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Fall 2022 Correspondence

Andrew Jackson, populist.

Julius Caesar was a colossus who outgrew Rome.

Diversity and Its Limits

The crisis of American democracy demands a clear-eyed understanding of the ways in which differences in ethnic groups and some sources of political polarization are never going to be resolved.

It’s Only Rock and Roll

Rock and Roll is dead.

Correspondence

Peace through strength, between marx and aquinas, life after roe, prisoner’s dilemma, deplorables’ troubadour, shutting the overton window, eminent victorians, leo strauss goes to shul, an american originalist, ties that bind, an indispensable abolitionist, dividing by race, talking about the constitution, location, location, location, taking aristophanes seriously, restoring the constitution, “our democracy,” not our constitution, nuclear autumn, leveling, up and down, parthian shot, the heart of the matter, shadow play, the pure radiance of the past, from the editor's desk, the red wave reconsidered.

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For 20 years, the Claremont Review of Books has been the gold standard for conservative criticism and political analysis. Now the CRB comes to the podcast world with a new interview show hosted by Dr. Spencer Klavan, the magazine's assistant editor. As each new issue comes out, Spencer phones up authors whose essays have prompted deeper reflection and discussion. Over a drink and a copy of the latest CRB, he'll chat with the leading minds on the Right about what's going on in politics and literary culture. New episodes release monthly.

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Every generation of Americans has been faced with the same question: how should we live? Our endlessly interesting answers have created The American Story. The weekly episodes published here stretch from battlefields and patriot graves to back roads, school yards, bar stools, city halls, blues joints, summer afternoons, old neighborhoods, ball parks, and deserted beaches—everywhere you find Americans being and becoming American. They are true stories about what it is that makes America beautiful, what it is that makes America good and therefore worthy of love. Each episode aims in some small way to awaken the better angels of our nature, to welcome us into and encourage us to enrich the great American story.

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The American Mind Podcast uncovers the ideas and principles that drive American political life. In each episode, we engage Claremont Institute scholars, co-conspirators, and critics in thought-provoking discussions about the real causes of our current political and cultural reality. We explore these ideas with an eye towards restoring American civic health.

The Roundtable is a weekly show, hosted by our editors and publisher with a unique blend of joviality and intellectually stimulating conversation. Each episode focuses on a handful of topics that carry significant weight in the debate of ideas for the best path of American life, both privately and civically. Of course, we do reserve some time for fun in each show.

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The Close Read: Winter 2021/2022 Review with Charles Kesler

Mar 18, 2022

In his latest editor’s note, Dr. Kesler identifies an emerging conflict between the anti-American Left, and the “post-American” Right. Spencer and Dr. Kesler discuss the conservative movement’s past and future as illustrated in essays from the issue. Plus: the CRB takes on the delicate subject of race in America.

About the Podcast

For 20 years, the Claremont Review of Books has been the gold standard for conservative criticism and political analysis. Now the CRB comes to the podcast world with a new interview show hosted by Dr. Spencer Klavan, the magazine's assistant editor. As each new issue comes out, Spencer phones up authors whose essays have prompted deeper reflection and discussion. Over a drink and a copy of the latest CRB, he'll chat with the leading minds on the Right about what's going on in politics and literary culture. New interviews appear once a month, and--as a bonus--Spencer will sit down once per issue with his boss and friend Dr. Charles Kesler, editor of the CRB, to discuss the major themes that have arisen in the news cycle and their deeper implications for the state of the nation.

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44 episodes

For 20 years, the Claremont Review of Books has been the gold standard for conservative criticism and political analysis. Now the CRB comes to the podcast world with a new interview show hosted by Dr. Spencer Klavan, the magazine's assistant editor. As each new issue comes out, Spencer phones up authors whose essays have prompted deeper reflection and discussion. Over a drink and a copy of the latest CRB, he'll chat with the leading minds on the Right about what's going on in politics and literary culture. New interviews appear once a month, and--as a bonus--Spencer will sit down once per issue with his boss and friend Dr. Charles Kesler, editor of the CRB, to discuss the major themes that have arisen in the news cycle and their deeper implications for the state of the nation.

