Features & Reviews
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“Edmund Wilson Regrets That It Is Impossible For Him To:”
Writer and famed literary critic Edmund Wilson wasn’t a fan of giving interviews, doing any kind of editorial work, reading manuscripts, and a number of other things according to a printed response to “a student group asking him to do…
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Take Dead Aim
Aim Straight at the Fountain and Press Vaporize is ambitious and clever. By turns entertaining, fascinating, and charming, it is also monotonous with its adolescent charm and fluorescent insistence.
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Gladwell on Finch
“If Finch were a civil-rights hero, he would be brimming with rage at the unjust verdict. But he isn’t. He’s not Thurgood Marshall looking for racial salvation through the law. He’s Jim Folsom, looking for racial salvation through hearts and…
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Shane Jones: The Last Book I Loved, Jakob Von Gunten
When it comes to books, I believe in love at first sentence. Or maybe first paragraph, but something triggers inside me after reading an opening in a book that really hits home and soon, too soon, I’m falling in love.
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Romantic Poets and Scientists
“A good history of science unreels like the practice of science itself. It wends through a world of experiments until a new reality arises. But the more layered story of that journey is that science is not just a process…
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Green Poetry
Identity Theory‘s Editor-in-Chief, Matt Borondy, has reopened the site to poetry submissions despite their current lack of a poetry editor. (Interested in the volunteer position? You can apply here.) The catch? All poems submitted must be about cheese, scrilla, bread,…
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“Indie Won” (and Thus Is Dead?)
“You see, to the extent that indie meant anything, it was as its root word, independent. It was about seizing the means of production. Independently produced. Aesthetics can be imitated, ethics faked, attitudes mimicked, but large bureaucracies could not possibly…
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Bob Sommer: The Last Book I Loved, You or Someone Like You
The last book I loved was You or Someone Like You by Chandler Burr. A wife and mother living the Beverly Hills good life, Anne leads book groups for directors, screenwriters, producers, and actors. It’s not that she planned to…
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In the Eye of the Hurricane
The Louisiana Skip Horack creates is both generative and broken, salvific and ruined, marked in ways large and small by Hurricane Katrina.
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My Favorite Clause: Ruminations on Stuart Dybek’s Penis
“Sauerkraut Soup” from Stuart Dybek’s 1986 debut collection Childhood and Other Neighborhoods begins with a narrator waxing philosophical on the cathartic nature of bodily purge. “Puking felt like crying,” he tells us. “At first I almost enjoyed it the way…
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Written on the Body
I’ve been in love with people who’ve had excerpts from Lord Jim scrolling up their arms, and Faunia Farley tattooed on their chest with an arrow going through a heart. It’s like you can’t escape these literary tattoos. But it…
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The Cupboard
Over at <HTMLGiant>, Adam Peterson and Dave Madden talk about The Cupboard, “a quarterly pamphlet of creative prose.” “…we do really take the ‘Pamphlet’ part of our name seriously. We want to produce volumes that have that spirit, however hard…