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In one of the more memorable passages of Ali Smith’s Artful, the narrator notes how “surprisingly lightly” we treat books “in contemporary culture. We’d never expect to understand a piece of music on one listen, but we tend to believe we’ve read a book after reading it just once.” As I wound my way for […]
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In 1988, Czech novelist Milan Kundera published a personal dictionary of his “key words, problem words, words I love.” Not your average lexicon, “Sixty-three words” fuses history, philosophy, social-critique and autobiography, ingeniously invigorating a literary form often lumped with the Yellow Book on the excitement scale. Ten years later, as if to prove that the […]
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Like many latecomers to his work, my introduction to David Foster Wallace began with a reading of his 2005 Kenyon College commencement address. I remember being struck initially, immediately, by its honesty, its rhetorical courage, its compassion.
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