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  • 26 JAN 2024

Fall 2023 Review with Charles Kesler

Editor Charles Kesler and Associate Editor Spencer Klavan meet to peruse the fall CRB.  Kesler’s editor’s note about the intellectual legacy  of Henry Kissinger considers whether foreign policy realism is gaining steam on the world stage as multiple wars rage on. Mark Helprin’s essay on the grinding conflict in Israel takes a practical look at the situation, and Bill Voegeli’s essay articulates the predicament of the modern Left since October 7. Plus much more from the fall CRB. 

  • 22 DEC 2023

Christmas Special: Algis Valiunas on The Enduring T.S. Eliot

Algis Valiunas, a fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center and contributing editor at The New Atlantis, joins Spencer to discuss the great modernist and Anglican convert T.S. Eliot. In the spirit of the season, Valiunas explores how a mixture of tragedy, heartache, and providence led Eliot gradually from the sorrow and discontent expressed in his jarring masterpiece, The Waste Land, on through to conversion and the searing brilliance of Christian poems like Four Quartets.  

The Future of AI in Hollywood

Martha Bayles, frequent contributor to the CRB and prolific author and essayist, joins Spencer to discuss the perils and pitfalls presented by AI, especially as it pertains to the entertainment industry. Bayles elucidates the challenge of AI in entertainment as it emerged during the SAG-AFTRA strike. Will the strike’s goals be met in the long term, or is an AI future inevitable? Plus: reflections on how digital delivery systems have changed the media landscape, for better and for worse.  

  • 20 OCT 2023

Summer 2023 Review with Charles Kesler

Editor Charles Kesler and Associate Editor Spencer Klavan convene to survey the summer CRB. Kesler's editor's note about the decline of West Virginia University proves timely as universities across the country reveal their funding priorities. Christopher Flannery’s cover essay on President James A. Garfield introduces a neglected American statesman, while analyses of everything from affirmative action to modernist poetry round out the issue. Plus: some new authors make their CRB debut.  

  • 18 AUG 2023

Wilfred McClay on Understanding the Midwest

Wilfred M. McClay, the Victor Davis Hanson Chair of Classical History and Western Civilization at Hillsdale College, joins Spencer to discuss the virtues and the public perception of the Midwest. Professor McClay illuminates the "reservoir of idealism" hidden away in the Midwest's often unexplored but fascinating history. Plus: a deep dive into why the Midwest is so misunderstood.  

  • 21 JULY 2023

Spring 2023 Review with Charles Kesler

Editor Charles Kesler and Associate Editor Spencer Klavan sit down to rifle through the Spring CRB. There's lots to unpack, including but not limited to: Kesler's editor's note on the growing ideological divide among the states, Christopher Caldwell's investigation of unrest in France, and a new biography of MLK, Jr. Plus: incisive commentary on the Supreme Court's history with affirmative action, and a whistle-stop tour through the greatest hits of country music's first ladies.

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Kelly Link Returns with a Dreamlike, Profoundly Beautiful Novel

In “The Book of Love,” the Pulitzer finalist and master of short stories pushes our understanding of what a fantasy novel can be.

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An illustration of a young woman walking amid a blue haze, with two other figures in the background.

By Amal El-Mohtar

Amal El-Mohtar is the Book Review’s science fiction and fantasy columnist, a Hugo Award-winning writer and the co-author, with Max Gladstone, of “This Is How You Lose the Time War.”

THE BOOK OF LOVE , by Kelly Link

A certain weight of expectation accrues on writers of short fiction who haven’t produced a novel, as if the short story were merely the larval stage of longer work. No matter how celebrated the author and her stories, how garlanded with prizes and grants, the sense persists: She will eventually graduate from the short form to the long. After an adolescence spent munching milkweed in increments of 10,000 words or less, she will come to her senses and build the chrysalis required for a novel to emerge, winged and tender, from within.

