Nation Topics - Literary Criticism | The Nation

In Life Sentences, William Gass shows that consciousness needs to be stressed to be strengthened.

For the critic John Leonard, “books are where we go alone to complicate ourselves.”

Freedom to do just what he pleases defines the life and writing of Geoff Dyer.

A conversation with the author of The Professor about her affair with an older woman and the journals of Susan Sontag.

If art is a product of the mind, and the mind a product of evolution, is art a product of evolution?

Laura Miller's study of C.S. Lewis falls short of providing a coherent theory of Narnia's magic.

A conversation with the author of A Jury of Her Peers: American Women Writers from Anne Bradstreet to Annie Proulx.

Unraveling the Kafkaesque mystique of Franz Kafka.

Re-reading a literary critic who regarded intelligence as a moral imperative.

James Wood may be the best literary critic we have, but the status he enjoys reveals just how far we have fallen.