Books by Mark Greif

1. Against Everything , Essays, by Mark Greif.  The worst of these are still well-written and interesting, and the best are among the best essays being written today.  There are many good sentences: “Were “In the Penal Colony” to be written today, Kafka could only be speaking of an exercise machine.”

That is the new book by Mark Greif, and the subtitle is Thought and Fiction in America, 1933-1973 .  I very much enjoyed grappling with this one.  One of my more recent views is that the thinkers of the mid-twentieth century are in fact, as a whole, extremely underrated.  They are not old enough to be classic and not new enough to be trendy or on the frontier.  Their world faced problems which seemed totally strange to us in the 1990s, but which are starting to sound scarily relevant and contemp...