Now Kelly Link — an editor and publisher, a recipient of a MacArthur “genius grant” and the author of five story collections, one of which was a Pulitzer Prize finalist — has produced a novel. Seven years in the making, “The Book of Love” — long, but never boring — enacts a transformation of a different kind: It is our world that must expand to accommodate it, we who must evolve our understanding of what a fantasy novel can be.

Reviewing “The Book of Love” feels like trying to describe a dream. It’s profoundly beautiful, provokes intense emotion, offers up what feel like rooted, incontrovertible truths — but as soon as one tries to repeat them, all that’s left are shapes and textures, the faint outlines of shifting terrain.

Still, here goes: Set in 2014, in a small Massachusetts town called Lovesend, “The Book of Love” is the story of three local teenagers (and one stowaway) who return from the dead and must compete for the prize of remaining alive by completing a series of magical tasks.

It’s the story of the parents, siblings and lovers of those teenagers, the people who mourned them for the year they were gone and now, magically, have had those memories of grief replaced: The teens were never dead, they were only studying abroad.

It’s the story of the wizard-priests who guard either side of the door to the world of the dead; one of them is the teens’ high school music teacher, who must now instruct them in magic if they’re to survive.

It’s the story of a fey, cruel moon goddess who’s lost the key to her larder of souls, and the young man, now hundreds of years old, who bound himself to her service in exchange for a promise of revenge.

It’s the story of two sisters, one of whom is part of the undead trio, who can’t speak without hurting or irritating each other, but who also need each other, are lost without each other.

“The Book of Love” is made up of smaller books: Each character perspective is presented as “The Book of [character name],” with surprising detours into the interiority of objects or concepts. This might suggest discrete accounts with clear divisions between them, but the reality is more complex: These books are in conversation with one another, their lives interleaved.

Susanna and Laura Hand, the sisters, are in a band with Daniel Knowe, who’s been secretly dating Susanna but is opaquely detested by Mo Gorch, who is close friends with the girl Laura has a deep crush on — the girl Susanna kissed out of spite. They’ve all known one another since childhood, and they’re all on the cusp of adulthood. Tugging the story forward through these relationships are the questions of how Laura, Daniel and Mo died, why they came back, who or what slipped out of death alongside them, and what they all have to do to stay on this side of the grave.

It’s common to read a book with a strong sense of place and say that the setting is a character in the story. But in “The Book of Love,” it’s more correct to say that characters provide the story’s setting: Each “Book” is a dwelling place to experience a life, and taken together, the result is immense. As C.S. Lewis wrote of heaven and John Crowley wrote of fairyland, the further in you go, the bigger it gets — an experience that recalls the process of getting to know a person.

So much of Link’s work steps lightly, a tempering of the commonplace with vivid, delicate surprise. In a 2023 profile for Vulture , Link observed: “The novel hardens as you go on. … At a certain point the ambitions, even the shape, begin to feel inevitable. The short story stays fluid.” I kept waiting for the novel to harden as it went on, but it never did; every sentence remained a springboard for new sound, piano keys rising and falling in new variations. In one chapter, a man summons his lover by playing wrong notes in an old song; Link’s project here sometimes feels like that, resisting an expected shape by leaning out of resolving cadences and into bumps, splinters, question marks.

“Don’t be ashamed of the things that you unabashedly love in narrative,” Link said in a 2019 speech. “Investigate them with a loving heart.” Investigating romance novels, small towns, families, the friends and music you make in high school, fairy villains and fairy lovers, with fascinated tenderness and deep familiarity, “The Book of Love” does justice to its name. Its composition, its copiousness, suggests that love, in the end, contains all — that frustration, rage, vulnerability, loss and grief are love’s constituent parts, bound by and into it.

THE BOOK OF LOVE | By Kelly Link | Random House | 628 pp. | $31

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In Lucy Sante’s new memoir, “I Heard Her Call My Name,” the author reflects on her life and embarking on a gender transition  in her late 60s.

