Eli S. Evans: Is That It

by Daniel Green The sheer bulk of Ron Silliman’s The Alphabet, as well as its apparently arbitrary structural principle, could initially leave the impression it deliberately defies reading. The same could be said of the larger project, the “life work” in progress and of which The Alphabet is a...

by Richard M. Cook I discovered Alfred Kazin’s journals in the summer of 1984. I was researching a book on American public criticism, criticism written for the reading public, or what Virginia Woolf called the “common reader,” rather than for academics. Kazin was one of the critics I wanted...

The Lion King, walt Disney Pictures, 1994 From Bookslut: “When nude/ I turned my back because he likes the back. /He moved onto me. // Everything I know about love and its necessities/ I learned in that one moment/ when I found myself/ thrusting my little burning red backside...

Flann O’Brien, Brian O’Toole From Boston Review: “A really funny book,” was James Joyce’s verdict on At Swim-Two-Birds, the comic masterpiece by his compatriot Brian O’Nolan, a.k.a. Flann O’Brien. Graham Greene said he read it “with excitement, amusement and the kind of glee one experiences when people smash china...

Real poetry originates in the guts and only flowers in the head...

Slaughterhouse 5.5, photograph by Alev Adil From New York Magazine: A cranky ostrich in a rumpled suit, Kurt Vonnegut might seem an odd fit for the staid Library of America. (His advice to young writers? “Literature should not disappear up its own asshole, so to speak.”) But Vonnegut, like...

Learning to read Ulysses means tracing a path through its strangeness...

by Gregory Jusdanis The world is text. Mallarmé and Flaubert described this possibility at the end of the nineteenth century and Derrida proclaimed it again more recently. But now we can say that the world is literature. It is turning literary through the Internet. What is taking place today...

The myconymic apprenticeship would serve as a point of access to human existence...

“Ahem!” said the Mouse, with an important air, from Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, by Lewis Carroll, illustrated by Charles Robinson, 1907 From Threepenny Review: It may be that Carroll’s tale has deeper roots in the human psyche than its nursery reputation might suggest. Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland does not...

by Madhavi Menon Surprisingly, queer theorists have rarely encountered Shakespeare. Not because they are badly-read or have blinkers on, but because of a deep belief that Shakespeare existed “before” the days of queer theory, and so it would be anachronistic to put the one in conversation with the other....

Trading Stories | by Jhumpa Lahiri

The New Yorker

Books, and the stories they contained, were the only things I felt I was able to possess as a child. Even then, the possession was not literal; my father is...

Boasting a scandalous history, Joyce’s novel is famous for the controversy it caused when it was serialized in the Little Review...

by Thomas Travisano The poet Elizabeth Bishop (1911-1979) was once considered a comparatively isolated figure. Because she shunned labels and avoided becoming identified with well-publicized literary movements, she was once considered—as David Kalstone wrote in 1977— a “hard to ‘place.’” However, as her posthumous fame has grown and...

Graffiti art by Banksy, near Ikea Croydon From Boston Review: Every Sunday morning I spend a few hours with the colossal edition of the New York Times and its tendency to sum up because I don’t want to see the week coming; I’d rather watch it going. One Sunday...