July 18, 2018
In Defense of Long Descriptions
When I was young (middle school) my favorite novels were The Lord of the Rings, though my friends always complained that they were too long and boring, with too much […]
November 30, 2015
A Moveable Funeral
Sales of Ernest Hemingway’s A Moveable Feast spiked in the wake of the Paris terror attacks. The media has framed it as a book that captures the dream of Paris, […]
October 29, 2013
The Twenty-Year Rule
Just as there is a sharp division between a 19th century Yeats (the “Celtic Twilight” material) and a deliberately developed, 20th century Yeats (the “Byzantine” Yeats of the more […]
August 30, 2013
The Literary Self(ie)
My favorite part of any literary biography or memoir is usually the glossy white section with the photographs. The photo section, along with the text, constructs the literary self we […]
August 26, 2013
This Is Your Writing On Drugs
Many writers would love to use words the way Alex Rodriguez plays baseball. And many have availed themselves of “performance-enhancing drugs” (PEDs), but writers’ culture is such that there will […]
July 12, 2012
Mix Tape: The One
The 3:AM website disappeared last week. Its servers were managed by a company whose website was down and whose owner could not be located—until people used social media to track […]
January 5, 2012
Mix Tape: The New Year (“So this is the new year, and I don’t feel any different”)
Helen Vendler goes after The Penguin Anthology of Twentieth-Century American Poetry, edited by Rita Dove. “Multicultural inclusiveness prevails: some 175 poets are represented. No century in the evolution of poetry […]