Anthony Domestico

A Short Introduction to Annaliese by James Elkins — Open Letters Review A review of the complex new novel by James Elkins

Tom LeClair reviews the 2nd novel in James Elkins' 5-volume 'Strange Languages' cycle, a digressive, verbally complex heir to Nabokov, Gaddis, Pynchon and Lucy Ellmann openlettersreview.com/posts/a-shor...

Marking Time Caring about language is really a way of caring for the world and those who are—or were—in it.

I wrote on marking time in new books by Yiyun Li and John Koethe for @commonweal.bsky.social

www.commonwealmagazine.org/li-yiyun-Koe...

Marking Time Caring about language is really a way of caring for the world and those who are—or were—in it.

For my September @commonweal.bsky.social column, I wrote on Yiyun Li's "Things in Nature Merely Grow" and John Koethe's "Cemeteries and Galaxies"

www.commonwealmagazine.org/li-yiyun-Koe...

Marking Time Caring about language is really a way of caring for the world and those who are—or were—in it.

"Caring about language is really a way of caring for the world and those who are—or were—in it."

@tonydomestico.bsky.social on new works by Yiyun Li and John Koethe:
www.commonwealmagazine.org/li-yiyun-Koe...

"How can a people who do not mean to understand death hope to understand love, and who will sound the alarm?"

- John Cheever, "The Death of Justina"

"Because Thanatoids relate in a different way to time, there was no compression toward the ends of sentences, so that they always ended by surprise."

- Pynchon, "Vineland"

"We are left with a feeling of immense sympathy for the book’s subject and the people who surrounded him."

John Skoyles on Nathan Kernan's life of Schuyler.

"More and more lately he'd been brooding about this great collective dream that everybody was being encouraged to stay tripping around in. Only now and then would you get an unplanned glimpse at the other side."

- Pynchon, "Inherent Vice"

"On his two younger sisters he then bestowed an equal portion of his fraternal tenderness, for he asked each of them how they did, and observed that they both looked very ugly."

- "Northanger Abbey"

Check out the contents of NEW AMERICAN REVIEW 1 in 1967: two stone classic stories by Paley and Gass, the first appearance in print of PORTNOY'S COMPLAINT, top drawer critical essays and poetry, all for $.95.

Genre Seductions In his August booknotes column, Anthony Domestico writes on the seductions of the campus novel.

For your weekend reading, my August column on two campus novels for @commonweal.bsky.social

www.commonwealmagazine.org/emily-adrian...

"I lay long awake at nights, listening to the silence with my outward ears and to a crowding-in of voices with my inward ear."

- Muriel Spark, "A Far Cry from Kensington"

Genre Seductions In his August booknotes column, Anthony Domestico writes on the seductions of the campus novel.

For your weekend reading, my August column on two campus novels for @commonweal.bsky.social

www.commonwealmagazine.org/emily-adrian...

Genre Seductions In his August booknotes column, Anthony Domestico writes on the seductions of the campus novel.

My August column for @commonweal.bsky.social on a new campus novel by Emily Adrian and a reissued one by Tom Wolfe.

www.commonwealmagazine.org/emily-adrian...

Genre Seductions In his August booknotes column, Anthony Domestico writes on the seductions of the campus novel.

"Fiction, through artifice, can arrive at truth. Artifice isn’t incidental but essential to the task."

@tonydomestico.bsky.social on @adremily.bsky.social, Tom Wolfe, and the campus novel:
www.commonwealmagazine.org/emily-adrian...

A Certain Power Tragically, James Baldwin’s most incisive and most beautiful writing was fueled not by love but by lovelessness.

Vincent Lloyd on a new life of James Baldwin for @commonweal.bsky.social

www.commonwealmagazine.org/james-baldwi...

"At that time I had a number of marvellous friends, full of good and evil."

- Muriel Spark, "Loitering with Intent"

Trump's Man at the Vatican CatholicVote relentlessly pushes the MAGA agenda. No wonder Trump made its cofounder ambassador to the Holy See.

"As for how it aligns with Catholic values, Burch is obviously untroubled by what troubles the consciences of many of his coreligionists."

@dominicpreziosi.bsky.social on the new ambassador to the Vatican.

www.commonwealmagazine.org/trumps-man-v...

"I gathered that they had 'gone over' in Italy, which seemed a suitable place to do it in, if one had to do it at all."

- Barbara Pym, "Excellent Women"

Middlemarch update: keeps getting better and better

"I was glad that Julian had preserved his dignity, as, indeed, I knew he would, even with the ping-pong bats in his hand."

- Barbara Pym, "Excellent Women"

"It was the middle of August now, a difficult time in the church."

- Barbara Pym, "Excellent Women"

"Cod seemed a suitable dish for a rejected one and I ate it humbly without any kind of sauce or relish."

- Barbara Pym, "Excellent Women"

"I was sure that she did not really like me, or at best thought of me as a dim sort of person whom one neither liked nor disliked, and I did not feel that I really cared for her very much either. Still, this was no doubt an interesting basis for social intercourse and we might even become friends."

Coming of age is hard enough, without Russia invading your country - The Boston Globe When 12-year-old Artem receives a beautiful, leatherbound sketchbook as a birthday present, he feels it is too beautiful to tarnish with his amateur artwork. What should he draw?

So glad I asked @therealbradbabs.bsky.social to review THE SUNFLOWER BOYS, a debut novel by Cambridge writer @samwachman.bsky.social. In print in Sunday's @bostonglobe.com! www.bostonglobe.com/2025/08/07/a...

"I realised that one might love him secretly with no hope of encouragement, which can be very enjoyable for the young or inexperienced."

- Barbara Pym, "Excellent Women"

The Times and Amazon Announce an A.I. Licensing Deal

Embracing a future in which blatantly doctored economic data can be inaccurately summarized by a customer-service chat popup and fed to me while I shop for unpronounceably branded dropship batteries that cost $27 each because of tariffs

"It was one of the calamities of old age that one's memory went and one forgot a quite considerable number of exasperations and awful things in which, contrary to general expectation, one had been startlingly right."

- V. S. Pritchett, "The Skeleton"

"He was a printer but had given that up, a man full of spit when he talked and his black eyebrows going up like a pair of swallows."

- V. S. Pritchett, "A Debt of Honour"

Fossil Poetry Fanny Howe and Chloe García Roberts testify to the bewildering work of poetry, translation, and grace.

My July column for @commonweal.bsky.social on Chloe Garcia Roberts and Fanny Howe

www.commonwealmagazine.org/bookmarks-to...