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As children, we’re both fascinated with the idea of the great big world around us, and consumed with the notion that we are at its center. I recall sleepless nights, hearing my father return home late from work, and tiptoeing past my sleeping sister’s bed to the living room so that I could sit with…
A critique often heard in creative writing workshops is that the protagonist of a story is too observational—read: passive—and not enough involved in the action, rendering a story that is either too “quiet” or a protagonist with too little at stake in the outcome of the plot. I think that this critique is often valid,…
A friend and I were recently talking about weird fiction. We were trying to figure out when the best time to make the “magical reveal” would be in a story. Should it be in the very first few lines so a reader knows what they’re getting into? Should it be delayed, so as to ease…
The Darkening Trapeze Larry Levis Graywolf Press, January 2016 96 pp; $16 Buy paperback The Darkening Trapeze, Larry Levis’ second posthumous book of poems since his death in 1996, is a strikingly self-conscious collection, a book whose lyrical depth and sweeping beauty is checked by gossip, unflattering confessions, jokes, and self-deprecation at every turn. The…
There’s a section of Alexander Pope’s The Rape of the Lock that’s famous enough to have its own almost-official title. The Toilet Scene. People mention this scene often when they talk about the poem’s mock-epic qualities, its training of a heroic gaze, modeled on the loftiness of The Aeneid or The Iliad, on much smaller…
Lily Bart is nothing if not a master of self-denial, supremely talented at self-deception and shameless rationalization, which inevitably bleeds into her distinctive brand of morality. At the beginning of House of Mirth, Wharton is careful to clarify that Lily is not “scrupulous” in the traditional sense, but that she maintains the illusion of moral…
Compared to the rest of the world, presidential campaigns in the United States are long. They weren’t always such—once upon a time they were Hemingway-long, but now they are Tolstoy long. When you live in a state with a primary or caucus, outlasting the endless stream of political ads isn’t quite as challenging as…
Martin O’Malley’s failed presidential bid is a novel that writes itself, and I’d write it tomorrow if my plot wouldn’t risk turning into fan fiction. A handsome, two-term governor gets bested by a woman and a socialist and suspends his campaign after receiving 0.5% of the vote in the Iowa Caucus. I doubt O’Malley’s story…
Michael Chabon wrote one of my favorite sentences of all time. It’s in a story called “Blumenthal on the Air,” first published in Mademoiselle in 1987 and collected in 1991’s A Model World. I’ve forgotten what “Blumenthal on the Air” is about, but this sentence has stuck with me ever since I first read it:…
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