January 16, 2015
Searching for Argos—Dogs in Karen Green’s Bough Down
I started Early— Took my Dog —is the opening line of a poem by Emily Dickinson, a line that I have mentally cut out with scissors, leaving behind And visited […]
January 8, 2015
A Physiology of Style: Asthma, Proust, Pharoahe Monch
“This asthma became part of his art—if indeed his art did not create it. Proust’s syntax rhythmically and stop by step reproduces his fear of suffocating. And his ironic, philosophical, […]
November 12, 2014
Dr. Murphy, or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Writing Abstracts
Abstract is a misleading name for an abstract, for an abstract should not be abstract. Today, I will write an abstract for my next conference paper, and it feels a […]
October 22, 2014
Online Book Discussion of Ann Patchett’s STATE OF WONDER: Week Three
Here’s a horrifying little story from this week’s Guardian newspaper for those of us who have been spending our reading time following Marina up the Amazon in recent weeks. (Warning: […]
October 20, 2014
Ann Patchett’s STATE OF WONDER: Week Three
Like Sergei, I find much to unpack in the scene set among the copse of fertility trees. And here I want to introduce a new thread for discussion—the depiction and […]
October 18, 2014
Online Book Discussion of Ann Patchett’s STATE OF WONDER, Week Two
Sergei and Natalie have offered rich and complex readings of STATE OF WONDER over the last couple of weeks, with some emphasis on the resonance of myth, of the struggle […]
October 12, 2014
Online Book Discussion of Ann Patchett’s STATE OF WONDER: Week Two
This week, our discussion of State of Wonder moves to the second section of the novel, in which Marina arrives in Manaus and begins her search for Dr. Swenson, unsure how […]
October 5, 2014
Online Book Discussion of Ann Patchett’s STATE OF WONDER: Week One
In his first post about State of Wonder, Sergei Lobanov-Rostovsky posed a series of questions about Marina’s nightmares. As the first section of the book unfolds, we learn that Marina’s childhood […]
October 3, 2014
Online Book Discussion of Ann Patchett’s STATE OF WONDER: Week One
This is the first in a series of posts about Ann Patchett’s State of Wonder. Please click on the links below to access additional posts. Natalie Shapero, Week One Natalie […]
September 9, 2014
An Interview with Jennifer Acker
The issue of how the internet has altered literary publishing is, when you get right down to it, a trick question: we don’t know yet. New modes of existence for […]
September 2, 2014
The Wonderful Worlds of Borges
I recently came across an edited set of interviews with one of the true masters, Jorges Luis Borges. The book is Borges at Eighty: Conversations. I first encountered the Argentinian […]
August 30, 2014
Meditation on Leslie Jamison’s THE EMPATHY EXAMS (and beyond…) (Part Five of Six)
Continued from Part Four Again, I try to imagine whether I could have possibly chosen the word “sandpaper” in my own writing about the place. I think I actually could […]