Posts by author
Guia Cortassa
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Lucky Lethem
On the other hand, hey, I’m 50. This is the third time I’ve gathered a decade’s stories. Let’s be clear about how much such introspection matters to the reader who’s either aboard or not aboard my “project” by now: likely,…
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A Life in Books
Often I wouldn’t be able to keep up, like with Dostoevsky’s The Idiot, but it made it feel like a whole new world of books had been opened up to me, dangerous and menacing and completely appealing to my teenage…
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Gambling on an MFA
There is a certain writerly allure to casino gambling that I find difficult to resist — or perhaps I should call it a not writing allure. Having a crowd chant my name as I shoot dice is not something I’ll…
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A Southern Northerner
Through the South, I tried to make sense of what seemed similarly wrong with the North. Over at BuzzFeed Books, James Hannaham explains why he decided to be a “Southern writer” despite his New York origins.
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Similes for Sale
You could spend hours being creative and find out that half of your ideas are on the Internet already. So why bother pursuing new ideas when I can sell you some that are “lightly used”? Should you ever feel uninspired…
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An “I” for an “I”
For a growing number of essayists, memoirists, and other wielders of the unwieldy “I,” confessional has become an unwelcome label—an implicit accusation of excessive self-absorption, of writing not just about oneself but for oneself. Over at the Atlantic, Leslie Jamison argues that personal…
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True Detective
Voltaire became steeped in the country’s rules of criminal procedure, a labyrinth he found appalling: “As there are half-proofs, that is to say, half-truths, it is clear that there are half-innocent and half-guilty persons. So we start by giving them…
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The Art of Literature
Literature often depends on the strategic disappointment of expectation. Sometimes, the effect of that is humorous; at other times, it’s unnerving: I consider it crucial to the composition of a novel. Laughter is physical; it involves the body of the…
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Click Here to Read
The form is far more important than the content. They don’t even really have to match. If you’re talking about an author people are a little less familiar with, you’ll want some black-and-white landscape photography or a 19th century painting,…
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Learning While Teaching
I went to university in 1964, a different era, when very few of us, around 5 per cent of the population, had the chance. We were undoubtedly a lucky generation. Now, many many more of us, young and older, are…
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Call Me Friend
Patrick James Dunagan explores the human and professional relationship between Herman Melville and Nathaniel Hawthorne in a review of Erik Hage’s book on the subject over at Bookslut: Hawthorne inspired and reinforced Melville’s conviction to elevate the writing of Moby-Dick beyond…
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Sappho, Who?
The greatest problem for Sappho studies is that there’s so little Sappho to study. It would be hard to think of another poet whose status is so disproportionate to the size of her surviving body of work. Over at the…