Disclaimer: For those who haven’t experienced David Simon’s HBO series The Wire, you should probably tune out now and hit up your Netflix. Same thing goes to those Wire fans who haven’t finished Season Four. I don’t want to spoil the narrative arc of the season for you. * In my vision, Michael Lee is…
Before I even begin talking about Jennifer Boyden I have to hold myself back a little, and that’s because I happened to travel to New York in the summer of 2002, and I happened to bring with me a copy of a lit journal, and in that journal was a poem by Jennifer Boyden which…
I had been writing fiction for fifteen years and publishing stories in literary journals for ten when Supriya Bhatnagar, the publications director at AWP, called me on a mid-May day in 2009. Listening to her brief message an hour later, I wondered if some pages were missing from the manuscript I had submitted for the…
Like most writers who are willing to admit it, my favorite poetry anthologies are either ones I’m in or ones I wish I was in: From the Fishouse, Seriously Funny, and Gathering Ground come to mind first. In truth, I’d love the quality and scope of these anthologies even if I wasn’t included in them….
There may be no writer more deserving of massive attention than Matthew Zapruder, and, thankfully, 2010 seems to have been the year he got caught up to. His latest, Come On All You Ghosts, was named in all sorts of year-end lists, and rightly so: the man’s writing some of the best poetry anywhere, and…
Ellen, Rosanne, Whoopi, Tina. They’re women, they tell jokes, and we’re on a first-name basis. These comedians have imposing brains but often focus on their thighs: they write frequently about their relationship with food, this being one theme that connects them. On the popular NBC sitcom 30 Rock, Tina Fey’s character Liz Lemon is known…
Thanks to a suggestion from a friend, I’ve been reading a lot of Homi K. Bhabha’s work on Postcolonialism and communicative politics. I’m not really built for critical theory, so I started with Bhabha’s best-known text, The Location of Culture. The fundamental tenet of the book (and this is a very loose interpretation): in a…
Like anyone, I have to contend with my own stupidity all the time—forgetting things, ignoring essentials, not listening—but one of my latest and most grossly idiotic moves was waiting until 2010 to read Joel Brouwer. That’s too kind, actually: I didn’t wait, it wasn’t like I’d seen his stuff and ignored it before, I’d just…
In “Dr. Deneau’s Punishment,” one of eleven excellent short stories in Lori Ostlund’s Flannery O’Connor award-winning collection The Bigness of the World, the title character despairs over the current trend in American schools to reward students for their mediocrity. Under the new regime of the militantly optimistic, the red pen is suspect, likewise the honest…
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