Cormac McCarthy, perhaps the greatest American novelist since Faulkner, passed away on Tuesday. His fiction adeptly pinpoints the most profound aspects of American culture and identity, arguably outperforming the work of many sociologists. McCarthy was interested in the hardest questions about human existence, which produced […]

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Quintessentially American novelist Cormac McCarthy died on Tuesday, June 13, 2023. Since his death, tributes have poured in from virtually every major media outlet around the world. In one sense, praise for McCarthy, who, in the aftermath of his death, is being called the greatest […]

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Like the rest of the humanities, the English major has been dead in the West for decades now. It survives in name, of course, but has been turned inside out. Its aim has been reversed, from learning to understand human and divine natures to hating […]

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Last week, interim President Richard Corcoran of New College of Florida, where I am a trustee, released an executive summary of a new core curriculum at the school. It’s a proposal in an early stage, but the first principle of a solid core is stated […]

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“Many years ago I realized that a book, a novel, is a dream that asks itself to be written in the same way we fall in love with someone.” That’s the opening of “The Shards,” Bret Easton Ellis’s first novel in over a decade. And just […]

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In the pages of The New York Times, Nicholas Kristof recently took on the problem of illiteracy among American students. According to the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), two-thirds of fourth graders across the country are not reading at grade level. While not a […]

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British novelist Ian McEwan has penned two new works: a fictional one about the life of one Roland Baines, and a truncated history of the last 75 years spanning World War II to Covid. The problem is that both are contained within the same novel, “Lessons.” […]

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Welcome to yet another Federalist year-end books column. If you haven’t encountered this column before, we do things a little differently than most year-end books lists. The books below aren’t necessarily books that came out in 2022. Rather, they’re just books Federalist staff and contributors […]

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By Lydia Maria Child. Over the river, and through the wood,To grandfather’s house we go;The horse knows the way,To carry the sleigh,Through the white and drifted snow. Over the river, and through the wood,To grandfather’s house away!We would not stopFor doll or top,For ‘t is […]

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“Yes,” says the latest edition of The Economist, “the Russian literary canon is tainted by imperialism.” Putin’s invasion of Ukraine has called into question “not just the value of reading” Russian classics, says the magazine, “but also the morality.” As it happens, I’m a big […]

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