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Philip Davis professor of English literature at Liverpool University, author of Bernard Malamud: A Writer’s Life, and editor of The Reader is fed up! This post originally appeared on Moreover.

It is probably because when I was a young beginner, trying to write about literature, I did not feel encouraged or appreciated. Those were days of high theory in literary studies: it was naïve to be interested in realism, in emotion, in the human content of literature as I was. “Nobody came,” says Thomas Hardy of the plight of his own young idealist, “because nobody does.” (more…)

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Philip Davis professor of English literature at Liverpool University, author of Bernard Malamud: A Writer’s Life, and editor of The Reader is back with another fascinating blog post. This post originally appeared on Moreover.

Come the last week in October, my wife and I will be flying to New York, to do publicity work for my biography of Bernard Malamud. Last time, we travelled in from Boston by train, which was a mistake. We came to a halt for a long hour and a half, just outside Queens. It felt just like the words of the song: if we could make it there, we could make it anywhere - but we couldn’t. (more…)

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Philip Davis, our favorite new blogger is back with more commentary today. Davis is professor of English literature at Liverpool University, author of Bernard Malamud: A Writer’s Life, and editor of The Reader. This post originally appeared on Moreover.

Dear America,

This week someone from Education (it would be) said to me, ‘I am comfortable with my belief-systems.’ I blame you, collectively, for this. (more…)

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Last week we posted a series of articles by Philip Davis, author of Bernard Malamud: A Writer’s Life. Today is the final piece in the installation. To see the previous posts click here. This post originally appeared on Moreover.

In the beginning dogs, it is written, were the first creatures domesticated by human beings. And when the humans saw the difference between themselves and the dogs, they knew more about what being human meant. (This is the true Gospel of Otherness.) Then the humans, being more than their dogs, began to domesticate other animals, to lie amongst them. And so in time what became pastoral agriculture was born. (more…)

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Below Philip Davis, author of Bernard Malamud: A Writer’s Life, combines science with literature to convince us to read out loud more often. To read his other blog posts click here. This piece first appeared in Moreover.

I have just launched a new M.A. course in bibliotherapy—by which I mean to ask, What help can reading provide for people? But I am not allowed to call the course “M.A. in bibliotherapy” because some of scientists at my university were not too keen on the word, accepted though it is in the States. I think they confused it with aromatherapy, when in the great words of the poet Gray, on the neglect of lowly human worth:

Full many a flower is born to blush unseen
And waste its sweetness on the desert air. (more…)

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I simply cannot encourage you to read Philip Davis’s blog series on Moreover enough. I love it. Davis, the author of Bernard Malamud: A Writer’s Life, also seems to be a born blogger. Below is part three of his blog series, which originally appeared in here.

I thought I would get braver as I got older but (aged 54), not so. I remember the poet Joseph Brodsky saying to me, near the end of his life, “I used to be one of the Strong”—it was across a drink in a Liverpool bar—”but not now.”
(more…)

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