Robert Erickson

4 days ago | newcriterion.com | Robert Erickson |Douglas Murray |Suzanna Murawski |Emma Richards

Nonfiction:Proto: How One Ancient Language Went Global, by Laura Spinney (Bloomsbury): The peak of Babeldom was probably realized during the Neolithic Age, “the moment in the human story,” as Laura Spinney notes in her new book Proto, “when more languages were spoken than at any other”—when a worldwide population in the tens of millions talked in as many as fifteen thousand different tongues.

1 week ago | newcriterion.com | Suzanna Murawski |Robert Erickson |Andrew Shea |Douglas Murray

Recent stories of note:“Saul Bellow’s Ravelstein”Matt Dinan, The Hedgehog ReviewWhen Saul Bellow’s Ravelstein was published twenty-five years ago, it was widely lambasted as, in the words of one critic, a “shockingly bad” memoir of “cruel violations” for revealing unsavory private details about the scholar Allan Bloom, upon whom the novel’s character Abe Ravelstein was based. But if you look a little closer, the correspondence is not so one-to-one.