J. C. Hallman
When I starting reading Nicholson Baker, so as to write my homage, B & Me: A True Story of Literary Arousal, I quickly grew concerned, because Baker’s many writerly interests got all jumbled up in my mind. It’s just this kind of jumble that triggers the taxonomical reflex in teachers of writing and literature—jumbles must be ordered, organized into units of study—and I did not stop being concerned until I realized that embracing this sense of jumbledness, books and ideas seeming to clamber all over one another, would produce the best possible portrait of Baker’s mind. I offer the following 
There are two versions of Charles D’Ambrosio running through this important essay collection, the first book to appear from the noted short-story writer since 2006. First, there’s literary journalist D’Ambrosio, whose job it is to visit peculiar places like hell houses, modular homes, and petty-crime scenes and have thoughts about them that are probably more interesting than they deserve. You don’t really care, reading this D’Ambrosio, how he got to be this thoughtful, conscientious, erudite, and so forth—you’re just glad he did. Second, there’s the D’Ambrosio who, across several essays, goes ahead and tells the story of how he got Not long ago I had a very foolish dream. I was sitting alone in a house when the phone began to ring in another room, a room in which my girlfriend, in turn, was asleep. I didn’t get to it before she awoke and answered it, annoyed, and of course it was for me. The woman on the line said something about something that needed to be done right away, but I couldn’t quite make out what she was saying. She seemed to know me and expected me to know her, and it all seemed quite serious, but I simply 
The most charming thing about perennial Washington Post literary guru Michael Dirda is his near-on phobic aversion to saying anything other than that a book is wonderful and a pleasure (a word for which he has a long-standing affinity, e.g., Reading for Pleasure, Bound to Please, etc.). If we were all to write about reading as Dirda does, if we taught children to write from joy rather than to form arguments, then the world would have many more serious readers and far better books. Yet Dirda’s loving take on the legacy of Arthur Conan Doyle reveals that his strength can 
Quite often, religion proves every bit as stupid as it is crucial. Which is to say that the sheer preposterousness of a religion—any religion—can serve as a measure of spiritual need. The longing for cosmological certainty is so great that humanity is susceptible to all kinds of bunkum. The sad truth: Our most fundamental trait is foolishness. The history of utopian literature is very nearly the history of civilization. Lewis Mumford claimed in The City in History that the original utopias—those of Plato and Aristotle—were a reaction to the dystopia of Athens, upending the usual argument that dystopia is the result of utopian experimentation gone wrong. In fits and spurts, and in a variety of forms, utopian literature has played a central role in the advent of almost every significant ideology in history, from democracy to fascism. In the contemporary era, when literature seems increasingly disconnected from the real world, the books here offer a reminder that