Auden wrote the following praise to Cyril Connolly about his recently published book:
As both Eliot and Edmund Wilson are Americans, I think Enemies of Promise is the best English book of criticism since the war, and more than Eliot or Wilson you really write about writing in the only way which is interesting to anyone except academics, as a real occupation like banking or fucking, with all its attendant boredom, excitement, and terror.
That is from Stefan Collini’s often quite interesting Common Reading: Critics, Historians, and Public.
Entertainment Weekly just came out with its list of the best 10 books of the last 25 years:
1. “The Road,† Cormac McCarthy
2. “Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire,† J. K. Rowling
3. “Beloved,† Toni Morrison
4. “The Liars’ Club,† Mary Karr
5. “American Pastoral,† Philip Roth
6. “Mystic River,† Dennis Lehane
7. “Maus,† Art Spiegelman
8. “Selected Stories,† Alice Munro
9. “Cold Mountain,† Charles Frazier
10. “The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle,† Haruki Murakami
Let’ see: you say you now appreciate Beloved, you like Philip Roth, Alice Munro is one of your favorite fiction writers…
When are you going to admit that you earned a rotten tomato for that post about avoiding any book that EW likes. You do NOT avoid all of the books that books they like; in fact, you like some of the very same books!
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