August 31, 2015
Ross, Pynchon, Vonnegut (Part Two)
In Kurt Vonnegut’s Paris Review interview, he calls his books “mosaics of jokes.” (The PR interview, published in 1977, is itself a kind of mosaic; it draws from four different […]
April 8, 2015
Trophies
In The Rag-Picker’s Guide to Poetry, Rick Barot, one of the book’s contributors, offers this bit of testimony about his development as a writer: For years, what I cared about […]
March 20, 2015
Speaking with Objects in Robert Frost, Richard Pryor, and Charles Baxter
In his fantastic book on the craft of fiction, Burning Down the House, Charles Baxter examines how some authors make animate and inanimate objects (like clouds and houses) come to life, gaze […]
April 10, 2014
Art Spiegelman, Through the Looking-Glass
Tonight in Ypsilanti, Art Spiegelman gave a talk titled “What the %@&*! Happened to Comics?” The crowd was a mix of EMU students and fiftysomethings in nylon windbreakers; Spiegelman took […]
December 30, 2010
Double Double, Part 2 (Abecedarians)
The Best American Poetry 2010, guest edited by Amy Gerstler, is chock-full of dark delights: Sandra Beasley’s “Unit of Measure,” Lynn Emanuel’s “Dear Final Journey,” Gabriel Gudding’s “And What, Friends, […]
December 24, 2010
“You wanna see a fire truck? Burn up your house.”
It’s my daughter Zia’s first Christmas, which means — spoiler alert! — I finally get to play Santa. We have a foot-high rosemary “tree” and a gas-lit fire; we have […]
December 1, 2010
Today, 70 Years Pryor
Had he not died in 2005 of cardiac arrest, Richard Pryor would have turned seventy years old today. He survives in countless ways — in video clips from The Ed […]