May 31, 2018
Should Fiction Writers Study Literary Theory?
In her 2010 review of Mark McGurl’s The Program Era, Elif Batuman makes the following observation: a schism has opened up between literary scholarship and creative writing: disciplines which differ in […]
May 28, 2018
Age of Glass
[Continued from American Sonnets for My Past and Future Assassin] Oh, the delight, when, after thinking about American sonnets for some weeks here at the Kenyon Review blog, the Cleveland […]
May 24, 2018
On “The Death of the Novel”
Declaring that the novel is dead sometimes feels like a pastime as old as the novel itself. Even men in the nineteenth century would lament how the novel was being […]
May 18, 2018
On Character Motivation
In Will in the World, Stephen Greenblatt argues that Shakespeare’s characters are compelling because he makes their motivations purposefully unclear in order to create greater psychological complexity: “Shakespeare found that […]
May 14, 2018
On Historical Accuracy in Historical Fiction
In his Postscript to The Name of the Rose, when he describes how he came to determine the specific setting for his novel—the particular time period (the fourteenth century), the […]
May 10, 2018
Everyone Dies: Found Annotations in BASS 2016
When I checked out a library copy of Best American Short Stories 2016, I found more than the twenty short stories selected that year. As it turns out, many of these […]
May 7, 2018
Nepantla: An Anthology (Q&A with Editor Christopher Soto)
To celebrate the release of Nepantla: An Anthology Dedicated to Queer Poets of Color, published by Nightboat Books, anthology editor Christopher Soto and I discussed both the editing process and […]
May 2, 2018
Omniscience, Paranoia, and Postmodern Fiction
Broadly, there are two diverging traditions evident in contemporary fiction. The first is often called “realism” and is today most notably evangelized by the critic James Wood, who in his […]
May 1, 2018
American Sonnets for My Past and Future Assassin
[Continued from “American Sonnets (Part XIX: The Pure Products of America)”] Now that I have my hands on the whole of American Sonnets for My Past and Future Assassin by Terrance Hayes, […]
April 23, 2018
Fiction as Atonement
I came across William Maxwell’s 1980 novel So Long, See You Tomorrow after reading an analysis of it in Stacy D’Erasmo’s The Art of Intimacy, another volume in Greywolf’s series […]
April 13, 2018
Against Relatability
In a recent article in The Baffler, Soraya Roberts argues that the new genre of “Instapoetry,” most famously practiced by Rupi Kaur, is nothing more than a narcissistic feedback loop, […]
April 11, 2018
Marty Skoble on Why Poetry Matters
(Photo Credit: Noah Davis) For National Poetry Month, I spoke to Marty Skoble, the brilliant man who “teaches” poetry to the students (from lower school to high school) at Saint […]