Juan Martinez discusses his debut collection Best Worst American, his relationship to the English language, and why Nabokov ruined his writing for years.
It is the most human tendency to impose order and organization where there is none, conjure sense out of nothingness, and James Tadd Adcox submits to this urge in The Map of the System of Human Knowledge. As a former student of linguistics (a discipline that gleefully embraces classification systems) and a current student of geography (a discipline that reaches its highest expression in the map), I came to The Map of the System of Human Knowledge with special interest.