Criticism & Features

REGULAR READERS of our blog have probably noticed that the name Edmund Wilson has come up several times in the previous installments of the Critical Library series — in which critics recommend

This week the NBCC has been focusing our In Retrospect serieson W. Jackson Bate's “Samuel Johnson,” which won our award for general nonfiction in 1977. The following remembrance of Bate as a teacher

AS JACK BATE moved through the ranks of postwar academe, biography was in bad repute. The scholars who came of age in the ’40s and ’50s complimented themselves for going

  Walter Jackson Bate’s fine book was immediately recognised as the best modern biography of Samuel Johnson when it appeared more than thirty years ago; it has not been superseded since.

The following essay by Jerome Weeks kicks off the latest week of In Retrospect, which will revisit W. Jackson Bate's “Samuel Johnson,”which won the NBCC's award for general nonfiction in 1977. IT'S A

Q: You strike a folksy, Midwestern tone in “The Braindead Megaphone,” but clearly you have also traveled to Pakistan and other countries. Can you talk about those trips, under what guise they

Twenty years ago last month,NBCC winner Edward Hirsch reviewed Williams' “Flesh and Blood” in the New York Times,along side Donald Justice's“The Sunset Maker,” which was also finalist for poetry in 1987.

  Thanks to the folks over at “The New Yorker,” three of the poems from CK Williams' 1987 NBCC-winning volume, “Flesh and Blood,” are available online at the magazine's website here. It's fabulous work. You can