The strongest impression I gathered from The Outermost Dream is one of an editor’s sensibility: ego suppression and attention to the delicate arrangement of material. Written with sympathy for and out of curiosity about his subjects—he avoided writing about fiction, choosing instead to discuss memoirs, correspondence, diaries, and biographies—Maxwell’s essays judiciously arrange for the reader the salient, character-summarizing facts of remarkable lives. [...]

In an article published three weeks ago at Inside Higher Ed, Lindsay Waters, executive editor for the humanities at Harvard University Press, discusses the relationship between books and essays in humanistic scholarship, and makes a claim for the latter: Books are the standard now, and for me to ask you to think that the future [...]

Jonathan Franzen’s The Discomfort Zone (FSG) is a beautifully written small book, surely a disappointment to those wishing to revisit the expansiveness of The Corrections, but undeniably winning for readers willing to be buoyed along by fluid, never-preening prose and the small insights, sadly often unusable, one gains about one’s past. Its six interlinked essays, [...]