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[...] I remember Jakov saying, a bit irritably, “You’re making it sound as if he’s just adding things up, like he’s some kind of double-entry bookkeeper.”

“That’s exactly right,” I said, also irritably, “he is a double-entry bookkeeper!”

In the course of the next five minutes, we concluded th…

I was first introduced to the work of Isaac Babel as a college sophomore, when “My First Goose” was assigned in a creative-writing class. The instructor, Robert Cohen, was a melancholy Jewish novelist with a beard, whom I remember primarily for the time he suddenly realized the truth of human morta…

Understandably, many people blame religion for all the ills of the world. But, as Gandhi suggested, it may be wiser to realize how the men claiming divine sanction only work out—if often more crudely than their agnostic counterparts—the nihilist logic of a purely secular morality: that nothing is s…

The novel is unexcelled at one thing only: the creation of interiority, or inwardness. How does life look and sound from the inside, where no public observes it and not even a friend listens in? No better instrument than prose fiction was ever developed for answering this question. Beside the novel…

The big mistake right now would be to fail to keep faith with what theory once meant to us. You hear a great collective sigh of relief from people who don’t have to read “that stuff” anymore—the ones who never read it in the first place. But who will insult these people now, expose their life as se…