Jonathan Russell Clark
Good Neighbors (on Wolfram Eilenberger’s Time of the Magicians: Wittgenstein, Benjamin, Cassirer, Heidegger, and the Decade That Reinvented Philosophy, translated from the German by Shaun Whiteside, and Claire Messud’s Kant’s Little Prussian Head and Other Reasons Why I Write: An Autobiography in Essays)
Wolfram Eilenberger’s Time of the Magicians features a library that seems like an academic’s version of Borges’s Babel or Zafron’s Cemetery of Forgotten Books. In the Warburg Library in Hamburg, […]
Read MoreIN Summer 2021
on Mud and Stars: Travels in Russia with Pushkin, Tolstoy, and Other Geniuses of the Golden Age by Sara Wheeler
When characterizing the fiction of Ivan Turgenev in a review of Constance Garnett’s translation of The Two Friends and Other Stories for The Times Literary Supplement in December 1921, Virginia […]
Read MoreIN Summer 2020
on Lost Time: Lectures on Proust in a Soviet Prison Camp by Józef Czapski, translated from the French by Eric Karpeles
IN Spring 2019
Julian Barnes’s 1989 novel A History of the World in 10½ Chapters includes an essayistic meditation on love in which he brilliantly considers the meanings and ramifications of history and […]
Read MoreIN Winter 2016
IN Fall 2014
Just Who Is This Oscar Wilde Person, Anyway? (on David M. Friedman’s Wilde in America: Oscar Wilde and the Invention of Modern Celebrity; Roy Morris Jr.’s Declaring His Genius: Oscar Wilde in North America; & Antony Edmonds’ Oscar Wilde’s Scandalous Summer: The 1894 Worthing Holiday and the Aftermath)
IN Summer 2015
When I studied abroad at Oxford as an undergraduate, I took a course on Ulysses. I ’d always wanted to read it, but I felt inadequate to its genius, for the […]
Read MoreIN Spring 2015