Go into the magazine section of any bookstore and you'll find professional writers' "trade" journals, imploring your attention with unassailable advice. The headlines blazon: Top Ten Tips to Writing Success, Be a Good Writer in One Month, How to Sell Your Novel. I don't know how many such magazines exist, but it's more than you'd think. In any issue of the typical writers' journal you'll find exhaustive listings of contests, awards, grant opportunities, and residency opportunities. You'll find a feature on a veteran novelist, or a first novelist in the early blush of success (this could be you …). And you'll find tips.

Contest listings have an obvious value. But tips? Tips are not even information: they're suggestions, approaches, repackaged common sense. Tips make no guarantees, and they have no conceivable end. And so these magazines are crammed with tips. They love tips. They swamp their readership with tips. The joy, or the misery, of tips is their endless repetition. Read More

Tony Judt. Reappraisals: Reflections on the Forgotten Twentieth Century.
Penguin Press. April 2008. 

You would be forgiven, upon reading the panoply of negative reviews of Tony Judt's Reappraisals,for thinking that Judt's latest book was a book-length screed, a Kassamrocket of scorn and derision directed at the state of Israel. Imagineyour surprise when on cracking the spine of Reappraisals youfind all of three essays, out of twenty-four, dedicated to Israel andthe Israeli-Palestinian conflict—one of which is primarily about thelife and work of Edward Said, himself neither exclusively norprincipally concerned with Israel. The gap between the perceived andactual subjects of Judt's work is startling. In fact the book dealsmostly with the shameful intellectual history of European Communism,western and eastern versions. It expresses Judt's desire to form a newleftist canon purged of communist influences, yearnings, and ideas. Yet the critics are not wholly wrong that Israel, too, is part ofthe puzzle. Read More

Marilynne Robinson. Home.
Farrar, Straus and Giroux. September 2008.

Christianity is the science of forgiveness. So manycritics speak of religion as if it were without content, one branch ascrazy as the other, at best merely different brands of ineffectiveanalgesic for the afterlife, whose specific worldly demands more oftencover for intolerance than rise to an even basic level of morality. Butreading Marilynne Robinson, you see how intensely this-worldly religioncan be as well as how impoverished much of today's moral conversationappears in comparison with the Christian rhetoric of forgiveness. Hereis one example, from Robinson's new novel, Home:

There is a saying that to understand is to forgive, butthat is an error, so Papa used to say. You must forgive in order tounderstand. Until you forgive, you defend yourself against thepossibility of understanding. … If you forgive, he would say, you mayindeed still not understand, but you will be ready to understand, andthat is the posture of grace.

Robinson's work has long stood for me as the bestrepudiation of Nietzsche's famous remark: "The Christian resolve tofind the world ugly and bad has made the world ugly and bad." Her newnovel, a story of prodigal sons and Lear-like fathers, at times asbeautiful as anything she has ever written, makes this defense evenstronger.

Home returns to the same people, place, and even the same time as Robinson's previous novel, Gilead. Not a sequel, rather a companion or counterpart, Hometells the same story of 1950s Iowa family life, its scene shifted onlya few miles from the dreary old home of John Ames, the dyingCongregationalist minister of Gilead, to that of his bestfriend, Presbyterian pastor Robert Boughton. Read More

Playboy: The Complete Centerfolds.
Chronicle Books. October 2008.

Steven Watts. Mr. Playboy: Hugh Hefner and the American Dream.
Wiley. October 2008.

The Complete Centerfolds is a coffee-table book compiling every Playboy centerfold published from the magazine's inception in 1953 until 2007. Six short essays preface the decades, but there is no other text. As you might expect, the pleasures of the book are instant and visual. My favorite Playboy centerfold is Miss September 1983, dressed for a college football game in striped socks and a tartan scarf. She has a flask, a fuzzy wool cap, and a team pennant. Her neo-Gothic surroundings are meant, I think, to evoke Yale. A single branch of ivy cascades next to her, and a textbook lies abandoned at her feet. She is naked. It sounds funny in writing, but somehow there's nothing funny about the photograph, or about any of the photographs in The Complete Centerfolds. Is laughter an anti-aphrodisiac?

