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

You can never know too much about Johnny Cash, one of the few icons who stands up to repeated listenings, readings, late-night and early morning considerations. You come home from a bad night out, a great night out, sort through the Cash catalogue, and I guarantee there’s something there to send you off to dreamland and get you up and going in the morning. …more

I was always better at stories than at real life. Books are a religion I have found to be more lasting than any church-based one. You must read David Foster Wallace, my friend and fellow believer said, like I was going to love his work and it was going to change my life. But some of us are the type to try and ease into love, to approach it sideways or not at all. And change? Change is frightening. I read that novel in the last semester of my undergraduate degree; it felt like I was reading constantly as a way to avoid all the decisions I needed to make. Or as though I would find the answers in Chapters One or Five. …more

It is not often that a book brings me to tears, but this book had me weeping into my pillow for much longer than is considered appropriate. This novel by Junot Diaz is just what the title suggests: the story of a man named Oscar Wao who has what is arguably a brief and wondrous life. However, the wonder does not come from the traditional source of fortune or adventure. Instead, it is the tale of a lapsed Dominican, a boy who does not follow any of the prescribed “rules” of Dominican manhood – Oscar is a fat, inarticulate nerd who repels women and finds his only solace in writing doomed science fiction novels.

At this point, you may be questioning both mine and Diaz’s definition of the word “wonder.” Let me explain. …more

Despite what some might see as a fuming belligerence that characterizes our age (tea partiers, Rush Limbaugh, Charlie Sheen, etc.), I think we’re hampered by a cultural tendency to be overly polite, especially when it comes to the arts.

Go to France and England and you’ll find people practically dueling over an aesthetic or intellectual dispute—and then inviting each other to dinner the following week for round two. …more

I often worry about over-hyping books.

Nothing ruins a good novel or collection of stories quite as well as a glowing review. So when Nick Flynn calls John D’Agata’s latest book of creative nonfiction, About A Mountain, “utterly amazing” and Ben Marcus raves, “Here is the literary essay raised to the highest form of art,” I’m settled in for smug disappointment. It is, after all, a book about nuclear waste. How good could it be? …more

Two of my family members recently passed away within a few months of each other.  The loss burrowed into my fingertips; for a while pretty much every draft or story I began involved the recent death of a loved one or a missing person.  A writing mentor suggested that I read In the Lake of the Woods by Tim O’Brien.  I had one of those marathon-reading experiences where the book seemed to insist I put it on the top of my to-do list until I finished.

I’ve never read a book whose structure provided so much meaning.  …more

After I read Péter Nádas’s beautiful novella, “Le nu féminine en mouvement,” in the Winter 2010 issue of The Paris Review, I couldn’t believe it: who is this writer? Why had I never heard of him before? How did he do that?

I discovered that he had written other things, many of them translated into English. Just now, I have finished reading his big novel, A Book of Memories. This is the book I have needed to read for years; I feel a little sorry for myself that I didn’t know of it sooner; I feel anxious about how easily I might have missed it. …more

Knowing that War and Peace is Richard Bausch’s favorite book, it seemed only right—especially considering its title—that I read his latest novel, Peace, on the heels of Count Tolstoy’s tome.  Its brevity also appealed to me.  After spending six months with the 1,136 pages that comprise War and Peace, the 171 pages of Bausch’s book tempted me as a tiny dessert might after an enormous meal.  I finished it in a weekend. …more

I interviewed author, Sarah Kilborne, who lives in the same town as I do, Hudson, New York, and takes banjo lessons downstairs in my father’s music store that I live above.

We had dinner a few months ago, where I picked her brain about the writing life, and we both overate pasta. It struck me that she is a wonderful and interesting person, so I asked her a few more questions. …more

Confession time: I’ve never read 1984.

Sure, it was assigned in high school, as were Crime and Punishment, Madame Bovary, and Great Expectations.  I didn’t read those either (though, for some strange reason, I finished Animal Dreams in an inspired flashlight-under-the-covers session the night after the test).  Like many others, I bullshitted, handing in paper after paper filled with wisdom gleaned from the Internet, and flushed out with words that looked literary to me as I thumbed through my thesaurus. …more

Her mother was a nurse, shot in World War II in Nepal.  She—my mother-in-law—was an Ivy League-educated, motorcycle-driving, garden-planting veterinarian in Vermont… with a pilot’s license.  When she passed away after a bout with cancer, two weeks after the birth of my first child, I decided to read her favorite book, Beryl Markham’s West with the Night.   It was, I figured, a book for brave women. …more

This summer, I find myself reading young adult fiction on the bus as inconspicuously as possible, wrapping my arm around the cover in such a way that no one will know its title, and tilting the book just-so, so that no one will see its absurdly large font filling its extremely short chapters.

I am reading Suzanne Collins’s The Hunger Games, and if you must know I am on the third book in the trilogy. …more

When we were all eight, the girls in my grade decided we had secret worlds. One world belonged to me and my best friend Chloe, and the other world belonged to every other eight-year old girl; and the clash between imaginary worlds turned into an all-out Vivian Girls war. …more

The last book I loved is about a woman named Bluma who was, arguably, killed by a poem, and a man called Carlos Brauer who loved books so much he mistook them for his mind, and cemented himself inside them on a desolate beach in Uruguay.

The last book I loved is The House of Paper or La Casa de Papel by Carlos María Domínguez, translated from the Spanish by Nick Caistor. …more

Three years ago this spring I gave myself one Sunday afternoon off from self-pity to indulge in some window-shopping. A movie rental place among the sporadic cush boutiques of a “turning” avenue in Greenpoint, Brooklyn first caught my guilt-trap. …more

I work at a bookstore in Berkeley, California; so, as one can imagine, I get and give book recommendations often.  Many of these recommendations I am compelled to ignore, because between that job and my other one, the writing I try to muster on a semi-regular, frequently infrequent basis, the stack of books calling to be read on my bookshelf, and the myriad other tasks that compile my current life, it is simply impossible to read every book I’m told is great.  That said, I’ll take heed of a recommendation when the recommender’s passion for a particular title is so intense, so contagious, that I catch it like the cold.

Such was the case of my encounter with the last book I loved, Paula Fox’s Desperate Characters.  …more

The first thing I noticed about this book, before I even wrestled with its gruesome and tender topics, is the style.

Flynn is a poet, which is clear from the first sentence. …more

Poets fall in love with poems all the time, so much so that the question “what poem did you love last” isn’t really a question, but an invitation to wax poetic about the current darling in your eye. Because the truth is that a poet learns to fall in love with the words of another. I’ll cheat though, and say this poem is less the last poem I loved and more the last poem that I wanted to love again and again.

I stalked this poem, going to Agni’s online site again and again to check it out. Jericho Brown’s “Rick” is a poem of hunger, and it’s startling because for me it changed the shape of want, made it less physical and more intimate. It also made me think about a world of considerations that moved beyond the poem. …more