The death of literature
Literature in the West is dead for the simple reason that the West itself is virtually dead
Books
Monday
Monday
‘The Fifth Head of Cerberus’ at 50
Check out Gene Wolfe’s minor masterpiece
Monday
Stacking up
Substack gives authors an opportunity to take back control of their own careers and destinies
Sunday
How a small publisher survived the digital age
A book about books for book lovers
Thursday
Books of the Year 2021
Our best reads and most pertinacious page-turners of 2021
Monday
Why we should venerate Evelyn Waugh
Waugh was unquestionably among the greatest novelists of the 20th century
Saturday
A letter to George Steiner
George Steiner was easier to admire than to love
Friday
Read Ray Bradbury before he’s canceled
Frankly, it’s a wonder we are allowed to read him at all
Thursday
In search of Nirad Chaudhuri
The forgotten visionary of British India
Monday
Is caste the American class system?
Only in fiction did Faulkner dare to reveal what he knew about the code of caste
Wednesday
Let’s just go ahead and ban books
Oversensitive readers can now line-edit novels by getting mad at their content on the internet
Wednesday
Help yourself to self-help
I’m hopeful about the current self-help trends
Monday
The soul of Flannery O’Connor
Was Flannery O’Connor a racist, or was she not?
Friday
Books you shouldn’t read in public
To read is to invite derision, especially if you grew up in a working-class town
Tuesday
Spells and bindings
The Madman’s Library: The Strangest Books, Manuscripts and Other Literary Curiosities from History by Edward Brooke-Hitching reviewed
Monday
What the books in our Zoom backgrounds really say about us
The background has overtaken the foreground as a measure of who we are
Wednesday
The author in full: Tom Wolfe
Wolfe excelled at capturing human foibles and petty vanities; anything deeper than that escaped him
Monday
Why men don’t read books anymore
Lockdown has been more illustrative of the gender gap in reading than any event I can remember
Wednesday
The lockdown list: books to read during quarantine
Daily reading recommendations from The Spectator’s writers and editors
Saturday
The Spectator USA guide to book curation
Gwyneth Paltrow has a book curator – now you can too!
