Reason & Society

I posted about this novel once before and have now uploaded an old review of it: Review of J. G. Eccarius, The Last Days of Christ the Vamp...

Philip Roth is a famous name in Jewish American literature, but I never read him or much of any of the Jewish American literature of his e...

‘Are the underground men in the works of Wright and Ellison given the same psychological dimensions as those Dostoevsky achieves for his...

Continuing on this work by Christopher Caudwell : Scenes and Actions: Unpublished Manuscripts , selected, edited, and introduced by Jean ...

What would I have thought of Kurt Vonnegut Jr’s 1976 novel Slapstick had I read it when it came out? I had read his 1973 novel Breakfast ...

I just finished reading Janna Levin 's novelization A Madman Dreams of Turing Machines . It is a superb piece of writing. At the end th...

My running commentary on Dostoevsky reflects what I have assimilated at the moment of writing and my perspective changes with what I learn. ...

The sphere of psychology, in which such projects take up residence, though with little success, is not exempt from the crisis of lit...

My understanding of Notes from Underground and its context has developed since I finished reading it. There are a number of factors to con...

I shall have a lot more to say, plus add additional references. First, let me link to pages on my web site that engage Dostoevsky: Georg L...

I have finished Part 2 of Fyodor Dostoevsky's Notes from Underground (1864), and so I have read the entire novel. I completely disag...

This installment is part 3 of Trotsky vs Dostoevsky, a unit of the larger project of analyzing the ideological structure of Dostoevsky...

Actually, this is Trotsky vs Dostoevsky, part 2, but it's all part of the larger trajectory. So this time, here are the other reference...

In an old post on Trotsky on religion , a quote from Trotsky mentions Dostoevsky. Here I will extract a short quote from the longer quote: ...

I have finished Part I of Fyodor Dostoevsky's Notes from Underground (1864) by Fyodor Dostoevsky and have begun Part II, for the second...

Sándor Szathmári wrote a novel in Hungarian and Esperanto-- Voyage to Kazohinia , now available in English from an American publisher--t...

In addition to public figures and intellectuals by profession, the planet is dotted with independent scholars and autodidacts who persever...

Saw the movie (spoiler alert:) Life of Pi yesterday afternoon. It was visually stunning. The acting was superb. The two-hour narrative was ...

Written November 27, 2009 at 6:05 am It’s been 40 years since I read Hermann Hesse’s novels as a teenager. Actually, I read only a few, t...

"I have no culture, no humane harmony in my brains. I can't live without a culture anymore." "Bad chemicals and bad ide...