Ariana Reines’ Coeur De Lion makes me want to drink and have sex. Not frilly drinks but hard strong liquor, and not just any sex, but the stuff of human explosions. …more

I’ve been told that it’s harder to make friends once you are an adult because in order to be close to someone you have to be vulnerable.

I was told this as though it is impossible for mature adults to be vulnerable. We just don’t do that. It’s not allowed. And that really, truly, made me sad. The idea is that you have to put away your inner turmoiled feelings and keep them to yourself in order to be the right kind of person. That disturbs me. …more

It’s not easy to explain David Foster Wallace’s Brief Interviews with Hideous Men, especially to a co-worker or a parent, or your wife or your wife’s friend.

First you have to tell them about the format. Yes: there are brief interviews. But you don’t hear the questions and you don’t know who is doing the interviewing or why. …more

The moment when a new book is begun it is a moment that vibrates, as potential energy (a writer’s wisdom distilled into a completed work, printed, bound, placed in your hands), converted slowly into kinetic energy (second by second, minute by minute, hour by hour, day by day) with each turn of the page. …more

“When the imminent demise of the great writer Prétextat Tach became public knowledge—he was given two months to live—journalists the world over requested private interviews with the eighty-year-old gentleman. …Monsieur Tach viewed his diagnosis [of the rare Elzenveiverplatz Syndrome, cartilage cancer] as a hitherto unhoped for ennoblement: with his hairless, obese physique—that of a eunuch in every respect except for his voice—he dreaded dying of some stupid cardiovascular disease.”

And then the unsuspecting journalists begin to arrive for their long, sharp, demeaning lashings. Prétextat Tach isn’t just a genius; he’s a misanthropic, crazed blowhard. …more

To truly commit a poem to memory is to commit your life to that poem. Out of all the many verses I’ve memorized over the last year, no other has so fully enveloped my days than John Ashbery’s “Poem at the New Year.” So much so that its evocative and elegiac images mark all my mythologies, memories, lies, fantasies, evasions, romances. …more

Was there ever a place greyer, wetter or lonelier than Paris in the fall?

For an Irish person, that’s a weighty question to consider. I guess that in some other incarnation of myself I might have found the glistening cobblestones of Montmartre immeasurably romantic but with my fiancé away on tour and being (scarcely) self-employed, the dampness weighed down heavily on my mood, pushing me into a period of semi-hibernation. …more

One of the first things that became apparent while reading Yvonne Vera’s The Stone Virgins was a gentle spiraling, a contracting of the scope of the novel, from the streets of Bulawayo to the small village of Kezi via the local gathering place Thandabantu; from Thenjiwe and her unnamed lover to her sister Nonceba; contracting into a pinpoint during the murder of Thenjiwe and the rape and mutilation of Nonceba. Flowing with the narrative are lyrical descriptions of the landscape and the “intoxicating scent of marula seeds falling everywhere,” all welcoming the reader into the heart of Zimbabwe. …more

Having been an English teacher with an undergrad degree in Journalism, one might think I read a lot of quality work, but I don’t.

I read news and posts that probably take less time to write than it does for me to make coffee, and I worry about that. I fear my sensitivities for literature have been dulled at the edge. I love tales where things blow up and the good guy woos the voluptuous gal and rights the wrong. What I fear now is that the endless bombardment of violent sound-bite images on television, drug store novels and in movies have eroded my appreciation of simple, elegant word art. …more

Have you ever read a book about a sensational event that isn’t sensational itself? That manages to transcend the shocking element to reveal a much more interesting and nuanced story, which then helps you begin to comprehend, even if not accept, the things that happen in extraordinary circumstances? …more

I read Seek: Reports from the Edges of America & Beyond in a hotel room.

Nowhere fancy: I was in Asheville, North Carolina, facing nothing more uncomfortable than bugs and frogs and humidity, the steady chatter of fat people plunking themselves into the swimming pool outside. …more

We were in the “international bookstore” of Xiamen, China, which is really a Chinese junk and bookstore but has half a dozen shelves of English books (such as Gossip Girl and 7 Habits of Highly Effective People). My wife found a Signet Classics edition of The Brothers Karamazov. “Do you want that?” she asked. “You do, don’t you? It looks boring.”

“I’ve already read it,” I said. …more

I was browsing through my favorite small indie bookstore (Farley’s in New Hope, PA; it’s magnificent) when the cover and title of this book captured my eye.

A book displaying peaceful nighttime ocean scene, mildly disrupted by the UFO beaming a ray of light into the ocean and the unmistakeable orange tentacle grasping at the eye from the foreground, Stories for Nighttime and Some For The Day seems part children’s adventure tales, part foreboding mysteries, and altogether oddly comforting… reminiscent of covers pulled up to the chin, glow-in-the-dark stars on the ceiling, and worn teddy bears. …more

Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter, Mario Vargas Llosa’s 1977 novel, begins with an epigraph–a quote from Salvador Elizondo’s The Graphographer–about the watery line between reality and its representation in language.

“I write,” it begins. “I write that I am writing. Mentally I see myself writing that I am writing and I can also see myself seeing that I am writing.” …more

The last book I loved was Senselessness, written by by Horacio Castellanos Moya, and translated by Katherine Silver.

I wish I could indulge a paranoid fantasy. Maybe a nice conspiracy theory centered around me. It really unburdens a person from the decision-making day-to-day life requires. “What to do today? Battle the forces arrayed against me? Is there any other option?” …more

Play It As It Lays  isn’t for pussies. Published first in 1970, the novel is considered an indictment of Hollywood culture, but it’s much more than that. Its capacity to terrify you into deep self-reflection turns on the revolting nihilism it portrays. Are there people like this? …more

My boyfriend sometimes says things like, “Back in high school, I was a theater geek.” What he means is that he attended acting camps during all his summer vacations, and he played juicy supporting roles like Horatio and Don Pedro in his high school’s Shakespeare productions.

