Samizdat Blog

Laureates and Heretics , my new book of literary criticism, is officially out and order-able on Amazon.com. Here's the publisher's p...

It’s been just over a year since I became a father, and I can’t count the number of times I’ve been waylaid by people who want to admire the...

What’s that you say? What? You’ll have to speak up: I’m trying to set the Samizdat temporal distortion teletype to the 1860s, and I keep o...

During the months I was carting myself around in a wheelchair after my little car-vs.-bike accident last year, I turned down just about ever...

Lately I've been spending my Fridays in the dull duty of an editor, working on an edition on the uncollected English works of the late, ...

Good news! The second issue of The Cambridge Literary Review is out. This is my kind of production: essays on Hume and Hegel rubbing shou...

What's this? A new dispatch is just now coming in on the Samizdat Temporal Distortion Teletype. It seems to be from the late Christop...

Last fall I found myself groping around for some brief, accessible definitions of realism, naturalism, and the genteel tradition in the nove...

Winter break was not, I'm happy to report, a dead loss, despite the sad fact that I was shanghaied onto a hiring committee and had to wa...

It is good, at certain hours of the day and night, to look closely at the world of objects at rest. Wheels that have crossed long, dusty d...

Since returning more-or-less unscathed from the MLA convention in Philadelphia, I've been spending mornings kicking back with a couple o...

For the second year in a row, I’m inspired by Mark Scroggins and Steve Evans to list the books I've read over the past twelve months. I...