Patrick Kurp can’t get enough of a highly praised British novelist Anthony Powell, to which he testifies before the congregation here. What’s more Kingsley Amis says Powell is “the most brilliant and penetrating novelist we have.” That’s got to count for something.

The University of Chicago Press will be offering the first novel of Powell’s A Dance to the Music of Time for free during December, so next Wednesday, if you’d like to dip your feet into an important British novelist’s epic work, download your copy here. (I neglected to say earlier that I got this link from the great Dave Lull.)

Michael Drout has written the foreword to new anthology called, The Last Man Anthology: Tales of Catastrophe, Disaster and Woe. The name is drawn from Mary Shelley’s The Last Man, assembling stories with the goal to bring “catastrophic literature into the twenty-first century while staying true to Shelley’s timeless themes of chaos and isolation.”

The Guardian has the most recent interview with the great writer and speaker Christopher Hitchens, who is suffering from cancer. In talking about his atheist efforts and others doing the same cuddly work:

Nonetheless, Hitchens mentions a “narrow but quite deep difference” between himself and Dawkins. Unlike the evangelical biologist, he has no wish to convert everyone in the world to his point of view, even if it were possible. In other words, he savours the counterargument. Like John Stuart Mill, he is aware of the empty end of achieved objectives. The true satisfaction lies in the means. Although Hitchens is often seen as a provocateur or a contrarian, and both are indeed aspects of his character, at heart he’s incurably in love with the dialectic.

(via The Daily Caller)

Joseph Epstein talks about T.S. Eliot’s life and reflects on modern literary culture. “Literary culture itself, if the sad truth be known, seems to be slowly but decisively shutting down.”