October 5, 2014
Ruefle, Redux (Part One)
Mary Ruefle gave a reading at the University of Michigan last Thursday, which meant that I was able to spend an hour, along with about a hundred others, in her […]
June 8, 2012
Short Takes: Cutting It Out, Keeping It In
Gangs of robots, social expectations, and charting syllogisms: if George Saunders, Lewis Carroll, and many others had written the much-maligned Twilight series. C. S. Lewis on “the thing” writers write […]
January 17, 2012
Short Takes: Poetic Violence
Why is it that, 600 years later, Joan of Arc still fascinates us? And by “us” I mean, of course, not just you and me, reader, but “Shakespeare, Voltaire, Twain, […]