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Jerzy’s many masks: A review of “Oral Pleasure:Kosinski as Storyteller”
Reviewed in this essay: Oral Pleasure: Kosinski as Storyteller. Edited by Kiki Kosinski. Grove Press, 2012. Years ago, when my reading tastes were largely defined by whatever contained the most explicit sex, I devoured the novels of Jerzy Kosinski. I had other sources—Henry Miller, Philip Roth, and Martin Amis—but there was something especially creepy and seductive…
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The Spirited Letters of Joseph Roth
Reviewed in this essay: Joseph Roth: A Life in Letters, translated and edited by Michael Hoffman. W. W. Norton & Company, 2012. Some writers do their most interesting work in correspondence; only with the right private audience does their voice reach its full potential. The letters of Kingsley Amis, for instance, are more hilarious, caustic,…
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On Why Trilling Matters
Reviewed in this essay: Why Trilling Matters, by Adam Kirsch. Yale University Press, 2011. Lionel Trilling was a major figure in his times: revered, loathed, and full of contradictions. He was—with perhaps only the exception of Edmund Wilson—the most well-known and respected American literary critic throughout the nineteen fifties and sixties. He was the first…