April 26, 2019
In Defense of a Literary Canon
Mild controversy erupted on Twitter early this month after Democratic presidential candidate Pete Buttigieg released a list of his ten favorite books. To me, the list felt a little like […]
June 18, 2018
What is it About Some Writing that Makes Us Gasp?
What is that sharp inhale, then heart flutter, then shot of warmth, then some kind of quiet in me when I read genius writing, that high I stalk again and […]
May 23, 2018
Your Online Dating Profile Written by Famous Writers
The Misunderstood Detective With a Poet’s Soul: About You: You love to dwell in uncertainties. You relish the chance to analyze anything, whether it be a text, film, or person. […]
August 30, 2017
On Living in the Moment
I’m sick of everybody telling me to live in the moment, but I get it. Why do we insist upon these ideals, extremes that don’t exist, a whole society built […]
April 6, 2017
Concentration and Isolation: Edna O’Brien on the Writing Life
“Violence is her theme,” Colum McCann said of Edna O’Brien during a recent William N. Skirball Writers Center Stage event, which featured both authors in conversation. “Beauty, too.” McCann and […]
September 22, 2016
Just a Kid from the Bronx: DeLillo on The Power of Language
When Don DeLillo first learned that a conference in Paris would be devoted entirely to his work, his initial reaction was: “How can that be? I’m just a kid from […]
May 7, 2015
How the West Inverted its Literary Values
In a true missing-the-forest-for-the-trees phenomenon, modern literary criticism has left unremarked, to my knowledge at least, the totally anomalous body of “great literature” that has come out of Europe and […]
January 29, 2014
“Who are the modern heirs of James Joyce?”
The New York Times Book Review has instituted a new feature recently, in which they pose a question to a pair of writer-critics. Generally the answers are constrained by the […]
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 […]
June 30, 2012
“The real world we think we inhabit”
“We need a dream-world in order to discover the features of the real world we think we inhabit” is the old line by Feyerabend, discovered sometime in college, that often […]
April 12, 2012
Mix Tape: Mellow Yellow Smellow
Who said it, James Joyce or Kool Keith? (“One is the most innovative writer of the 20th century, the other is James Joyce.”) Philip Larkin once said, “Deprivation is for […]
February 12, 2012
Short Takes: Toward a New Past
A defense of the virtues of an art that’s seemingly more and more lost each year: memorization and declamation. William Gibson, on science fiction authors’ hankering for the way things […]