For people of all ages in Pasadena, Calif., Vroman’s Bookstore, founded in 1894, has been a mainstay in a world of rapid change. Now, its longtime owner says he’s ready to turn over the reins .

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Each week, top authors and critics join the Book Review’s podcast to talk about the latest news in the literary world. Listen here .

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    The Claremont Review of Books ( CRB) is a quarterly review of politics and statesmanship published by the conservative Claremont Institute. A typical issue consists of several book reviews and a selection of essays on topics of conservatism and political philosophy, history, and literature. [1] Authors who are regularly featured in the Review ...

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  7. The Claremont Review of Books Podcast

    For 20 years, the Claremont Review of Books has been the gold standard for conservative criticism and political analysis. Now the CRB comes to the podcast world with a new interview show hosted by Dr. Spencer Klavan, the magazine's assistant editor. As each new issue comes out, Spencer phones up authors whose essays have prompted deeper reflection and discussion. Over a drink and a copy of the ...

  8. ‎The Claremont Review of Books Podcast on Apple Podcasts

    The Claremont Review of Books Podcast on Apple Podcasts 44 episodes For 20 years, the Claremont Review of Books has been the gold standard for conservative criticism and political analysis. Now the CRB comes to the podcast world with a new interview show hosted by Dr. Spencer Klavan, the magazine's assistant editor.

  9. The New 2023 Summer CRB Issue Is Online

    In the new Summer 2023 issue of Claremont Review of Books, Christopher Caldwell and William Voegeli each reflect on why affirmative action has been so hard to dismantle despite consistent popular opposition to it and now a new Supreme Court victory...

  10. The New CRB Issue Is Online

    The Claremont Review of Books Spring 2023 Issue is now online. With affirmative action policies in higher education being one of the most important cases the Supreme Court considered this past term, the Claremont Review of Books's new Spring 2023 issue takes up the question of "Whatever Happened to Civil Rights?"

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    For 20 years, the Claremont Review of Books has been the gold standard for conservative criticism and political analysis. Now the CRB comes to the podcast world with a new interview show hosted by Dr. Spencer Klavan, the magazine's assistant editor.

  12. How the Claremont Institute Became a Nerve Center of the American Right

    Kesler, the editor of The Claremont Review of Books, is widely regarded, at 65, as the institute's éminence grise. Unfailingly congenial, he was walking beside his cat beneath a long white ...

  13. The Claremont Review of Books Podcast

    For 20 years, the Claremont Review of Books has been the gold standard for conservative criticism and political analysis. Now the CRB comes to the podcast world with a new interview show hosted by Dr. Spencer Klavan, the magazine's assistant editor. As each new issue comes out, Spencer phones up authors whose essays have prompted deeper reflection and discussion. Over a drink and a copy of the ...

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    The Claremont Review of Books Podcast The Claremont Institute (Author) About the podcast For 20 years, the Claremont Review of Books has been the gold standard for conservative criticism and political analysis. Now the CRB comes to the podcast world with a new interview show hosted by Dr. Spencer Klavan, the magazine's assistant editor.

  15. ‎The Claremont Review of Books Podcast on Apple Podcasts

    42 episodes. For 20 years, the Claremont Review of Books has been the gold standard for conservative criticism and political analysis. Now the CRB comes to the podcast world with a new interview show hosted by Dr. Spencer Klavan, the magazine's assistant editor. As each new issue comes out, Spencer phones up authors whose essays have prompted ...

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    The Claremont Review of Books Podcast. For 20 years, the Claremont Review of Books has been the gold standard for conservative criticism and political analysis. Now the CRB comes to the podcast world with a new interview show hosted by Dr. Spencer Klavan, the magazine's assistant editor. As each new issue comes out, Spencer phones up authors ...

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  19. Book Review: 'The Book of Love,' by Kelly Link

    Amal El-Mohtar is the Book Review's science fiction and fantasy columnist, a Hugo Award-winning writer and the co-author, with Max Gladstone, of "This Is How You Lose the Time War." Feb. 12 ...