This niggles me. I think the phrase “theater geek” is an oxymoron. Theater people are not geeks.

Actually, let me qualify that statement. While it is conceivable that some tech crew personnel are geeks, actors are not true geeks. …more

I read Alice Munro’s books in benders. It usually takes me less than two days to finish one of her collections, and while reading it, I make and break promises to myself—to stop after this story, to take a shower, to run an errand just for the exercise or maybe see a friend (or else around eleven PM, I will find myself regretting how restless and dirty I am, still in last night’s pajamas, which are now exactly my body temperature.) …more

Maps, at their best, are more than representations of the world. They are worlds unto themselves—endlessly explorable, enigmatic, complicated, and alive. I remember the first globe I owned as a kid. I liked to spin it on its axis, as hard as I could, as if it were the big-money wheel from some cheesy game show, Wheel of Fortune or The Price is Right. I’d close my eyes, place my index finger on a random spot and imagine winning a trip to wherever my finger ended up when the spinning stopped. Which, more often than not, was the middle of an ocean, or some distant, exotically-named island the size of a pencil dot—Midway, Guadeloupe, Reunion, Mauritius, Cape Verde, Kiribati, Tuvalu… …more

The last poem I loved was “Nothing Twice” by the well-known Polish poet Wislawa Szymborska. I loved all of her poems that followed, but “Nothing Twice” was the first Szymborska poem I ever read. Last week, I was on my way to the train station in Amsterdam, when I found a large bookstore. As most avid readers, I couldn’t just walk past. So I decided to spend an hour there, and I stumbled upon Szymborska’s collected poems. …more

You are 25 years old, and since college you’ve been shelving children’s books in a small Missouri library and living on the top floor of a theater, where you are banned from flushing your toilet during performance hours.  The lives of your alcoholic boss and wheelchair bound co-worker are more appealing than your own.

How do you add excitement to your life? …more

I return to The Street again and again.

I first read the novel when I working as a bookseller out on West 4^th St. in New York.  A man I sold books with lent me his copy, saying that it was out of print and he needed to make sure he got it back, but that he thought I should read it.  The Street, a 1928 Yiddish novel by Israel Rabon, tells the story of a lonely, recently discharged Polish Army veteran trying to survive in the streets of Lodz.  …more

How do we know what we know ’til we learn what we’ve learned? Once upon a time I fashioned myself to be one of those thinkers who, as I sophomorically put it, “find the deep in the superficial.” When I write that Robyn Schiff’s second poetry collection surpasses all of my heavy thoughts of mundane, I mean it as an intense compliment. Schiff makes connections to references I think only experts in the field would know about. Certainly no one else would have this uncommon knowledge of the history of pre-fabricated steel, Singer sewing machines, and the marriage of Elizabeth Colt. I think Schiff might actually know everything about all. …more

The week I decided to move to Los Angeles, I read a book of poetry by a woman who had lived there for four years, hated it, left it for New York, and couldn’t stop writing poems about it.

It seemed fitting. Except Becca Klaver came “back East,” leaving Los Angeles, whereas I’m about to set up shop there. …more

I am on a reading spree off and on and a lot of it depending on the state of my mind and my love affairs. If I am happy and in love I don’t read as much as I would if I was single. See there had to be something positive about my being the eternally single one.

A book I absolutely devoured in the recent times and one that utterly transported me to another world was Kartography by a Pakistani author called Kamila Shamsie. …more

Lately, I’ve found myself in that kind of frenetic stage of higher education where I feel compelled to read all the books I’ve been told deeply matter.

I figure reading the chosen few masterpieces is one of those requisite steps to enlightened adulthood, like lying about how much I floss or pretending to like endive. So in my jumpy, schizophrenic manner, I’ve attempted to get through a series of seminal texts, only to finish each book bemused about what exactly it is I’m supposed to have absorbed. …more

I didn’t just love Valerie Martin’s Property—I devoured it, thought about it for weeks, forced it upon every single one of my reading friends, and even initiated a brief correspondence with the writer because I just had to talk about it. …more

Making Toast by Roger Rosenblatt is a lovely memoir written by a prestigious author / journalist / columnist about how, following the death of his daughter, he and his wife Ginny move in to help their son-in-law raise their three grandchildren.

I don’t know if it is that theory of Schadenfreude which caused me to read this book, but I’m willing to bet it’s the personal grief I feel now that led me to pick it up on a lonely Friday night. 166 pages long, I read it in under 2 hours, with the feeling that once I finished it, I should read it all over again. …more

When I was a kid, I loved participating in my school’s science fair each year even though I did not necessarily have any aptitude for the scientific.

My experiments were never that inspiring but I certainly thought they were—volcanoes erupting with the magical properties of food coloring, baking soda, and vinegar, a suspension bridge made out of balsa wood and kite string that could hold a heavy brick, a microscope set up with a dark red smear of my blood on a carefully prepared slide—simple experiments that made me feel like I had accomplished something innovative, even in the face of the far bolder experiments around me. …more

Matthea Harvey’s “The Crowds Cheered As Gloom Galloped Away” resides in her second full-length collection, the wonderfully-titled Sad Little Breathing Machine. It is a poem about ponies, sadness, and the inversion of cognitive behavioral therapy. It is a poem about pills, the surprising delicateness of rodents’ palates, and the psychological benefits of a day at the races. A weird, exquisitely-detailed Joseph Cornell box of a poem, “The Crowds Cheered” opens up on a pharmacological utopia/dystopia where sadness has finally been banished. …more