The Los Angeles Review of Books is running a new essay from me about love, God, our democracy, and the writer Marilynne Robinson. Here’s a snippet. For all we say about love and its relationship to openness and our knowledge of the person we love (and vice versa), as it’s practiced day to day, love actually depends […]

We talked in my David Foster Wallace class this week about Dostoevsky (specifically about Wallace’s review of Joseph Frank’s Dostoevsky), and some students raised the possibility that (publicly) reading a book like The Brothers Karamazov, say, might earn its reader some strange, disapproving looks. The same might be said for Moby-Dick, or Ulysses, or, who knows, Wallace’s own Infinite Jest. In September, and in […]

This week in my course on David Foster Wallace, we read several pieces, including the story “The Depressed Person,” the essay “Shipping Out” (more famously known as “A Supposedly Fun Think I’ll Never Do Again), and Jonathan Franzen’s “Farther Away.” Students recalled poems by Mary Karr that deepened the conversation, including “Face Down” and “Suicide Note: An […]