Rents, Sick Boy, and sweet addled Spud are the same as ever—only here they are pre-skag and still naïve about a world that will leave them jaded and vicious in a few books’ time.
We’re thrilled to be partnering with Tumblr Storyboard! Building on our Last Book I Loved series, we’re teaming up to highlight Tumblr writers and the books they love. Got a book you…
If Thomas McGrath were a painter, he would apply fat brushes to giant canvasses in complex color and texture. Gershwin’s gloss and the landscape of Copland are tame music compared…
Neither of my parents finished reading Yann Martel’s Life of Pi. My father abandoned the novel halfway through, pleading boredom, and my mother couldn’t get past the first few chapters…
As if Anne Carson were a geological epoch, a little ice age or a period of Cretaceous warming, I divide my life into B.A.C. (Before Anne Carson) and after A.A.C.…
Jericho Brown’s Please explores the way love and violence coexist with each other and how the two sometimes intertwine. The collection of poems is categorized by four sections: “Repeat,” “Pause,”…
Of all of the people I know who own a smartphone (a majority, anymore), most of them get up in the morning and immediately reach for said smartphone from their…
As a fiction writer, and as a reader, I gravitate toward stories from the perspective of a specific, imperfect and alert, outward-and-inward-looking consciousness, a transparent eyeball with legs and, at…
I always make my students read Andrew Grace’s “Y,” and they always hate it at first. Because undergrads are undergrads and are hung over approximately one hundred percent of Monday…
As a fiction writer, I sometimes get jealous of the storytelling freedom in comics. With prose writing, everyone seems determined to fit stories into predefined boxes. A work must be…
A round- cheeked girlchild comes awake in her crib. The green swaddlings tear open I first encountered the last poem I loved, Galway Kinnell’s “Under the Maud Moon,” eleven summers…