Category: Literary Studies

In her Los Angeles Times round-up of the best of 2008, Sarah Weinman makes a special mention of Leonard Cassuto’s Hard-Boiled Sentimentality: The Secret History of American Crime Stories. Weinman writes: “Pick up Leonard Cassuto’s “Hard-Boiled Sentimentality: The Secret History...

Friday’s Wall Street Journal included Leonard Cassuto’s essay “Bound for Perdition: Highsmith’s ‘Strangers on a Train’ is Fueled by Anxiety.” In the piece Cassuto describes how Highsmith tapped into Cold War anxiety to create such a compelling novel. As in...

It is not very often that international literature is covered in the seemingly ever-shrinking space allowed for book reviews in newspapers, so it was especially nice to see Carlin Romano’s review of Harold Segel’s The Columbia Literary History of Eastern...

The New York Public Library’s exhibition, Yaddo: Making American Culture opens today at the main branch at 42nd and Fifth Avenue. There is also a review of the exhibition in today’s New York Times. For those of us who cannot...

But what if that standard [of the hard-boiled narrative] had less to do with Sam Spade and Philip Marlowe than with Ellen Montgomery, the naive young heroine of Susan Warner’s 1850 bestseller “The Wide, Wide World”? What if the walk...

In a recent Newsweek article, Jeremy McCarter describes 2008 as an annus mirabilis for literary critic, frustrated novelist, and former Columbia professor Lionel Trilling. Three books by Trilling were published or reprinted this year, including the never-before-published novel, The Journey...

The Baltimore City Paper just named Tattooing the World: Pacific Designs in Print and Skin by Juniper Ellis as the best new book by a local author. The paper writes: Juniper Ellis has authored a tattoo book that is as...

We began the week with Trilling and we’ll end the week with Trilling. More specifically, The Valve held its second round of responses to Lionel Trilling’s novel, The Journey Abandoned. This segment includes a response from the book’s editor Geraldine...