June 2012
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A Hologram For The King
At The New York Times, Michiko Kakutani reviews Dave Eggers’ A Hologram for the King, calling it a “comic but deeply affecting tale about one man’s travails that also provides a bright, digital snapshot of our times.” For more on…
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Ben Lerner in The New Yorker
“In the name of clarity, a lot of authors offer what strike me as basically pre-fabricated structures of feeling, leaving no room for the reader to participate in the construction of meaning.” Ben Lerner, poet and author of Leaving the…
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The Utopian Project
“In relation to the future, a poem is like a note sealed in a bottle and thrown into the sea.” Charles Simic writes on Poetry and Utopia for the New York Review of Books.
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Cattle Haul
The latest story featured by Electric Literature’s Recommended Reading comes from National Book Award winner Jesmyn Ward, author of Salvage The Bones. The story, originally published in A Public Space, is a powerful look at a long drive across the…
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Writing for the Ear
“Language can still be an adventure if we remember that words can make a kind of melody. In novels, news stories, memoirs and even to-the-point memos, music is as important as meaning. In fact, music can drive home the meaning…
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Musical Effects
At The Chronicle, Mark Edmundson, English professor at University of Virginia, explains the emotional importance of pop music, as it “suggests, by its easy, pleasurable repetitions,” that our “static inside” makes sense, as “we can pretend, for the duration of a…
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Existential Ménage-à-Trois
Andy Martin, author of The Boxer and the Goalkeeper, writes about the woman called Wanda who ended the “bromance” between Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus. “Camus was the new kid on the block, confronted by the great metropolitan circle of critics and…
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Watchword by Pura López Colomé
There is spiritual alchemy at work here, making one wish this piece, and many others, could be chanted by choruses taking turns, in both languages, with an audience not responding audibly between poems.
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The Last Book (Collection) I Loved: The Ken Kesey Collection
What would the man who said, “I’d rather be a lightning rod than a seismograph,” think about becoming a museum piece? The quote, by Ken Kesey, appears in the first chapter of The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Tom Wolfe’s chronicle…
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Dan Weiss’s Morning Coffee
Thinking about what existed before the big bang hurts my brain. How to kiss. Should the tides rise, San Francisco will look a lot more like I imagined it from the never ending bridge crossing on Full House. Today in…
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SELF-MADE MAN #11: Blood and Ceremony
I’m trying to tell you that there’s something steady inside each of us, something unconcerned with expectation or gender or fear. There’s a center, and it’s like a friendly ghost of every person we’ve ever been.