Saturday Links

Critical zingers, Tolkien’s poetry, insomnia, on writing for children, and much more.

Source: Wikimedia Commons

Good morning! In Commonweal, Rand Richards Cooper revisits some of his favorite critical zingers: “Some of my favorite zingers deploy an arch, Oscar Wilde–type of irony, as when critic Adam Mars-Jones asserts, of Joshua Cohen’s Book of Numbers, that ‘there’s no inherent reason for this to be a long book, beyond the primitive equation of length with importance’ . . . many readers are familiar with Truman Capote’s haughty quip about Jack Kerouac’s oeuvre—‘that’s not writing, that’s typing’—but I cherish his even snarkier comment on Gore Vidal’s move to Italy in the 1960s. ‘I guess Gore left the country because he felt underappreciated here,’ Capote remarked. ‘I have news for him: People who actually read his books will underappreciate him everywhere.’”