The first thing that strikes the casual reader is the anatomical variety among bunnies. Nipples, for one thing. Some are as big as cupcakes, others are the size of a penny. They are occasionally erect and come in a range of colors as varied as drugstore lipsticks. Pubic hair is another delight to behold, appearing first in 1971 and thriving until 1997. Gauzy coronas of pubic hair, technicolor dreampubes of every shade. You forget how assertive a healthy growth of hair can look. It comes as a pleasant shock in the midst of a creamy-smooth expanse. Read More

Neil Gross. Richard Rorty: The Making of an American Philosopher.
University of Chicago Press. May 2008.

Richard Rorty's favorite sentence in all of Freud was from the book on Leonardo da Vinci. "If one considers chance unworthy of determining our fate," Freud wrote, "it is simply a relapse into the pious view of the universe which Leonardo himself was on the way to overcoming when he wrote that the sun does not move." On Rorty's account, this "pious view of the universe" reflected a desire to see man as what Aristotle called a natural kind, something that "divides into a central essence—one that provides a built-in purpose—and a set of peripheral accidents." To Aristotle, that central essence was the locus of human dignity; the peripheral accidents were matters of unworthy chance. Rorty spent much of his career explaining why we might all be better off if we gave up the attempt to uncover such built-in purposes, and instead located human dignity in the ability to invent novel ones. Such a view would encourage us to narrate our lives in terms of how we've adapted and enlarged ourselves to meet the chance demands of the day.

In Richard Rorty: The Making of an American Philosopher, the young sociologist Neil Gross has tried to use Rorty's intellectual biography—his transformation from a philosopher working primarily within the narrow Anglophone analytic tradition to a digressive, itinerant intellectual on the model of his pragmatist hero, John Dewey—as a case study in an argument against certain kinds of piety. He is, however, reluctant to advocate too enthusiastically the role of chance; his book represents an attempt to show how what he calls "the new sociology of ideas" might split the difference. Gross writes that the story of Rorty's development from a child of Trotskyists and writers through an adolescence at the University of Chicago, graduate school at Yale, and his first two teaching positions, at Wellesley and at Princeton, reflects "not Rorty's idiosyncratic and entirely contingent biographical experiences but the operation of more general social mechanisms and processes that shaped and structured his intellectual life and career." We ought to see him "not as a being spinning out ideas on the basis of a transhistorically rational consideration of their objective merits or as someone pushed this way and that by his personality or character, but as a social actor embedded over time in a variety of institutional settings. . . . [W]hat is true of Rorty in this regard is true of all other intellectuals: they are persons no less impinged upon by social mechanisms and processes than any other." Read More

Christine Schutt. All Souls.
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. April 2008.

Christine Schutt, the author of two short story collections and two novels, was one of the last writers Gordon Lish published before he left Knopf. Her early books bear the strong imprint of the Lish method; her later books tell a story of evolving from it.

In the early eighties, Lish published Raymond Carver, Barry Hannah, Amy Hempel, and Mary Robison. Schutt was part of a later cohort whom he found in the early nineties. This later group included Gary Lutz, Schutt, Lily Tuck, and Diane Williams. Like his earlier writers, most of them have been associated with the idea of literary minimalism. Lutz and Williams present among the most extreme examples of what Lish seems to have emphasized in his famous writing classes: an obsessive focus on language (the idea that each time a word is used, anywhere, by anyone, it becomes slightly diminished) and straightforward confessionalism (Lish is said to have started workshops by asking his students to tell him a secret). The result was a lot of exceptional writing that often seems to have a wounded quality, as though the writer felt forced to return to the same hurts and same sentences constantly and dig what was already there even deeper. Read More