The question Vladimir Nabokov did not pose to his students at Cornell University concerning the magic of literature is whether there needs to be an actual wolf in the fable “The Boy Who Cried Wolf.”Out of curiosity I put the question to first-year lit students. Sentimental souls tend to wish away the awful comeuppance in […]

You don’t need to be Alexis de Tocqueville to ‘divine in one glance’ that the consumer landscape in America has reached a point of saturation in its gilding over of a clearly dissipated creative force.But I wouldn’t say the answer lies in a backward directed glance to Mary McCarthy’s brazen formulations demarcating for Simone de […]