"Guv'ner," says Phil with exceeding gravity, "he's a leech in his dispositions, he's a screw and a wice in his actions, a snake in his twistings, and a lobster in his claws." - "Bleak House"

What better way to start a Friday than by listening to Joel and I talk about Mason & Dixon? on.soundcloud.com/dhLTLsFPABxW...

It's been a James Schuyler day. The Manhattan sublime, from his Payne Whitney poems.

"I was seeing men styling, wallowing, and self-pitying, but I wasn’t seeing them reading or writing or thinking." Steve Donoghue on the vacuous, anti-intellectual world that men's magazines present to the young men who read them. open.substack.com/pub/stevedon...

My conversation with Brandon Taylor for @commonweal.bsky.social

In case you missed it ...

My October column for @commonweal.bsky.social on Hester Kaplan's "Twice Born" and a new genre: the critic's daughter's memoir. www.commonwealmagazine.org/domestico-cr...

A conversation with Brandon Taylor about his new novel, "Minor Black Figures," and lots of Catholic stuff for @commonweal.bsky.social www.commonwealmagazine.org/learning-zola

"In the matter of gravy he is adamant." - "Bleak House"

"For," says he, "it's being ground to bits in a slow mill; it's being roasted at a slow fire; it's being stung to death by single bees; it's being drowned by drops; it's going mad by grains." - "Bleak House"

Wonderful to spend time rereading Spark this summer/fall.

I wrote on Muriel Spark, perfection, and Frances Wilson's excellent new biography for @bookpostusa.bsky.social books.substack.com/p/review-ant...

"To the very last, and even afterwards, her frown remained unsoftened." - "Bleak House"

look at this incredible list of contributors and interlocutors for CLOSE READING FOR THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY so many thanks to @dan-sinnamon.bsky.social and Emory for hosting our launch symposium -- which is free and open to the public. maybe you want to join us?

"As much mud in the streets as if the waters had but newly retired from the face of the earth, and it would not be wonderful to meet a Megalosaurus, forty feet long or so, waddling like an elephantine lizard up Holborn Hill." - "Bleak House"

Tom LeClair reviews the 2nd novel in James Elkins' 5-volume 'Strange Languages' cycle, a digressive, verbally complex heir to Nabokov, Gaddis, Pynchon and Lucy Ellmann openlettersreview.com/posts/a-shor...

I wrote on marking time in new books by Yiyun Li and John Koethe for @commonweal.bsky.social www.commonwealmagazine.org/li-yiyun-Koe...

For my September @commonweal.bsky.social column, I wrote on Yiyun Li's "Things in Nature Merely Grow" and John Koethe's "Cemeteries and Galaxies" www.commonwealmagazine.org/li-yiyun-Koe...

"Caring about language is really a way of caring for the world and those who are—or were—in it." @tonydomestico.bsky.social on new works by Yiyun Li and John Koethe: www.commonwealmagazine.org/li-yiyun-Koe...

"How can a people who do not mean to understand death hope to understand love, and who will sound the alarm?" - John Cheever, "The Death of Justina"

"Because Thanatoids relate in a different way to time, there was no compression toward the ends of sentences, so that they always ended by surprise." - Pynchon, "Vineland"

"We are left with a feeling of immense sympathy for the book’s subject and the people who surrounded him." John Skoyles on Nathan Kernan's life of Schuyler.

"More and more lately he'd been brooding about this great collective dream that everybody was being encouraged to stay tripping around in. Only now and then would you get an unplanned glimpse at the other side." - Pynchon, "Inherent Vice"

"On his two younger sisters he then bestowed an equal portion of his fraternal tenderness, for he asked each of them how they did, and observed that they both looked very ugly." - "Northanger Abbey"

Check out the contents of NEW AMERICAN REVIEW 1 in 1967: two stone classic stories by Paley and Gass, the first appearance in print of PORTNOY'S COMPLAINT, top drawer critical essays and poetry, all for $.95.

