Five Fabulist Sentences
As a reader, I’m a sentence-collector: for their sound, and also for the fascination of inspecting one small, discrete piece of something and seeing what it has to say about the whole.
Reading
George W. Bush and the Literary Double-Take
I’ll come clean: I was supposed to write a different post for you, called something like “On the Emotional Incompetence of George W. Bush.”
M. & Mme Bovary the Romantics
I first read Madame Bovary in high school. I found Emma whiny and annoying like I probably was and couldn’t see too far past her image. I didn’t remember her husband Charles at all, and I definitely had no feelings for him. Who would?
Some Call it Dick Lit
Some call it Dick Lit, others call it Lad Lit, but many male authors reject both of these genre categories as being reductionist, inaccurate, and for unfairly lumping disparate novels into a single arbitrary category. How can gender be a genre, they ask.
Crafting A Novelscape
In the words of my own personal goddess of literature, Joyce Carol Oates, one should “…never underestimate the power—benevolent, malevolent, profound and irresistible— of place.” These words make my heart keen.
Food in Cuba (and PARADISO at 50)
Angshuman Das’s excellent series on food writing has made me think about the role cuisine plays in Cuban literature and about the meals I ate when I visited the island in 2012 to do research for my dissertation.
What We Talk About When We Talk About Folk Tales
My reading list of late includes a lot of folk and fairy tales, reappropriated and retold: Helen Oyeyemi’s Boy, Snow, Bird, Maxine Hong Kingston’s The Warrior Woman, Terry Pratchett’s Discworld series. Call it my not-so-secret fondness for narratives that deconstruct and rewrite their source material.
Book Reviews | Fiction | Reading | Writing
Critiquing Communication Creatively: Egan’s Twitter-Formatted “Black Box” As a Critique of 21st Century Conversation
Today, we have this new platform for conversation, a no-man’s land in the arena of how we communicate with one another. We can say just about whatever we want however we want, we can share and consume anything from artwork to politics, lip syncs to gun violence.
When Poetry and Comics Intersect
The cross-pollination between comics and poetry may seem unexpected, but it’s certainly a creative collaboration that has become more popular within the past decade. Evidence of the two forms meeting occurs again and again.