[2] He is also the author of The Things That Matter: What Seven Classic Novels Have to Say About the Stages of Life (2006),[3] about nineteenth- and twentieth-century novels, and Moral Agents: Eight Twentieth-Century American Writers (2015).
His work on Thomas Pynchon includes Pynchon: A Collection of Critical Essays (1978) and numerous essays, including "The Sacred, the Profane, and The Crying of Lot 49" (1975; reprinted in the 1978 collection) and "Gravity's Encyclopedia" (in Mindful Pleasures: Essays on Thomas Pynchon).
[4] He is the editor of annotated editions of novels by Thomas Hardy, George Meredith, Arnold Bennett, H. G. Wells, and Anthony Trollope.
With Michael Seidel he co-edited Homer to Brecht; The European Epic and Dramatic Traditions (1977).
Since 1986 he has written about computing, software, and typography and is a contributing editor of PC Magazine.