Posts by author
Michael Berger
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Why I Studied The Humanities
“Studying the humanities improves your ability to read and write. No matter what you do in life, you will have a huge advantage if you can read a paragraph and discern its meaning (a rarer talent than you might suppose)……
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June is Novella Month
How’s this for a definition of novella: “a novella, I think, looks through the narrow lens of a short story, and with a short story’s intense focus, at a small, precise part of the world, but it treats what’s within that…
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Bowden On Juárez
“The way I was trained, reporters went toward the story, just as firemen rush toward the fire. It is a duty. As it happens, I am a coward and would rather write about a bird or a tree. But, I…
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Should We All Commit Facebook Suicide?
“But somewhere in that transition from a social site meant to deepen interpersonal relationships to a self promotional, commercial tool, Facebook lost its appeal. “The various facets of my life merged into a web of connectivity where I could no…
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Writing, Getting Fired and Resume-Building
“I would be lying of course if I didn’t admit I fell harder than I initially may have thought. The days and weeks following my firing were the first time I admitted to myself that instead of building a Blakeian…
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Children’s Books Written By Adult Authors!
“After years of finding children’s books tucked away in authors’ bibliographies (Graham Greene wrote children’s books!), followed by quick disappointment (how can they be out of print?), I realized that I was having this same frustrating revelation over and over.…
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We’re All Poets Now?
“I think avant-garde fiction has already gone the way of poetry. And it’s become involuted and forgotten the reader. Put it this way, there are a few really good poets who suffered because of the desiccation and involution of poetry,…
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The Mythologist Of Our Time
Ray Bradbury conjures up for me images of sun-drenched Nebraska meadows, autumn landscapes beset upon by Buick-sized ravens and dusty towns overrun by sinister carnivals. He reminds me of the childhood I never quite had except in my head. He’s…
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All I’ve Got Left Are Unread Pages
I like looking at my books and often spend several minutes in the evening running my gaze over them. Most of them I haven’t read but the possibility that I will read them is deeply exciting. (Proust is also excited…
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No One Belongs Here More Than My Therapist’s Wife
It’s funny, I love Miranda July’s stories but Gordon Haber at Bookslut is insightful about her varied titles: “We Are Vaguely Included seems to show the influence of Miranda July, who has demonstrated talent in numerous genres while consistently formulating…
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Leafing Through Old Lit Magazines
Sometimes you read a story published almost a hundred years ago in a magazine and you ask yourself, “Would this stand a chance of getting published today?” These sentences are long, tangential and laden with disruptive conjunctions. This narrator is…
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Anne Carson’s Luminous Fold-Out Elegy Scrap Book
Anne Carson’s new book Nox, at first sight looks like a Vollmann-esque door stopper of at least a thousand pages — until you hold the book and realize that it opens like a treasure box to reveal an accordion-like sprawl…