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Standing by Words Wendell Berry Life is a Miracle: An Essay Against Modern Superstition Wendell Berry  The Language Wars Henry Hitchings  Technique in Fiction Robie Macaulay  Read to Write Donald Murray  The Accidental Connoisseur Lawrence Osborne  Invitations to the World: Teaching and Writing for the Young Richard Peck  Signposts in a Strange Land Walker Percy  Another Sort of Learning James Schall  

The Italian author Umberto Eco belonged to a rare breed—a medievalist of encyclopedic erudition, a creative philosopher and a talented novelist. Prompted by his recent death, Eco’s first novel, The Name of the Rose , has resurfaced in bookstands everywhere.  The virtue Aquinas opposes to curiositas is not humility , but studiousness , that is, knowledge pursued well.  The parallel between the monastery with the vast library and a globalized world with Internet access should now be clear. Aquinas thought of curiositas as largely caused by acedia —i.e. spiritual laziness or aimlessness. Who among us has not wasted hours on Wikipedia rather than completing the task at hand?   [Full text]

An Intellectual Study: Irving Babbit by Thomas Nevin In Praise of Wisdom by Kim Paffenroth Stephen Langton by Maurice Powicke James Joyce's Ulysess by Stuart Gilbert Poems and Critics by Christopher Ricks     Hired Pens by Ronald Weber Hawthorne's Fuller Mystery by Thomas Mitchell Concerning E. M. Forster by Frank Kermode Vectors and Smoothable Curves by William Bronk The Paris Review 103  Carlyle's Essay on Burns  

The Man Behind the Book by Louis Auchinloss A Cosmos of My Own edited by Doreen Fowler   Double Agent: The Critic and Society by Morris Dickstein Style and Faith by Geoffrey Hill Talking About Detective Fiction by P. D. James The King James Bible and the World Made by David Jeffrey Christianity and Literature by David Jeffrey   Golden Codgers by Richard Ellman Shopping in Space: Essays by Elizabeth Young Cultural Interactions in the Romantic Age edited by Gregory Maertz

In The New Yorker , Adelle Waldman writes that For as long as novels have been written, heroines in books by women have studied their beloveds’ minds with a methodical, dispassionate eye. The ideal mate, for Jane Austen’s heroines, for Charlotte Brontë’s, for George Eliot’s, is someone intelligent enough to appreciate fully and respond deeply to their own intelligence [...] Straight male authors devote far less energy to considering the intelligence of their heroes’ female love interests; instead, they tend to emphasize visceral attraction and feelings. From Tolstoy, whose psychological acuity helped to redefine what the novel is capable of, to unabashed chroniclers of sex like Saul Bellow and Philip Roth to contemporary, stroller-pushing, egalitarian dad Karl Ove Knausgaard, men have been, in a sense, the real romantics.   Titled " The Ideal Marriage, According to Novels ," she shows how Eliot, Austen, and Brontë were all writing against a climate in which female in...

H:bSt, H:eS1b, H:dS1f, H:dS2b The Waste Land and Other Poems by T. S. Eliot T. S. Eliot by Lyndall Gordon   Notes towards the Definition of Culture by T. S. Eliot He Do the Police in Different Voices by Calvin Bedient To Criticize the Critic and Other Essays by T. S. Eliot

The Flying Inn by G. K. Chesterton   Father Brown Stories by G. K. Chesterton   The Wisdom of Father Brown by G. K. Chesterton  The Tumbler of God: Chesterton as Mystic by Robert Wild The Gift of Wonder by Dale Ahlquist Utopia of Usurers by G. K. Chesterton As I Was Saying: A Chesterton Reader by Robert Knille The Outline of Sanity by G. K. Chesterton Tremendous Trifles by G. K. Chesterton   The Uses of Diversity by G. K. Chesterton Twelve Types by G. K. Chesterton Manalive by G. K. Chesterton The Napoleon of Notting Hill by G. K. Chesterton The Ball and the Cross by G. K. Chesterton The Man Who Was Thursday by G. K. Chesterton Charles Dickens by G. K. Chesterton G. K. Chesterton: Collected Works I gratis Ralph Wood G. K. Chesterton: Collected Works II G. K. Chesterton: The Autobiography gratis Ralph Wood