Everybody wants a piece of Flaubert His contemporaries Victor Hugo Ivan Turgenev Emile Zola Guy de Maupassant and others hailed his genius Twentieth-century critics from Erich Auerbach to Lionel Trilling ushered him into the pantheon of modernism Jean-Paul Sartre ground out five massive vol

Roth’s language is mostly matter-of-fact, but often enough he launches into eloquent spasms of what the Germans call erlebte Rede (lived discourse), where writer and character breathe as one.

As an migr e born in Kiev 1903 one of the world epicenters of Jew-hatred Ir ne N mirovsky may have been a fatalist about the rising tide of Nazism in which she drowned A successful novelist in her adopted country and language N mirovsky seems not to have been surprised when the French po

What exactly is the conservative intellectual tradition in America More troubling still what can be said who can be cited to counter Lionel Trilling rsquo s pronouncement in his preface to The Liberal Imagination 1950 that In the United States at this time liberalism is not only the dominant

Once upon a time all Francophones were taught to write clearly and distinctly la Descartes nowadays it seems they are trying their best to write obscurely la Michel Foucault And Abdellah Hammoudi a Morocco-born Princeton anthropologist with a Ph D from the Sorbonne 1977 succeeds onl

In 1935 a 26-year-old Viennese Jew with a Ph D in art history but no job hastily penned Eine kurze Weltgeschichte f r junge Leser as part of a series called Knowledge for Children before fleeing to England where in time he became director of the Warburg Institute and the celebrated author of

Always try to do too much must be taken as one of Salman Rushdie's mantras and he certainly lives up to it here This sprawling story flashes back and forth from pre-World War II Strasbourg to present-day Los Angeles touchesat least fleetinglyon every major world crisis from the Holocaust to

Man of letters Public intellectual Cultural critic Feuilletoniste Whatever he was exactly they don rsquo t make them like that anymore and the more rsquo s the pity Once upon a time writers like Edmund Wilson Mary McCarthy Irving Howe Alfred Kazin or even George Orwell armed only with the

On khokmes as they say in Yiddish but seriously nobody not even a veteran scholar like Professor Sachar could compress the whole of modern Jewish history into a mere 800-plus pages with alas no maps photographs or statistical tables Not if you start roughly with the horrific massacres le

The novelist Michael Cunningham leapt into the spotlight with The Hours 1998 a meditative spinoff of Virginia Woolf rsquo s Mrs Dalloway Cunningham rsquo s book won the Pulitzer Prize and enjoyed a successful second run in a filmed version four years later Now he has written another trio of in