Maggie Greene (Lauren Cohan) in Season 3 of “The Walking Dead”

Last year while in graduate school, my roommate, boyfriend, brothers and close friends all incessantly tried to convince me to start watching “The Walking Dead.” Between them, every comprehensible reason was thrown at me. “The first season is only six episodes!” “It’s not really a zombie show, it’s more about how people would react in utter chaos.” “The special effects are amazing; it’s the most expensive drama on prime-time.” Having a full-time job and being a full-time student allowed me to cite time constraints as my main excuse for not drinking the “Walking Dead” Kool-Aid. In reality, I just didn’t care about another show about zombies.

I ended up conceding during Hurricane Sandy. With the storm in full swing, I was out of excuses—the office was closed, school was cancelled, and what, my boyfriend asked, would be more appropriate for the last week of October? Giving in, I watched the pilot. I was largely unimpressed with everything, except for Andrew Lincoln’s ability to put on a convincing Georgian accent. After all, what woman can forget him standing outside Keria Knightley’s apartment in “Love Actually” brandishing his “To me, you are perfect” sign? Well played, “Walking Dead.” You have appealed to your female demographic.

Since then, I have become just as addicted as the rest—so much so that I’m actually considering reading the graphic novels. The true appeal of the show lies in its realism. The special effects, props and sound effects are astounding (with some episodes costing as much as $3 million to create). More importantly, though, the show’s creators focus as much on the psychological effects of society’s destruction as on the challenges of fighting off zombies’ snapping jaws. Indeed, by the beginning of season three, the “walkers” seem to have become little more than furniture, background to the true conflict between rivaling groups of survivors. The decisions the groups are faced with are difficult, and the consequences are real. Nothing is sacred and no one is safe. The show has been simultaneously criticized and lauded for its ability to ruthlessly kill beloved characters. “My advice,” my brother said when I told him I finally started watching the show, “is do not become attached to any characters. They don’t stick around long.”

True, some don’t deserve to stick around, but others—like Daryl (Norman Reedus), Glenn (Steven Yeun), Hershel (Scott Wilson)—are all strong, well-rounded characters with sound judgment. What’s sadly missing is a dynamic and powerful female presence. Andrea (Laurie Holden), typically runs to the man (or woman, for that matter) who has the most influence. In recent episodes, she has been trying to do “what’s right,” but it feels too little, too late. Michonne (Danai Gurira), while clearly an able warrior, independent thinker and highly valuable, remains flat. She’s tough, but does that mean she has to be devoid of emotion? The only exception is Maggie (Lauren Cohan). Maggie is a smart, courageous fighter who, though she’s in a romantic relationship, does not hide behind it. So why, then, in a recent episode, was sex used against? If a woman becomes too strong, must her sexuality be made into a tool of humiliation? Still, she is the redeeming female character who, I would argue, does not get nearly as much screen time as she deserves. This may not be a sentiment shared by the show’s core demographic of men aged 18 to 49, but among the upwards of 11 million viewers per episode, I can’t be the only one who would like to see a woman take the lead.

Perhaps as season three comes to a climax, the stage will be set for Maggie to play a bigger part in the next season. The men in charge have made questionable decisions with calamitous consequences. The imminent threat of war promises loss on either side, and I’m anxiously wondering who will be there when the dust settles. Either way, despite my initial reluctance to watch, I will look for season four as ravenously as walkers look for the living.

The English pianist Stephen Hough is hardly unknown on the music scene; The New York Times gave him a full-page profile in advance of his Carnegie Hall recital earlier this month, and many of his recordings (including much-praised complete Rachmaninoff and Saint-Saens concertos) have been spectacular successes. As the Times story makes clear, Hough is a Renaissance man: not only an effortless virtuoso who seems to manage fiendishly difficult music without a sweat, but a composer, painter, poet, onetime MacArthur Fellow, and eclectic blogger for the UK Telegraph.

Hough converted to Roman Catholicism in his teens, attracted to the church in part by a performance of Elgar’s The Dream of Gerontius (based on Cardinal Newman’s poem). On his blog, he reflects regularly on faith and the church from his perspective as a gay Catholic, and responds with exceptional calm and class to some of the combox flame wars that inevitably follow.

