Usa

Only America, a friend of mine once insisted, could produce the New Criterion. This friend happened to be American, but his point stands nonetheless. America alone is sufficiently large, wealthy and self-confident to sustain a conservative arts journal of such consistent quality. The New Criterion is 30 years old this year. The anniversary has given its editors cause for consideration as well as celebration. They have commissioned a series of essays on the questions prompted by the unnerving nature of the future. The themes of these essays — America’s place in the world, the West’s malaise, the constant tension between continuity and change — might be reduced to this sentence in

Gore Vidal was famously waspish or infamously nasty, depending on your point of view. Most outspoken (and successful) writers divide opinion, but Vidal does so more than most. His distinctive prose and the righteous fashion in which he expressed his liberal opinions are not for everyone; one man’s crusading iconoclast is a preachy monomaniac to those of different inclinations. In all the dense weight of recollections and memorials published since Vidal’s death on Tuesday, I have not seen a sharper criticism of his writing and its preoccupations than that made by Spectator reader Walter Taplin in a letter to the magazine in 1982. ‘Sir, On page 13 of the Spectator

Whatever Mitt might think, if there’s one thing that makes us proud to be British, it’s the fact we’re not American. Alright, it’s true we don’t have a black president but we still think we’re cooler: less brash, more sarcastic and ready to give Tim Berners-Lee a starring role in the Olympic show. The differences are particularly obvious when it comes to the holy trinity of American life: guns, god and portion sizes. And Ben Fountain’s debut novel – at the age of 48, he’s a honed late developer after the excellent short story collection Brief Encounters With Che Guevara (2006) – rips into all three over-indulgences. In Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk,

Richard Ford published his debut novel A Piece of My Heart in 1976.  But it was The Sportswriter — which introduced the world to Frank Bascombe, and other marginalised characters trapped on the edge of the American Dream — that distinguished Ford as a serious literary force. The two books that followed, Independence Day, which won him the Pulitzer prize in fiction, and Lay of The Land, completed the Frank Bascombe trilogy. Canada, his seventh novel, begins in Montana in 1960. It’s narrated by Dell Parsons, the son of a retired Air Force pilot, and a schoolteacher. The novel begins when Dell’s parents, Bev and Neeva, are sent to jail

UP: SHAKESPEARE IN LOVE Faber’s new Shakespeare’s Sonnets app is rated 12+ on account of its ‘Infrequent/Mild Sexual Content or Nudity’. After watching Andrew Motion’s  come-to-bed reading of Sonnet 142 we’re surprised it escaped an X-certificate. Who needs 50 Shades when you’ve got the third sexiest poet laureate (after Ben Jonson and Ted Hughes) wearing nothing but polka-dot pyjamas and braces? ‘Love is my sin’ indeed!     UP: 60s SUMMER READS Now’s the time of year when literary pages replace serious stuff like reviews with drivel about what famous people are reading on their holidays. A depressing symptom of our celeb-obsessed age, it’s tempting to think, but a glance

Viz magazine. The Beano. Judge Dredd. 2000AD… But that’s about it. Why doesn’t Britain have a comic book industry? Try an extended metaphor: Think of all English literature, laid out like a vast library. Ten thousand Romantic novels by Trollope. Cupboards crammed with textbooks on Shakespeare. Ubiquitous thumbed paperbacks of Harry Potter, Narnia, the Lord of the Rings. And enough soft porn to fill an Olympic swimming pool. But the shelf – if there was even a shelf – of British comic books would be nasty, brutish, and short. Why is this? Are we somehow less talented than our square-jawed American cousins? Certainly, there is no shortage of appetite here

If racism presupposes that different ethnic groups cannot live harmoniously together, then segregation puts that theory into practice. Carl H. Nightingale’s Segregation: A Global History of Divided Cities, teaches us that separating cities along racial colour-lines, has always concerned one commodity: real estate. Cities, Nightingale observers, are places where people of several races are meant to come together. But this has not been the case. Instead, residential segregation and city-splitting politics — across the globe — has ensured that by putting a coerced colour-line in place, white-power has remained the definitive norm. Tracing the trajectory of segregationist politics from 1700, to the present day, Nightingale notes that racial segregationists have

Possessing a meticulously detailed and layered style, as well as having an exceptional ability to describe nature, Jorie Graham’s poetry is primarily concerned with how we can relate our internal consciousness to the exterior natural world we inhabit. In 1996, The Dream of the Unified Field: Selected Poems, 1974-1994, earned Graham the Pulitzer Prize in poetry. She is currently the Boylston professor of poetry at Harvard University. Her forthcoming book, Place will be her twelfth collection to date. She spoke to the Spectator about why poetry needs to be reclaimed to the oral tradition, how technology is corrupting our imagination, and why her work is laced with contradictions and paradoxes.

John Irving’s latest novel, In One Person is narrated by a bisexual writer, Billy Abbot, who recalls his high school days from the 1950s, in the small New-England town of First Sister — where the majority of the cross-dressing residents are more likely to celebrate polymorphous perversity than puritanical punishment. Billy takes a fancy to various people, including: his stepfather; his friend’s mother; the captain of the school wrestling team; and the local librarian, Miss Frost — who reveals to Billy a secret regarding her own identity. The mood of the latter half of the book darkens when Billy moves to New York in the 1980s, witnessing the AIDS epidemic.

It is perhaps fitting — given his lack of fame and success — that many of you will have never heard of Pat Hobby. Hobby was a character who featured in a number of F. Scott Fitzgerald short stories towards the end of the author’s life, when he was working in Hollywood. Hobby is a forty-nine year old scriptwriter whose best days are long behind him. Rather than reaching out for a green light at the end of a dock in Long Island, Pat is forever scrabbling around for his next ten dollars in order to buy another drink or pay off his bookie. Regardless of whether he employs honest