Eli S. Evans: Is That It

In English writing we seldom speak of tradition, though we occasionally apply its name in deploring its absence. We cannot refer to “the tradition” or to “a tradition”; at most, we employ the adjective in saying that the poetry of So-and-so is “traditional” or even “too traditional.”

It's been striking me how many parties there are in Shakespeare, how (as in Proust) they seem to occur mid-play...

by Rauan Klassnik People want poems about titties. Want poems that parody the Kill List (or the Fuck List). Want stalker hate poetry. Poems about dogs pissing on other dogs. Mosquitos fucking people in the ear. Hi, I’m Rauan Klassnik and I curate and illustrate the occasional Poem-A-Day for...

Consider, for example, the Pynchon anecdotes told by the television producer Deane Rink—who attended Cornell a few years after Pynchon and studied creative writing under Walter Slatoff, with whom Pynchon had also studied. Rink tells his stories as part of an early Web exercise in which he sent emails...

On the subject of death I’m inclined to turn to my two favourite writers. Vladimir Nabokov begins Speak Memory, an autobiography of sorts, with the kind of banality any reader of his knows better than to get cosy with: ‘The cradle rocks above an abyss and common sense tells...

Though Aldous Huxley is primarily remembered for his novels and to a lesser extent his essays, he began his writing career as a poet. While a student at Balliol College at Oxford, having been exempted from military service due to extremely poor eyesight, he was involved in several student...

All his life Chekhov lived on his own soul; he was always himself, inwardly free...

On a solo road trip this summer I took along the ten-disk set of Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn for the ride...

Georg Simmel is known primarily as a sociologist, but his works roam and lurch between academic disciplines, blurring sociology into social psychology, anthropology and philosophy...

Vijaydan Detha, the fabulist, folklorist writer would have been pleased if one were to start talking about him with a chougou - a form of mostly nonsensical rhythm or rhyme he employed in most of his stories much in the oral tradition of storytelling that he found himself most...

Various explanations have been offered for the obsession with conspiracy. C. G. Jung theorized that our sense of individuality is enhanced by the possession of a secret which the individual is pledged to guard, and that the earliest evidences of social structure reveal the craving for secret organizations. If...

Charles Manson, Crime & Punishment Museum, Washington D.C.. Photograph by Sarah Stierch From London Review of Books: The Ketchup Bottle Holdup was the point where the five-year-old Manson’s life veered from hard luck to horror show. His mother and uncle went to prison in Moundsville, West Virginia. He was...

The Poet, who made Chairman Mao’s red-braised pork for supper last night, so I am not entitled to complain about anything, has a dark side. Before he was an academic he was a book dealer. He gave up book dealing but not the books. We live in a terraced...