Recently Hough has been raising his profile as a composer: at his New York recital he gave the U.S. premiere of his Second Piano Sonata, notturno luminoso, a fearsomely virtuosic picture of sleeplessness and “night visions” that I can’t wait to hear again. But he has also been devoting attention to sacred music. His 22-minute Missa Mirabilis, written in 2007 for Westminster Cathedral, recently had its U.S. premiere and was also just broadcast on the BBC. Here’s the end of the Credo, performed by the BBC Symphony Orchestra and Chorus conducted by David Robertson:

Listen to the whole thing here, but hurry if you’re interested: It’s a live concert recording that may disappear quickly from the BBC website. If you think you hear the influence of Francis Poulenc’s choral music, that isn’t an accident; Hough is a Poulenc admirer.

And for those who have never heard Hough play, here he is with a Chopin waltz:

Marilynne Robinson on her reading habits (her favorite genre is non-fiction), the gap separating Housekeeping from Gilead (it was a period filled more with productivity than despair), and the literary character she’d most like to meet (Ishmael).

A great tradition: the Morning News Tournament of Books, in which the best books from the past year square off against one another, March Madness-style.

Teju Cole, author of Open City, has posted a series of tweets in which the opening of a famous novel is interrupted by a drone attack. A typical example: “Stately, plump Buck Mulligan came from the stairhead, bearing a bowl of lather. A bomb whistled in. Blood on the walls. Fire from heaven.”

Francine Prose on dreaming in literature.

I’ve been rooting for Ben Fountain ever since Malcolm Gladwell profiled him in a 2008 New Yorker piece on late-blooming talent. That’s when I learned that Fountain was forty-eight when his first collection of short stories, Brief Encounters With Che Guevara, appeared. Anyone who’s seriously tried (with minimal to middling success) to write, much less sell, a serious piece of fiction can’t help but like the story of a guy who never gave up, first while toiling at a job he loathed (lawyer) and then while rededicating himself for several humbling years to the hard work of craft. Brief Encounters arrived to great reviews and in 2007 won the PEN/Hemingway award for fiction.

I loved the stories in Brief Encounters. What I didn’t love so much was Fountain’s debut novel in 2012, Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk. I even had a brief Verdicts piece about it ready to post last summer, but being then brand new to Commonweal felt a little nervous going negative so soon, and I buried it in my hard drive instead. Soon enough, Billy Lynn won the National Book Award. Now, it’s also won the 2012 National Book Critics Circle Award (announced last week). I heard somewhere else it’s also going to be a movie.

Good for Fountain! I mean that. Success is no reason to begrudge good fortune, no matter my (legitimate) gripes about the book. But success should have nothing to do with what someone says about a novel (or painting or song or TV show), especially when someone is paid for his considered opinion. Which leads me to Alexander Nazaryan’s confession in Salon this week:

I had started reviewing books, a dangerous occupation for an aspiring novelist, sort of like inviting an arsonist to join the fire department. As my own rejection letters piled up, it became unbearable to stomach the notion that others — many of whom seemed, from their biographies, to have sacrificed much less than I had — were being celebrated while I lurked in the byways of the literary world.

Consequently, the reviews I wrote came to bear a stench of bitterness, none more so than one I wrote for the Village Voice in 2008 in which I took on two debut novelists, Keith Gessen and Nathaniel Rich. After comparing them to James Joyce and Ralph Ellison, I proceed to snidely savage their work. It is true: I did not like their novels. But my dislike was set aflame by jealousy of young men whose profiles were similar to mine and who had managed to do what I had not. I remain more embarrassed by that piece than by any other. Keith, Nate: I am sorry.

