From Montaigne in the sixteenth century to Orwell, Eliot, and Trilling in the twentieth, the best literary essayists combine a gift for observation with an abiding commitment to books. Although it may
This Thing We Call Literature collects 10 essays from the combative, cantakerous cultural critic Arthur Krystal. Theessays in this compact volume, mostly from The New Yorker, Harper's, andThe Chronicl
When cultural critics with such wildly divergent views as Jacques Barzun, Christopher Hitchens, Joseph Epstein, Dana Gioia, and Morris Dickstein all agree about the merits of one contemporary essayist
