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Four Hundred Words for Six Hundred Dollars

The announcement arrived through LJExpress on a Friday in late July, dressed in the language of service. Media Source, the company that owns Library Journal, School Library Journal, The Horn Book, and the Junior Library Guild, had opened a storefront called Open Shelf Reviews, aimed at independent authors and small presses, and the copy asked me to hold two ideas at once: the reviews would be paid for by the authors under review, and a wall would keep those purchased reviews away from the magazines whose names give the wall its worth. The company described the operation as “a clearly identified paid service,” with its own editor, reviewer pool, and website, all kept apart from the editorial processes that made Library Journal matter to librarians for a century and a half.

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Nobody Closed the Gate: How Traditions Convince Themselves That Thinking Ended, and Who Collects the Toll

In 1984 a legal historian named Wael Hallaq published a study whose title was a question: “Was the Gate of Ijtihad Closed?” The question sounds technical, and the journal that carried it, the International Journal of Middle East Studies, is read by a few thousand specialists. What Hallaq did inside those pages deserves a wider audience than it has ever had, because he performed one of the cleanest demolitions in modern intellectual history, and the thing he demolished is a structure that keeps getting rebuilt in other neighborhoods, including our own.

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Three Books on a Table

When this novel began, there were three physical books on my table, and none of them had anything to do with the others. One was a slim green-and-gilt volume from 1922 called The Wild Heart, eleven animal sketches of Puget Sound country, foxed at the corners, written by a woman almost nobody remembers. One was the Theogony of Hesiod, a genealogy in verse, roughly a thousand lines of who was born to whom, composed by a Boeotian farmer about seven hundred years before Christ. And one was the Inferno, in the English that Henry Wadsworth Longfellow made out of the worst years of his life. An animal book, a family tree, and a tour of hell. The Disposition is what happened when I stopped treating them as three books and started treating them as one instrument with three registers.

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The Voice Goes Off: Writing My Half of Back to Willowbrook

On the first day of my classes at New York University, the voice goes off. I stand at the front of the room and I do not speak, and no one else will speak for the rest of the semester, because the language my students have come to learn does not live in the throat. It lives in the hands and the face and the shaped space between two people, and the fastest way to teach that is to stop pretending otherwise on day one.

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The Necessary Art: Taking the Title Back

Today I am publishing a book about a theft at the center of Western culture, one its victims were trained to take as a compliment:The Necessary Art: Aristotle’s Six Elements in the Clinic, the Courtroom, the Proof, the Blueprint, and the Republic. It runs 342 pages in paperback, it exists in a Kindle edition and a free reading edition you can download right now, and the audiobook will follow as soon as the voice is ready. Those are the facts of the launch. What follows is the case for why this book exists, because its central fact has stood in plain sight for two hundred and eighty years while the people it names were trained to take the theft as a compliment: the professions of the working world were robbed of a word, the robbery has a date and a paper trail, and the word can be taken back.

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Two Words, Three Sources, Four Generations: How I Built The Wergild

A novel can be assembled inside the space between two words, provided the words are old enough and the space between them has never closed. The oldest components of The Wergild are a pair of terms from early English and Germanic law. The first is the title itself: the wergild was the man-price, the payment a killer or the killer’s kin owed to the family of the killed, scaled to the standing of the dead, the settlement that closed a feud and kept grief from multiplying into graves. Beside it sat morð, the old law’s name for a killing done in secret and left unacknowledged, the one category of death the whole system could never settle, since no price can change hands until the killer has a name. Every law that promises repayment carries a shadow clause for the debt it cannot collect. I built the novel inside that shadow, and every other component was chosen for how much load it could carry there.

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The Magnificent Loser: The Book I Wrote to Answer Two Words in Red Ink

Every writer carries a verdict he never agreed to. Mine was two words long, written in red marker across the title page of a play I cared about, by a historian whose judgment I had asked for and could not afford to ignore. BAD DRAMA. No note beneath it, no argument, no second page. I was in my twenties. I put the play in a drawer and told myself I had learned something useful about my own limits. It took me forty years to understand that I had learned the wrong lesson, and that the right one would take an entire book to say.

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