For your weekend reading, my August column on two campus novels for @commonweal.bsky.social www.commonwealmagazine.org/emily-adrian...

"I lay long awake at nights, listening to the silence with my outward ears and to a crowding-in of voices with my inward ear." - Muriel Spark, "A Far Cry from Kensington"

For your weekend reading, my August column on two campus novels for @commonweal.bsky.social www.commonwealmagazine.org/emily-adrian...

My August column for @commonweal.bsky.social on a new campus novel by Emily Adrian and a reissued one by Tom Wolfe. www.commonwealmagazine.org/emily-adrian...

"Fiction, through artifice, can arrive at truth. Artifice isn’t incidental but essential to the task." @tonydomestico.bsky.social on @adremily.bsky.social, Tom Wolfe, and the campus novel: www.commonwealmagazine.org/emily-adrian...

Vincent Lloyd on a new life of James Baldwin for @commonweal.bsky.social www.commonwealmagazine.org/james-baldwi...

"At that time I had a number of marvellous friends, full of good and evil." - Muriel Spark, "Loitering with Intent"

"As for how it aligns with Catholic values, Burch is obviously untroubled by what troubles the consciences of many of his coreligionists." @dominicpreziosi.bsky.social on the new ambassador to the Vatican. www.commonwealmagazine.org/trumps-man-v...

"I gathered that they had 'gone over' in Italy, which seemed a suitable place to do it in, if one had to do it at all." - Barbara Pym, "Excellent Women"

Middlemarch update: keeps getting better and better

"I was glad that Julian had preserved his dignity, as, indeed, I knew he would, even with the ping-pong bats in his hand." - Barbara Pym, "Excellent Women"

"It was the middle of August now, a difficult time in the church." - Barbara Pym, "Excellent Women"

"Cod seemed a suitable dish for a rejected one and I ate it humbly without any kind of sauce or relish." - Barbara Pym, "Excellent Women"

So glad I asked @therealbradbabs.bsky.social to review THE SUNFLOWER BOYS, a debut novel by Cambridge writer @samwachman.bsky.social. In print in Sunday's @bostonglobe.com! www.bostonglobe.com/2025/08/07/a...

"I realised that one might love him secretly with no hope of encouragement, which can be very enjoyable for the young or inexperienced." - Barbara Pym, "Excellent Women"

Embracing a future in which blatantly doctored economic data can be inaccurately summarized by a customer-service chat popup and fed to me while I shop for unpronounceably branded dropship batteries that cost $27 each because of tariffs

"It was one of the calamities of old age that one's memory went and one forgot a quite considerable number of exasperations and awful things in which, contrary to general expectation, one had been startlingly right." - V. S. Pritchett, "The Skeleton"

"He was a printer but had given that up, a man full of spit when he talked and his black eyebrows going up like a pair of swallows." - V. S. Pritchett, "A Debt of Honour"

My July column for @commonweal.bsky.social on Chloe Garcia Roberts and Fanny Howe www.commonwealmagazine.org/bookmarks-to...

Fanny Howe and Chloe García Roberts testify to the bewildering work of poetry, translation, and grace. July bookmarks from @tonydomestico.bsky.social: www.commonwealmagazine.org/bookmarks-to...

"She was sitting up in bed, and she had the pleased, shining, new, ashamed look, rather wet and cunning, of a golden spaniel that has been dressed up in shawls by children and is presently going to make a bolt for it into the garden." - V. S. Pritchett, "Citizen"

My review of Michael Clune's novel "Pan" for the Boston Globe. www.bostonglobe.com/2025/07/16/a...

My review of Michael Clune's novel "Pan" for the Boston Globe. www.bostonglobe.com/2025/07/16/a...

"As I drove back toward Los Angeles that night, along Whittier Boulevard, wide lane enscrolled on either side with continuous neon scallops, the sulphur of Los Angeles seemed a better thing to breathe than the muggy air, heavy with moral perspiring, of Whittier." - Garry Wills, "Nixon Agonistes"

Why be obedient to a world that will end? Fanny Howe