The abominable Marquis de Sade influenced many consequential writers in the 19th and 20th centuries.
But the most lasting value of "Stranger Shores" is the light it casts on a stage in the intellectual journey of one the most cerebral and consequential writers of our day.
I picture myself as a stop-gap man rather than a consequential, professional writer.
It's a long-standing paradox of literary careers that the more consequential a writer's major work is, the larger the number of not terribly consequential odds and ends that gets added to the eventual account.
Her professional career as a consequential researcher, teacher, writer, and thinker spanned a period of drastic change for women in academe, from the days when women no matter how brilliant, well-trained, and productive overwhelmingly got only adjunct or temporary positions to now, when many are tenured faculty members or top-level administrators, despite a gender gap that still persists.
Yet again one of his memorably flawed, paranoid narrators sucks us in, and what starts off as a drunken lament, as sweet and bitter as an extended country and western song, slips seamlessly into the sort of big, consequential novel we've come to expect from a writer of his stature.
Ziegler is a clever and compassionate writer, but the play feels more methodical and less consequential than it should, as though there's a wilder, darker work roiling below its smooth surface.
Our review, by the science writer James Gleick, calls it "a thorough, illuminating exploration of the most consequential controversy raging in modern science," one that raises thorny philosophical questions.
The problem with attempting to write a consequential book about "the problem that has no name," which ambitious feminist writers try to do every few years, is that often the problem under consideration is a touch more trivial than the one Friedan took on.
We're taking stock of the internet right now, with writers who cover the digital world cataloging some of the most consequential currents shaping it.
