2,418 words

Tom Wolfe
The Bonfire of the Vanities
New York: Bantam, 1987

When the Left finally gets around to banning (or burning) classic novels, Tom Wolfe’s Bonfire of the Vanities will likely be on the top of the list. Unlike Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Bonfire’s great sin is not merely being linguistically taboo but substantively taboo as well. (more…)

June 8, 1867–April 9, 1959

2,943 words

So long, Frank Lloyd Wright
I can’t believe your song is gone so soon.
I barely learned the tune
So soon, So soon.
Architects may come and
Architects may go and
Never change your point of view.
When I run dry
I stop awhile and think of you.

— Simon and Garfunkel, 1969  (more…)

2,616 words

“Keep it up, and even if you do get my job you’ll never run this place. You’ll die in that corner office, a midlevel executive with a little bit of hair who women go home with out of pity. Want to know why? Because no one will like you.”[1]

The poohbahs of the manosphere often put me in mind of the Stalinist shop steward played by Peter Sellers in I’m All Right, Jack — (more…)

2,690 words

Lars Holger Holm
Hiding in Broad Daylight: An Analysis of the Political Radicalisation and Commercialisation of Artistic Modernism
London: Arktos, 2015

“Charles,” said Cordelia, “Modern Art is all bosh, isn’t it?”

“Great bosh.”

—Brideshead Revisited (1945)  (more…)

3,070 words

Tom Wolfe
Back to Blood: A Novel
New York: Little, Brown and Company, 2012

Tom Wolfe’s Back to Blood is a quick read despite its 700-page length, and absorbing. Of his four novels, The Bonfire of the Vanities (1987) about race tensions in New York City is the most famous, but his second, A Man in Full (1998), is better. (more…)

3,617 words

I stopped reading contemporary literature—works by living novelists and short story writers—when I was in my late teens or early twenties. I found it aesthetically and intellectually unrewarding. The sole exception was the work of journalist-turned-novelist Tom Wolfe, the Virginia-born, New York City-based founder and exponent of New Journalism, a type of feature reporting employing literary techniques.  (more…)