October 19, 2013
Why I am Inherently Evil
The idea of karma—the moral effect of your actions, good or bad, following you across births—suggests that even a newborn has some inherent guilt. In this Eastern model of […]
September 23, 2013
Futurism Revisited: An Interview with Marjorie Perloff, Part I
[This interview, which will be published in parts, was preceded by an introduction; you can read that here.] The Kenyon Review: I was interested to learn that F. T. Marinetti was […]
September 16, 2013
“The Authoress of the Odyssey”
Was the Odyssey written by a woman? The theory has been raised in the past—and long before the rise of late 20th-century feminism, which is when, historically, you’d expect […]
September 14, 2013
Genius and Unpredictability
We all know that which book or author “takes off” and which one doesn’t is, at least in part, a matter of chance. The process by which large numbers of […]
September 9, 2013
Human Beings Writing about Human Beings
I am, I am told, an “Indian-American” writer, and my novels are Indian-American novels. Sometimes they’re called “immigrant fiction,” even though I’ve never immigrated from or to anywhere. My […]
August 20, 2013
Virtues of Madness and Vices of Honey: An Interview with Mary Ruefle
[This interview was preceded by an introduction; you can read that here.] Last year, Ruefle and I corresponded via mail; our correspondence is printed below. You can find out more […]
August 18, 2013
Video Games and Religion
A worldwide majority of people have claimed, for centuries, that they believe in, and want to go to, heaven. Whether heaven exists has always been a matter of debate, but […]
August 12, 2013
Lectures With Nothing (Or Everything) To Say: On Mary Ruefle
[This post serves as the introduction for a soon-to-be-published interview with Ruefle.] The function of the anecdote in criticism is double-edged: at once ailment and salve. But in considering Mary […]
August 4, 2013
Popular Art and the Unaccompanied Voice
An unaccompanied voice is almost never the voice you find in popular art forms. Even our most popular singers and rappers don’t get on a stage or on the radio […]
July 6, 2013
“Deeply and Irreverently”: How and What to Read
One of the usual defenses of reading widely in the Western tradition (or, say, in 20th century poetry) is that it improves your writing—that it’s the legwork necessary for the […]
June 30, 2013
The Lost Books of Lord Byron
I have read somewhere that you cannot read in dreams, that there is some neurological block against processing written language. I don’t remember where, maybe in a dream. Because I […]
June 28, 2013
What Makes Contemporary American Poetry So Good
One of the most wonderful things about being a writer in contemporary America—besides the unprecendented ease of access to books—is our multiplicity of traditions. In the past, in smaller, more homogenous […]