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James Wood on Harold Bloom
In his essay “Shakespeare in Bloom,” critic James Wood performs one of the strangest, most backhanded (and yet earnest) defenses I’ve ever read of Harold Bloom‘s aesthetic reaction to (what Bloom has...
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Odds and Ends
At A Piece of Monologue, Rhys Tranter reviews Simon Critchley’s “philosophical antidote to the self-help manual,” How to Stop Living and Start Worrying. Read our review of Critchley’s The Book of Dead...
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Harold Bloom Explains Why the New Testament Is an Aesthetic Disappointment
The Paris Review has made their famous cache of author reviews–spanning seven decades–available online. Here’s Harold Bloom griping about the New Testament in a 1991 interview– INTERVIEWER: You’ve...
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Blood Meridian — 25th Anniversary Edition
This week, Random House celebrates the 25th anniversary of Cormac McCarthy’s masterpiece Blood Meridian by releasing a new hardback edition of the book. This new Modern Library version retains Harold...
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“The Authentic American Apocalyptic Novel”— Harold Bloom on Blood Meridian
The Triumph of Death, Pieter Bruegel the Elder, c. 1562 Harold Bloom’s esteem for Blood Meridian may have done much to advance the novel’s reputation over the past decade. His essay on the book, first...
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Books I Am Always (Re-)Reading
Trudging through a very long book the other night–never mind the title, at least now anyway–it occurred to me that I’d rather be reading from 2666; that, at that particular moment, I’d rather re-read...
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“Poetry Is the Enchantment of Incest”— A Passage from Harold Bloom’s...
A passage from Harold Bloom’s ”A Manifesto for Antithetical Criticism,” a chapter in his seminal study The Anxiety of Influence— Every poem is a misinterpretation of a parent poem. A poem is not an...
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Hadji Murad — Leo Tolstoy
Like many readers of Leo Tolstoy’s final work, Hadji Murad, I read the novella based on Harold Bloom’s praise in his work The Western Canon, where he declares it ”my personal touchstone for the sublime...
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Harold Bloom Talks About Blood Meridian (Video)
Tagged: Blood Meridian, Cormac McCarthy, Harold Bloom, Video
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Why I Abandoned Chad Harbach’s Over-Hyped Novel The Art of Fielding After...
Genre fiction gets a bad rap from some readers and critics because it often rigidly follows a set of formal conventions, from plot to character to prose, to satisfy reader expectations. One mark of...
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David Markson on Harold Bloom
From David Markson’s The Last Novel: Where the synecdoche of tessera made a totality, however illusive, the metonymy of kenosis breaks this up into discontinuous fragments. Somewhere declareth Harold...
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Stuart Kendall’s New Translation of Gilgamesh Restores Poetic Strangeness to...
Somewhere in his big and often laborious book The Western Canon, Harold Bloom defines canonical literature as that which possesses a “strangeness, a mode of originality that either cannot be...
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“Half Horse Half Alligator”— I Review Charles Olson’s Inimitable Melville...
The classical Greeks understood that literature is a form of competition. The eminent literary critic Harold Bloom folded a bit of Freudian psychology into this insight, describing the “anxiety of...
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Unknown Pleasures (I Riff a Bit on Marcel Proust’s Swann’s Way)
1. I was an undergrad in college when I first tried to read Marcel Proust. It was one of those things I did on my own, which is another way of saying that none of his writing was ever assigned to me;...
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Harold Bloom on “The School of Resentment”
Harold Bloom on his agon with “The School of Resentment.” From his 1991 interview with The Paris Review. INTERVIEWER How do you account historically for the school of resentment? BLOOM In the...
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Every deep reader is an Idiot Questioner (Harold Bloom)
Tagged: Arts, Criticism, Harold Bloom, Poetry, Reading, the anxiety of influence
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The Never-Ending Torture of Unrest | Georg Büchner’s Lenz Reviewed
The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters (detail), Francisco Goya Composed in 1836, Georg Büchner’s novella-fragment Lenz still seems ahead of its time. While Lenz’s themes of madness, art, and ennui can...
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Borges Riff/Borges Anxiety
Art by Roman Muradov 1. Jorge Luis Borges is 115 today. 2. I’ve shared clips from my scattered readings of Borges on this blog (receiving the occasional takedown notice as well)—but I’ve never mustered...
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Reading the very best writers is not going to make us better citizens (Harold...
Reviewing bad books, W. H. Auden once remarked, is bad for the character. Like all gifted moralists, Auden idealized despite himself, and he should have survived into the present age, wherein the new...
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One reads for oneself and for strangers (Harold Bloom)
The terms “power” and “authority” have pragmatically opposed meanings in the realms of politics and what we still ought to call “imaginative literature.” If we have difficulty in seeing the opposition,...
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