May 2, 2018
Omniscience, Paranoia, and Postmodern Fiction
Broadly, there are two diverging traditions evident in contemporary fiction. The first is often called “realism” and is today most notably evangelized by the critic James Wood, who in his […]
August 30, 2015
Ross, Pynchon, Vonnegut (Part One)
Yesterday, at the end of my discussion of Fran Ross’s Oreo, I promised to do something that I’ll have to do anyway in a couple of months: compare Ross to Thomas […]
April 30, 2015
Hitler. Toklas.
Hitler took his last foul breath on this date, seventy years ago. He doubled down on his leave-taking: cyanide capsule, bullet. I think we can all agree he was a […]
September 28, 2013
Matter and Antimatter
Twenty-eight years ago, at the University of Wisconsin, I took an introductory course in philosophy. Asked to write about epistemology (as espoused by Descartes, I think, or maybe Bishop Berkeley), […]
July 4, 2011
KR in the 60’s: “America goes on, goes on”
a whirlwind survey of the Kenyon Review’s final Old Series decade, part of this special summer blog series and a follow-up to these previous surveys of the 40’s AND 50’s! […]