Selected Essays Book

The man's critical faculties were machete sharp and scalpel precise. Every essay in here reads like the work of somebody with a desk full of papers who throws them all on the floor in one motion and starts from scratch. The craftsmanship and attack strategy is consistently illuminating. Reading his critical work is like watching fog dissipate.

A big chunk of this falls into hyper-specialized poetry and theater criticism that I have little use for, and religious writing that is specialized and speaks to a social climate about which I know very little, but the whole thing deserves to be scanned for structural insight. His observations about the role of critics and the problems of being a journalist would hold up anyplace.