Sunday, September 22, 2024
Spent a lovely few weeks making my way, intentionally slowly, through Carl Phillips’s new book of poetry, “Scattered Snows, to the North”. A huge fan of his sensitive, fluid-with-pauses work. A few lines I was especially struck by (though reading the original in print, with line breaks, is …“Theodicy,” by Nick Laird. What a phenonomal poem, with a vivid, piercing close.
Sunday, April 19, 2020
Borrowing the structure of a few other online writers whose websites I enjoy (Paul Robert Lloyd and Mark Boulton, among others), I thought I’d start weekly low-key look-backs on the week, bullet list-style. Perhaps weekly is aspirational. We’ll see. Greatly enjoyed Emily Nussbaum’s long New Yorker …Friday, March 6, 2020
I just finished Toni Morrison’s The Source of Self-Regard: Selected Essays, Speeches, and Meditations (2019), and every few pages or so, I thought to myself: it’s rare I’m taking in prose this rhythmically perfect, this deeply intelligent. From “Peril” (2008): How bleak, unlivable, insufferable …I was impressed and moved by Ocean Vuong’s debut novel, On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous. Poetic, searching, deeply affecting. Highly recommended. Related reading/listening: Jia Tolentino in The New Yorker; Kat Chow in The Atlantic; and this Politics & Prose conversation with the author (genuine, exacting, deeply intelligent).
From the novel:
Is that what art is? To be touched thinking what we feel is ours when, in the end, it was someone else, in longing, who finds us?
Monday, November 12, 2018
From a substantive new interview with Joshua Rothman: I had felt for many, many years that the form of the novel, as I used it, created a distance from life. When I started to write about myself, that distance disappeared. If you write about your life, as it is to yourself, every mundane detail is …Sunday, June 17, 2018
On this Father's Day, here are four terrific recent pieces I've been lucky to come across — two very short essays, two short poems — that capture this part of life so well: "Mum's the Word," by Rivka Galchen"What is Possible," by Mohsin Hamid "To White Noise," by Carrie Fountain"Poem …Friday, June 8, 2018
The Longform Podcast's new episode with Elif Batuman is fantastic. I've enjoyed her writing for a few years, and in this interview you can just feel her thinking deeply about literature and writing and gender and observing in cities around the world and much more. As interviewer Max Linsky tweeted …Monday, December 11, 2017
I wrote this piece, “Words of William H. Gass touched readers around the globe," for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. It was published this past Sunday. (The anecdote at the beginning — which in a way launched my relationship with Gass — almost didn’t happen. I went to that literary …George Saunders on Monocle 24: A does-the-heart-and-mind-good interview with Georgina Godwin.
Tuesday, October 24, 2017
For The New Yorker Radio Hour, Joshua Rothman walks Central Park with one of my favorite living writers. I especially loved this bit, which comes after Knausgaard is asked about the differences between the way children and adults go through their days: I have four children, and maybe when I spend a …Tuesday, July 4, 2017
After discovering this short appreciation in a Jonathan Lethem essay collection on bookish things, I just read it aloud to my wife, who'd been curious about why I've been so utterly taken by this series and increasingly hungry for each subsequent volume. Lethem nailed it ("Knausgaard's approach is …Tuesday, May 9, 2017
A special piece by Daniel Mendelsohn about Homer's epic, his father and a journey they took together.Loved this World Book Club episode, with informed and curious readers asking Karl Ove Knausgaard about one of my favorite works of literature in several years. We shouldn’t be surprised that he’s a thoughtful and candid interviewee.
Saturday, December 10, 2016
In September of this year, I was honored to be part of “The William H. Gass Symposium: International Writing” at Washington University in St. Louis. I joined Lorin Cuoco, who co-founded the International Writers Center with Gass in 1990 and was its associate director until 2001, in giving some …Sunday, October 23, 2016
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FvvjWhFlV38?feature=oembed&enablejsapi=1&origin=https://safe.txmblr.com&wmode=opaque&w=500&h=281] Yes, please.Sunday, July 10, 2016
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Having just finished book three of Karl Ove Knausgaard’s My Struggle (I enjoyed the first two more, though this volume’s still captivating), I was eager to listen to both part one and part two of the author’s interviews on Michael Silverblatt’s “Bookworm.” It’s great listening. These insights from …Saturday, June 7, 2014
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Sad news: The great Irish poet Seamus Heaney has died at age 74. When I was a freshman in college in the early 1990s, I was fortunate enough to take an upper-level English class with Dr. Ed Duffy, who dedicated a few months of the semester just to Heaney’s work. It was a remarkable immersion, …Tuesday, July 30, 2013
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Lots going on at my other blog, perhaps most notably Cynthia Ozick’s review of Middle C, which carried the cover of the Sunday New York Times Book Review.Saturday, March 23, 2013
At McSweeney’s, Teddy Wayne’s “Feedback From James Joyce’s Submission of Ulysses to His Creative Writing Workshop.”Friday, March 15, 2013
Fun interview in The Daily Beast. Happily surprised to see my name pop up.Sunday, February 10, 2013
I really like this bit from Katherine Boo, taken from her interview for the New York Times Book Review’s “By the Book” series: I was working my butt off trying to investigate the violent deaths of some homeless children, under circumstances that had been covered up by the police, when I reached the …Saturday, January 5, 2013
From William H. Gass’ forthcoming novel, Middle C: Joey … rails ran across France then, rails ran through the mountain passes and through tunnels into and out of the mountains, rails ran along the Mur, through forests of fir trees, because the war was over, the sirens had hoarse …Tuesday, January 1, 2013
The Frank Lloyd Wright house in Ebsworth Park, which we visited in February This post is part of my “Annual Favorites” list I’ve been keeping for the past decade-plus. Favorite Books (Goodreads profile) The German Genius, by Peter Watson (choice passages) Journey to the Abyss: The Diaries of Count …Sunday, December 9, 2012
I’m still at work editing The Ear’s Mouth Must Move: The Essential Interviews of William H. Gass. While I’d love for this to be published in a gloriously beautiful print version, I haven’t yet found an interested publisher. So it’s likely that, as with Abstractions Arrive, I will publish it myself …Thursday, November 15, 2012
The subtitle of this Slate piece is way too glib, but the essay from Piper — a literature professor at McGill — is worth reading. Thoughtful and thought-provoking. It’s excerpted from Piper’s book, Book Was There: Reading in Electronic Times.Monday, July 30, 2012
Today is William Gass’ 88th birthday. For the Big Other website, John Madera asked some writers, readers, and publishers to name their own “literary pillars,” as a tribute to Gass and his “50 Literary Pillars” project from the early 1990s. After being invited to …