Brandon Katzir

The Dictionary at the Disposal Pile

The twenty volumes were in excellent condition, their navy-blue bindings marked only by Dewey decimal labels.

Aug 6

Reading Poirot Out of Sequence

Most people meet Agatha Christie the way she seems to have imagined it: in order.

Aug 3

June 2026

Longfellow's Children

There’s something both disarming and honest about the representation of children in Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s poetry.

Jun 16

Place as Fate: Alexandria

I should say at the outset that this essay was not planned so much as stumbled into.

Jun 10

May 2026

Framing Middlemarch: Eliot's Invitation to the Moral Community

George Eliot begins Middlemarch with a modest prelude, barely over a page.

May 18

García Márquez and the Accumulative Grammar of a Life

In Love in the Time of Cholera, Gabriel García Márquez gives Fermina Daza a sentence that seems, at first glance, to be doing little more than…

May 18

Two Types of Hairsplitting

There is a word I sometimes see when a philosophical or political argument has gone on too long or when a lawyer’s brief, for example, has disappeared…

May 15

February 2026

Heaventree: Joyce's Starry Axis Mundi

Recently I finished Joyce’s Ulysses for what I hope is the last time.

Feb 2

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January 2026

On Laving the Hands

In my morning study of Hayom Yom, a daily calendar compiled by the Lubavitcher Rebbe, Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson, I came across the word “lave” in…

Jan 29

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