader? The degree to which a well-phrased back cover can replace the book in a hurried reader's experience?

My favorite book begins with an image and then a sudden historical sweep. I’m talking about the setting-rich, plot-poor first chapter of Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter, in which we readers are just settling into a scene amidst the Puritans in “in sad-colored garments and gray, steeple-crowned hats” before our narrator steps back – rather abruptly, I’ve always felt – to offer us some general thoughts on what some people call the course of huma...

I was talking about Erich Auerbach’s Mimesis to a bunch of smart young Comp Lit graduate students this morning. My copy of Mimesis is embarrassingly old: bought used in Nashville, circa 1975, it was probably printed around ten years earlier than that. Attention collectors: it has the green geometric border and the tan details on matte paper, in the smaller trade paperback size. My students had bought the current edition, a good bit taller, wid...

There seems to be no real blueprint for literary magazines. There are good examples, and influential publications, but it's unclear how to go about making one, and it's equally unclear how to read one. They’re magazines, but they want you to read them as books. They’re shaped like books, they don’t have glossy pages, and for the most part they don’t inform you of anything – they are the things you’re being informed of. Soft Targets is as new ...

I spent my morning reading a book that arrived in the mail for my birthday. I sat down with a cup of coffee and intended to just look into the book, but read it straight through. It’s been a rare, restful morning – good coffee, good book, sunny, with the sounds of a distant lawnmower. I thought I’d share and prolong it. The book that arrived is Appointment, a photo-text by the artist Sophie Calle.