Hungary’s Jews survived until rather late in World War II. The lateness of their sufferings draws the attention starkly to its senselessness and horror — as though they had been shipped off and gassed merely for form’s sake.

But perhaps the anarchic, gentle absurdity that is Achewood's stock-in-trade only works if there is a repeated, familiar element that anchors it, that prevents it from becoming a (boring, saccharine, creepy) daydream.

As Dick grew older, ingested various drugs in ever-larger quantities, and indulged his compulsive passion for catastrophic relationships with women, his fantasies grew ever more bizarre, and ever more insistent on the illusory and adversarial nature of reality.

"Are you ever going to publish any of your poetry in manuscript?"
"Who do you think I am? Dante?"

It's hard to imagine a more sublime comedy than the opening scenes of The Metmorphosis, with Gregor's deadpan acceptance of his transformation into a monstrous vermin, his embittered musings on his life, the Yiddish-theatrical rushing around of his parents and sister.

I mean no offense to him by calling him perverse; he was something of a pathological liar and a compulsive philanderer, and a confirmed contrarian.

You frequently find the name of a well-known poet on the cover of a New Translation of someone-or-other. Almost as frequently, one finds a second name beneath the well-known poet's.

The fallacy that a book has a dominating external purpose is true only of the lowest sorts of literature -- political theater, pornography, and the like.

We have shown, despite having only a cursory understanding of what stupidity might be, no hesitation in bringing the word into over-common use. This would be fine, except that it has made it almost impossible to use the word "stupid" as a serious criticism.

Perhaps he does not understand the stories that he is reviewing, and has to fall back on this to avoid the greatest solecism a reviewer can commit: having nothing to say.

While the merits of these books are open to debate, it seemed to me that, no matter how excellent they might be, the kind of praise they received was excessive. The adjectives had lost much of their force through overuse.

Dear Mark, I appreciate you devoting so much time and energy to rebutting me. But I have to say, I'm not entirely convinced.

Despite the self-evidently literary nature of Newton's blog, she publishes very little there recognizable as actual criticism.

To be a Jew is, evidently, to be subjected to an authorial harangue. What subtler commentary on the prophets' enraged and passionate speeches to an adulterous Israel could there be?

While we are talking to Z., his co-editor and collaborator Brian H. hangs palely in the background, muttering to Timothy L. Brian H. has terrible posture, hipster glasses, and a soul patch. He teaches English, and has just written a book on James Tate, called "On James Tate." S. and I once declined to publish H.'s poems in our college magazine. Being an established and important figure, and ten years our senior, he was rather huffy about it. He has not spoken to us since.

Instead of the piercing analytical ability found in so many of his contemporaries, Kazin seems limited to a kind of repeated affirmation that the material under his microscope is emphatically and powerfully alive.

For Sassoon, the literary developments of the 20th century simply never happened -- Eliot and Yeats are hardly mentioned; Hemingway does not make an appearance.

Morris was an astute observer of the French Revolution--eventually, through its excess, becoming wholly suspicious of all egalitarian sentiment in politics. In doing so he grew ever more disenchanted with the vaporings of Thomas Jefferson--this would become a point of lifelong enmity between thern. Morris eventually became minister to France, despite the fact that, by 1790, he had been labeled as a "counter-revolutionary" by James Madison, James Monroe, Thomas Jefferson, and the Marquis de Lafayette. It is a testament to Washington's faith in Morris that he did not let these attacks sway his faith in his appointment.

Revel refers, with deadly irony, to the "precautionary Molotov cocktails" of the anti-globalization protesters in Genoa in 2001; the "gleeful" crowing in the French press over the recent spike in American unemployment, at a time when France's unemployment stood at around 9%; the "hyperdelinquency" of Europe's immigrant youth (scoring one off, perhaps, on Hubert Vedrine, coiner of the word "hyperpower").

The Ern Malley affair is one of the best stories of modern literary times, which makes it difficult to understand why Peter Carey feels he has to fictionalize it.