Saul Bellow Versus Hugh Kenner

Saul Bellow’s selected letters have just been published and, at least according to a review by Jeff Simon, they reveal that the Nobel Prize winning novelist really hated the literary critic Hugh Kenner: There are 708 letters here and none of them seem much like practice, whether nominating Roth for the Nobel Prize in 2000 [...]

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Coren and Conservative Revisionism

    Back in August, I took part of a panel on the Michael Coren show. You can see the show here. One interesting thing about the show is that it illustrates the pervasiveness of a certain type of conservative revisionism. Two examples:

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Joseph Sobran: Far Worse than a Holocaust Skeptic

    As I’ve noted before, the death of a bigot presents a problem for obituary writers. Politeness dictates that we skimp over the misdeeds of the dead while honesty requires a fuller reckoning with the past. Joseph Sobran, onetime National Review editor, died earlier this week. Outside the circles of the far right, Sobran [...]

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