The current featured contributor at
Writers Read: Alan Jacobs, a professor of English at Wheaton College in Illinois. He is the author of several books including
The Narnian, a biography of C. S. Lewis, and
Original Sin: A Cultural History.
His literary and cultural criticism has appeared in a wide range of periodicals, including the
Boston Globe,
The American Scholar,
First Things,
Books & Culture, and
The Oxford American.
His entry opens:
Right now I'm in the middle of Nicholson Baker's witty and curious Double Fold: Libraries and the Assault on P
aper. Baker always writes beautifully, but he's also a man of enthusiasms and frustrations, which is not always good. This is for work, sort of, because I'm in the early stages of writing a book about reading, but I'm also making time to read things just for fun. That was the spirit in which I picked up David Liss's A Conspiracy of Paper: a book about a retired-pugilist-turned-private-investigator in 1719 London had to be quite distant from any contemporary concerns, right? — except that it's also about the early stock market, prone to bubbles of excitement and, and when confidence fails, sudden and dramatic crashes. As I say: quite distant from any contemporary concerns.[read on]
Alan Jacobs blogs at
The American Scene.
Writers Read: Alan Jacobs.
--Marshal Zeringue
The current featured contributor at Writers Read: Alan Jacobs, a professor of English at Wheaton College in Illinois. He is the author of several books including The Narnian, a biography of C. S. Lewis, and Original Sin: A Cultural History.
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