Kenyon Review
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VISIBLE: Women Writers of Color: Jaquira Díaz
Jaquira Díaz discusses the challenge of writing about family members, her greatest joy as a writer, and her literary role models.
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Cosmically Illegal
At the Kenyon Review blog, Brian Michael Murphy celebrates the sheer density of reference and intricate structuring of rap lyrics revealed by a computer program, The Raplyzer, and its Rhyme Factor Scale. Murphy dissects the lyric genius of Wu-Tang’s Inspectah…
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Artists as Activists
I was recently asked by a young interviewer if writing, with all the time it takes and its use of paper (though I compose on a computer) is not antithetical to what is needed now, the speed that is, to…
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George Saunders and Donald Trump
George Saunders! America’s greatest satirist! The heir to Mark Twain’s estate! And I thought, Oh, what I wouldn’t give to hear Saunders weigh in on Trump. And then I remembered that, in a way, he already had. At the Kenyon…
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The Importance of Moby-Dick
The affronted world’s Ahabs, crippled by attack, vow vengeance and a show of might. At The Kenyon Review blog, Karen Malpede talks about her experience of reading Moby-Dick out loud every night and explains why the book is still relevant…
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Means to an End
It’s a process that catalyzes us into seeing in a new way, to grasping what may intuitively lie beyond language itself. The Kenyon Review editor David H. Lynn asks: what makes an essay literary?
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Writing from the Basement
I never bring my computer with me to the basement, and the discipline of the method is to force myself to work out the ideas, the arrangement of the argument or story before I start building paragraphs and sentences. For…
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Why They Chose the Cricket Risotto
Halfway through her essay “Mēl,” Amy Wright sits down to a freshly prepared bowl of cricket risotto. The Kenyon Review discusses what led them to publish Amy Wright’s latest essay.
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It’s Not Just Gourd Season
Yes, it’s gourd season—but for those of us who teach, it’s also syllabus season and course-packet season. At the Kenyon Review, Cody Walker talks about going back to school and all that comes with it.
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The Causes of Extinction
What fuels such savagery against human and animal kind? What, but the promise of great profits, the lure of luxury items, fine ivory jewelry and statues, or healing potions, gloves and seal skin coats, and free slave labor leading to…
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The Daniel Swiftboating of Poetry
I want to get to why this grumbly, axe-grinding, British review of Vendler relates to two trends I see now in American poetry—the confusion over the critic’s role and the rise of literary teams—but first, the question that’s probably foremost…
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Honesty is Ugly
I used to work more deliberately at resolving contradictions in my work. Now I tend to see contradictions as evidence that I’ve gotten close to saying something true. When we’re honest, we’re conflicted. The Kenyon Review interviews Garret Keizer about…