Posts by author
Kirstin Allio
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Remembering Jenny Diski
At n+1, philosopher and writer Justin E.H. Smith remembers Jenny Diski, and shares their correspondence. For Diski, death was always the subject, the knot to admire, wryly, and attempt to untie: …the year before her diagnosis, Jenny invokes the bleak…
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Don’t Judge a Book…
In the Court of Po Biz, I tend to relate to the jester. Over at Entropy, John Yohe does some quick name-checking and decides, a little cynically, by the blurb, that Robyn Schiff’s new book, A Woman of Property, is…
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Telling Your Own Truth
The art of storytelling is largely about choosing what is to be conveyed and—most importantly—what is to be left out. For FSG’s “Works in Progress,” Guillermo Erades, author of the just-released Back to Moscow, writes about the persistently bedeviling give-and-take of fiction…
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All About the Essay
John D’Agata, visionary champion of the essay and master anthologizer, sees the lyric form “partake of the poem in its density and shapeliness, it’s distillation of ideas and musicality of language.” He also sees it as unbound to conventional notions of…
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The Cool Future
“All plots tend to move deathward,” the narrator of “White Noise” says. “This is the nature of plots. Political plots, terrorist plots, lovers’ plots, narrative plots, plots that are part of children’s games. We edge nearer death every time we…
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Poetry as Peace Work
Over at Los Angeles Review of Books, Leah Mirakhor engages poet Robin Coste Lewis, 2015 National Book Award winner of Voyage of the Sable Venus, in deep and generous conversation about writing and life. Coste Lewis remembers Audre Lorde as a…
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Miracle and Magic
Check out Deborah Treisman in lively conversation with Lara Vapnyar on the “miracle of a New York City adventure,” the bewitching, wish-granting power of Leonard Cohen’s songs, and Russian immigrants. Vapnyar’s forthcoming novel, Still Here, explores Russian culture in the…
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Douse, Rattle, and Roll
There’s a treasure trove of poetry recommendations at Tin House’s Open Bar. Jessica Lakritz’s Sex on Sundaze is alive: she writes her lines on human bodies. One Tin House staff member declares, “Poetry is the hard liquor of literature, and I choose…
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Poetry in Paradox
The title of experimentalist poet Rosmarie Waldrop’s new book, Gap Gardening (New Directions), is “classic Waldrop, a phrase that asserts its meaning by undoing itself,” writes Dan Chiasson for the New Yorker. Waldrop is among those who “track the nanotech of language,…
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Maggie Nelson’s Flow
Hilton Als of the New Yorker speaks with Maggie Nelson and her partner Harry Dodge about the continuum of life, work, love, and gender. Nelson’s most recent book, The Argonauts, rises with the tides of her own transformation in pregnancy, and Dodge’s…
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Calling the Canon
Don’t miss Kaveh Akbar’s review of Olio, by Tyehimba Jess (Wave Books), for Oxford American: The characters cast in Olio’s poly-vocal swirl count no fewer than a dozen, and almost all of them are famous (or infamous) figures of the early…
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Poets in Place
Poet Ange Mlinko responds to a challenge from FSG’s Works in Progress series, to “tackle a question—or invent a new one—that lies within [Rilke’s] Letters to a Young Poet.” Mlinko muses on poets and places: do writers of beautiful lines…