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Read this beside Ursula Le Guin’s The Dispossessed, and you will see the two directions American science fiction could have gone in the 1970s and chose both. Heinlein published Time…

Margin notes from a copy of The Plague I read through the winter after the pandemic, the one I had bought years earlier and had never managed to finish, because…

Here is the contrarian take. News from Nowhere is a better book than Utopia, Walden Two, Looking Backward, or any of the other politically-serious utopias that a reader is supposed…

You cannot read this book properly in a city. You need a desert. Not a metaphorical one. An actual desert — the kind with junipers stunted into witch-knots by the…

A letter to Jules Verne, who is well beyond receiving letters but who, I suspect, would have enjoyed the idea that one of his American readers was still thinking about…

I have read this book three times. Each time it has been a different novel. The first time I was twenty-one, in a small rental in Bellingham, working a shift…

Before I read Midnight’s Children, I knew Salman Rushdie as the man the ayatollah wanted dead. That was almost everything. The fatwa had been issued in 1989 for The Satanic…

An imagined conversation with Paul Bowles, who lived in Tangier for fifty-two years and died there in 1999. I get to ask the questions. He can answer however he wants.…

William Seward Burroughs II died in Lawrence, Kansas, in August 1997, at eighty-three, of a heart attack. He had outlived almost everyone he had ever taken drugs with. He had…

Verdict first: there is no such book as The Thousand and One Nights. There are many books, assembled over a thousand years, in multiple languages, by many hands, and the…

Read this book beside Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose, and you will see the same novel written twice — once in Latin Christendom, once in Ottoman Istanbul —…

From the margins of my copy of Common Sense, a small Penguin Classics edition I read slowly one winter, pencil in hand, because the pamphlet is short enough that a…

Here is the contrarian take, and it is not the one people expect. The Importance of Being Earnest is not Wilde’s best play. It is not his second-best play. It…

I did not love Walden the first time I read it. I read it in high school in Reedsport, in a mass-market paperback with a tree on the cover, and…

A letter to Jean-Paul Sartre, written in the full knowledge that he is beyond it and was, when alive, largely uninterested in letters from American readers. Monsieur Sartre, I read…

I have read this book four times. Each time it has been a different book. The first time I was sixteen, in Reedsport, from a paperback with the original Ace…

Before 1Q84, Haruki Murakami was a famous novelist. After 1Q84, he was something else — a publishing phenomenon whose new books arrived at midnight release parties in Tokyo bookstores the…

An imagined conversation with Upton Sinclair. I get to ask the questions. He can answer however he wants. Me: Mr. Sinclair. Sinclair: Please. I published the book at twenty-seven. If…

Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoyevsky died in January 1881 at the age of fifty-nine, from a pulmonary hemorrhage, in a St. Petersburg apartment his wife had finally managed to furnish after two…

Verdict first: this is the most useful book I have read about the present decade, and it is shorter than it looks. Douglas Rushkoff wrote Team Human in 2019, which…

Read this book beside Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, and you will see the two hemispheres of the Edwardian novel of becoming. They were published…

From the margins of my copy of Life Ahead, a Krishnamurti book that was given to me by someone who, in retrospect, was trying to tell me something. Page 4,…

Here is the contrarian take, and I will defend it: The Grapes of Wrath is not Steinbeck’s best book. It is not even his second-best book. It is the book…

I first saw this book at a swap meet in Reedsport, on a card table under a tarp, in a box marked TWO DOLLAR EACH. The seller was an old…

A letter to Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoyevsky, written in full knowledge that the post is bad. Dear Fyodor Mikhailovich, I have just finished your little book again. The third time in…