lunch with Harold Bloom

At 80, critic Harold Bloom says he should have departed this world seven times by now, but thank goodness he hasn’t.  His 39th book, The Anatomy of Influence: Literature as a Way of Life (published this month by Yale), is due out now. For a dash of Bloomian spirit, see this lunchtime interview in Vanity Fair, click here. Along with Stanley Cavell, Bloom is the best guide to Emerson that we have, and he calls Emerson, in this interview, the “best mind ever to come out of America.”