I count myself lucky. Weird, I know, in this day and age when all around us the natural and political world is going to hell in a handbasket. But that, in fact, may be part of it. Back when I started ...

This book review appeared in the Winter 2014/15 issue of The Independent Review. In the final paragraph of his introduction to Literature and Liberty, Allen Mendenhall clearly outlines the project of ...

“One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman,” Simone de Beauvoir famously wrote. In the opening essay of Shapechangers, Niamh McBranan suggests the same might be said of writers. It is a fitting ...

The season will see past masters celebrated and the trade secrets of contemporary writers revealed. Other titles will track authors’ lives through their letters and survey the literary footprints left ...

OF the twelve papers here reprinted, the seven more strictly literary essays are in the interest of that self-respectful demeanor, high purpose, and honest art in literature which Mr. Higginson has ...

The Age of Criticism, Martin Amis once wrote, started in 1948 and ended with OPEC. That is, it started with the publication of F.R. Leavis’s The Great Tradition – the book that, more than any other, ...

Fittingly for uncertain times, this fall authors emphasize the value of returning to old literary favorites. The season won’t be strictly nostalgic, however, and will see its fair share of debuts and ...