Posts by author
Kyle Williams
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Too Much For Leopold Bloom to Keep Track Of
Over at Guernica, Paul Stephens looks at the current state of “information overload,” and how it’s been explored in art from the avant-garde poetry of Lyn Hejinian to the conceptual writing of Kenneth Goldsmith, with additional commentary from Ezra Pound and…
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Judging by the Cover
Covers not only stage an interaction between word and image, printed matter and visual representation, they also broker various connections among reader, designer, editor, publisher, and bookseller. Using Peter Mendelsund’s amazing books Cover and What We See When We Read…
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We Must Do Better This Time
The American Scholar is reprinting an article published in its Spring 1970 edition, “Comments on Neglected Books of the Past Twenty-Five Years,” in the hope of making “a small impact” on American literary history, just as the original article’s publication…
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Is Writing Useless?
My compulsion to write does not occlude the uselessness of filling pages with words. I know that what I do is pointless, one more message in a bottle in a moment when everyone else around me is also casting messages…
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Percival Everett, Begrudgingly
Everything is about identity. What is not? Over at VQR, Matthew Dischinger interviews Percival Everett, who expresses his views on the necessity of region and place in literature, good old-fashioned American racism, and his hatred of USA Today.
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An American Writer from Russia
At the New Yorker, John Colapinto explores Nabokov’s quintessentially American classic, Lolita, and just how a Russian-born writer could so perfectly capture American culture as an emigre, working specifically with Robert Roper’s new biography on the great writer, Nabokov in…
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Sylvia Plath’s First Tragedy
I don’t know whether it is a hereditary characteristic, but our little family is altogether too prone to lie awake at nights hating ourselves for stupidities—technical or verbal or whatever—and to let careless, cruel remarks fester until they blossom in…
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An Interview with James Wood
Over at Electric Literature, Steve Paulson interviews legendary literary critic James Wood, who comments on a variety of subjects: what makes a good critic; the plight of reading widely in our contemporary age; literature as analogous to religion; genre fiction;…
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Orwell’s First Love
Brain Pickings dives into the young love lives of George Orwell, then known as Eric Blair, and Jacintha Buddicom. Jacintha was famously the model for Julia in Nineteen Eighty-Four, and the interactions between Orwell and Buddicom as they age may be…
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Murakami’s Starting Pitch
The satisfying crack when the bat met the ball resounded throughout Jingu Stadium. Scattered applause rose around me. In that instant, for no reason and on no grounds whatsoever, the thought suddenly struck me: I think I can write a…
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I Have Wasted My Life
Over at the Paris Review, Dan Piepenbring talks about James Wright’s famous epiphanic poem Lying in a Hammock at William Duffy’s Farm in Pine Island, Minnesota, in conjunction with Ann Beattie’s new story Yancey, and the general discussion and controversy…
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The Marriage of Science and Poetry
Brain Pickings explores beloved science writer Oliver Sacks’s memoir On the Move: A Life, paying particularly close attention to the growth of his friendship with poet Thom Gunn, a friendship both beautiful and important for Sacks in his development as a writer.