Harold Bloom | Harold Bloom
Feb.18.2013
My personal approach to reading literature as a youth was very intuitive in that I would casually walk into a library or a bookstore and select my next book based on a genre that appealed to me at that moment and skim the passages to see which book piqued my interest most. (In other words, I was...
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Dec.10.2012
Someone recently referred to Wikipedia as the “end of scholarship.” I can’t remember who said it, and I can’t turn it up on Google or even on Wikipedia itself, which I guess means it might as well never have been said. But I’m sure I read it somewhere. And I’m not surprised at the sentiment. It...
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Dec.04.2011
(c) 2011 Jeanne Powell"Anatomy of a Poem"all rights reserved
In those halcyon days before I discovered coffee actually was drinkable, I used to relax with a cup or two of freshly brewed tea -- frequently the Iron Goddess of Mercy oolong from China. On such afternoons I read the...
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Aug.21.2010
All books published posthumously come to us shrink-wrapped in heartache, from a voice we know has already been extinguished. There is more sadness still in a subgroup of this category: books that come from manuscripts abandoned during wartime or hidden for safekeeping and discovered when the...
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Oct.15.2008
There's been a lot of discussion about the resurgence of fantasy over the past few years, with various theories advanced as to the reasons. Certainly the exceptional Lord of the Rings films in the early part of the century (hard to believe we're already at the point where I can say that without...
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Sep.03.2008
A response to Vivian Gornick
(See her essay in the September Harper’s Magazine)
In the September Harper’s Vivian Gornick adds her voice to the choir that has pronounced the death of “Jewish-American writing.” Her diagnosis centers on the waning of Roth and Bellow as literary stars of the first...
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