February 18, 2016
The Weight that Will Make Us Planets
A week before the Lunar New Year, an old friend whom you met only last year drops you a line, which means you Skype. Lately the computer freezes because he’s […]
August 20, 2013
Café of the Future
The Long Now Foundation is hiring volunteers to curate their “Manual for Civilization,” a collection of 3500 volumes to be shelved in the Long Now Salon. Founded in “01996,” Long […]
May 23, 2013
The Regression to the Primitive
Northrop Frye, discussing the arc of Shakespeare’s plays, says something very profound about Shakespeare’s late “Romances,” like A Winter’s Tale and Pericles, Prince of Tyre. …as a dramatist, […]
February 15, 2013
“The Centre Cannot Hold”: The (Rise of?) Apocalyptic Writings
As I child, I was fascinated with the biblical concept of The Rapture. As an adult, I don’t know who or what to blame—the hurricanes? The wars? All the disaster […]
December 9, 2012
Short Takes: By the Letter, By the Draft
August Wilson: “Blues is the bedrock of everything I do. All the characters in my plays, their ideas and their attitudes, the stance that they adopt in the world, are […]
November 8, 2012
Entertainment and Excess: The Great Literary Audiences
At the most basic level, what’s success for a biological organism is success for a literary one—whatever survives, wins. A sequence of words has an effect on a given […]
July 2, 2012
The Jack of All Modes
When you publish a novel, there’s often a flurry of interviews over the ensuing months. The interviewers repeat questions independently of one another. It’s an interesting indicator of what people […]
September 13, 2011
Short Takes: Glossophobia
Ian Fleming, the creator of James Bond, to Raymond Chandler in 1958: “I don’t know if you do, but I find it extremely difficult to write about villains. Villains are […]
September 20, 2010
Absolutes
At the edge of the caldera, a pack animal stumbles: The following evening as they rode up onto the western rim they lost one of the mules. It went skittering […]