Apologizing isn’t a bad move, and not just because it’ll help get your essay some attention. But Nazaryan might not have wished to seek the scrutiny of D.G. Myers. Paraphrasing won’t do Myers justice, so:

Don’t misunderstand me. I am as beset by small-mindedness as any other critic. But I have never written a review out of jealousy, and cannot really understand what it would mean to do so. I have abused my share of bad books … but never out of the fear that their authors’ success magnified my own failure. …

I am not bitter that some writers have succeeded where I have failed; I am angry that they have settled for such a measly simulacrum of success. Consider Nazaryan’s own literary ambitions: “Allow me to be immodest: I would like to write the best thing about Brooklyn since William Styron’s Sophie’s Choice and a campus novel to rival Donna Tartt’s The Secret History.” William Styron and Donna Tartt? Really? That’s your idea of literary greatness, is it? Now imagine a young actor’s announcing his “immodest” ambition to do community theater.

Like Nazaryan, I too wanted to be a novelist once upon a time. (Till I admitted to myself that I lacked the talent.) My thwarted ambition to write fiction did not leave me jealous of published novelists, though. It gave me a specialized knowledge, an insider’s vantage—the same way an amateur tennis player can see things at the U.S. Open that escape those who have never tried to master the difficult game. But an amateur who is jealous of Roger Federer isn’t particularly interested in tennis; he is engaging in a narcissistic fantasy.

“Things that escape those who have never tried to master the difficult game.” That’s why I like Myers (not because his opinion of Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk just happened to validate mine). But it’s also why I’ll probably always like Fountain—he tried, and tried, because he was interested in the writing. 

Fans of rock music and fans of fantasy literature, rejoice!

The Hold Steady will follow the National’s lead and do a song for the upcoming third season of HBO’s hit series “Game of Thrones,” Entertainment Weekly reports. They’ll perform a song called “The Bear and the Maiden Fair”, with lyrics from Game of Thrones author George R.R. Martin and music by Ramin Djawadi, who does the music for the show. The Hold Steady will release the song on a 7″ on Record Store Day on April 20, backed by the new track “Criminal Fingers”.

I’ve written here about the National before, and Eric Bugyis has written here about the Hold Steady. No one, to my knowledge, has written here about George R. R. Martin’s Game of Thrones. That’s a shame, since Game of Thrones is probably the best fantasy series of the past 15 years or so (imagine Lord of the Rings crossed with House of Cards), and the HBO adaptation is enjoyable, if not quite as good as the books. The band and the show seem a perfect fit:

“We wanted our rendition [of 'The Bear and the Maiden Fair'] to be bawdy and a little sloppy– drunken musicians getting up on the table and jamming while the rowdy party continues around them,” showrunners David Benioff and Dan Weiss explained toEntertainment Weekly. “There was no one better for the job than the Hold Steady.”

Joseph Frank, biographer of Dostoevsky and a brilliant literary critic, died on Wednesday. Perhaps Frank’s most influential argument was that modern literature was defined by “spatial form.” Frank showed that modern novels like Ulysses and Nightwood regularly favor simultaneity over sequence, asking the reader to, as he puts it, “suspend the process of individual reference temporarily until the entire pattern of individual reference can be apprehended as a unity.” In other words, to read the modern novel, you must read it like a poem–which is to say, you must re-read it (and then re-read it again).

Frank is most well known, though, for writing his epic, five-volume biography of Dostoevsky. I know, every biography is described as “magisterial,” but this one really was: deeply researched and endlessly rich in its readings of Dostoevsky’s life and work. Frank’s biography also served as the starting point for one of David Foster Wallace’s greatest essays, appropriately titled “Joseph Frank’s Dostoevsky.” The piece ends with Wallace calling for contemporary writers to reclaim the seriousness of Dostoevsky’s vision, a vision that Frank elucidated as powerfully as anyone:

So he [Wallace means the contemporary writer]–we, fiction writers–won’t (can’t) dare try to use serious art to advance ideologies. The project would be like Menard’s Quixote. People would either laugh or be embarrassed for us. Given this (and it is a given), who is to blame for the unseriousness of our serious fiction? The culture, the laughers? But they wouldn’t (could not) laugh if a piece of morally passionate, passionately moral fiction was also ingenious and radiantly human fiction. But how to make it that? How–for a writer today, even a talented writer today–to get up the guts to even try? There are no formulas or guarantees. There are, however, models. Frank’s books make one of them concrete and alive and terribly instructive.