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 […]
September 9, 2016
How To
Who said—and I’m woefully paraphrasing—that each poem teaches you to read it in the reading of it? Or each poet teaches you to understand their personal language within the poems themselves? I […]
April 1, 2016
No One Is Ordinary; Everyone Is Ordinary
Whenever my brother and I have talked about depression or therapy, which have both been part of my life for over half of it, he will bring up the film […]
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 […]
November 9, 2013
With or Without You: Government Censorship and Literary Creativity
Good Queen Bess, absolute monarch during the great flowering of English drama, had a hair-trigger policy on censorship. No writer was allowed to criticize the Queen or her policy on […]