\u201cThe sacred bones of a literary culture [are] being ground into dust by technology and AI and many other distractions,\u201d writes essayist Allen. To help remedy this decay, she offers a set of appreciative essays on canonical European and Anglophone writers, focusing on the personalities of writers and how fictional and historical characters interact to offer lessons in living lives of beauty. Many of her writers\u2014Samuel Butler, Somerset Maugham, Osbert Sitwell, and Ogden Nash, among others\u2014achieved success despite hardship or criticism. \u201cLight verse used to be a vital part of American culture, high and low,\u201d Allen writes in her essay on Nash. Why has Sybille Bedford never escaped her status as \u201cone of the twentieth century\u2019s most attractive literary curiosities?\u201d How can the plays of Horton Foote teach us that \u201cwe are all orphans wandering alone through life, and the consolations of community and family are fleeting at best?\u201d The more you read these essays, the more you are convinced that there is something wrong with you: Distracted by modernity, you have lost grace and humor in the face of, writes Allen, \u201cour Robespierrean practice of cancellation.\u201d Most of Allen\u2019s writers remain products of their own time, with their own prejudices and foibles. Can we truly get past Patricia Highsmith\u2019s misanthropy? Can we forget Sitwell\u2019s politics? Is Truman Capote anything other than the self-caricature he became? Many of these essays originally appeared in venues noted for their highly curated conservatism: the New Criterion, the Wall Street Journal, Christianity Today. Published over the past 25 years, they offer a road map to a reader unhappy with the way the world has turned out.<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
\u201cThe sacred bones of a literary culture [are] being ground into dust by technology and AI and many other distractions,\u201d writes essayist Allen. To help remedy this decay, she offers a set of appreciative essays on canonical European and Anglophone writers, focusing on the personalities of writers and how fictional and historical characters interact to […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":0,"featured_media":4680,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4679","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-interesting"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4679"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=4679"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4679\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/4680"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4679"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=4679"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=4679"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}