September 16, 2019
What Makes a Character Human?
It’s been almost twenty years ago now since James Wood penned (metaphorically speaking, of course, since I’m sure he used a computer) his famous critique of a genre of literary […]
July 26, 2019
On the Importance of the Authorial Voice
In his book The Art of Perspective, part of Graywolf Press’s series of craft books on writing (which I’ve written about a few times before on this blog), Christopher Castellani […]
August 13, 2018
On “Ethnic Fiction”
Mark McGurl’s The Program Era is a wonderful book, and I’ve mentioned it several times before on this blog, but it does use the problematic label “ethnic fiction” to describe […]
May 24, 2018
On “The Death of the Novel”
Declaring that the novel is dead sometimes feels like a pastime as old as the novel itself. Even men in the nineteenth century would lament how the novel was being […]
January 30, 2017
La La Land, Swing Time, and Nostalgia in 2017
Perhaps now is not the best time to discuss artistic nostalgia. We have just witnessed the inauguration of a president whose campaign routinely masked bigotry with invocations of longing for […]