Monthly Archives: November 2008

Wild about the wolf

A few years ago, the philosopher Mark Rowlands began a book on animal rights by telling a story about a ferry crossing from Pembroke to Rosslare that he once made with his pet wolf, Brenin. Rowlands had locked Brenin in his car, leaving just a single window partly open. The wolf reacted to this confinement [...]

An American suicide

On the evening of 20 October this year a memorial service was held at Amherst College, Massachusetts, for the writer David Foster Wallace. Wallace, who graduated from Amherst in 1985, had hanged himself the previous month at his home in California. He was 46.

You can read the rest of my essay about the late David [...]

Post-racial kitsch?

I have contributed to a Prospect symposium on the future of America under Obama. My piece, which appears under the headline ‘Post-racial kitsch’ (the phrase is Shelby Steele’s), is here.

Performing blackness

I have a piece in the December issue of Prospect about the reaction of African-American intellectuals to Barack Obama’s recent election victory. The article was based on conversations I had with a number of black academics and intellectuals shortly before and immediately after the election. You can read transcripts of three of those conversations - [...]

Les complaisantes

This review of Édouard Husson and Michel Terestchenko’s evisceration of Jonathan Littell’s novel Les Bienveillantes (which I reviewed here) appears in this week’s TLS.

The blurb on the jacket of Jonathan Littell’s novel Les Bienveillantes, which won both the Prix Goncourt and the Grand Prix du Roman de l’Académie Française in 2006, compares it to Vasily [...]