A few weeks back, Eric Weinstein had a great post about the five books that changed the way he wrote. His post inspired me to think about my own influences. I realized that, though I am a short story writer, some of the most important influences on my writing were not short stories. Also, for…
On the June afternoon when I first joined Lesley’s MFA faculty, during a break between meetings, I carried my coffee to an outdoor table where several other faculty members were sitting and asked if I could join them. Wayne Brown, the Trinidadian writer I’d only just met, looked up. He said to me, solemnly, “When…
Our valiant editorial intern, Sean Mackey, suggested this month that in honor of April Fools’ Day we recommend a few humorous books. He had this to say himself: Humor is becoming more and more specific for different audiences, where a reader who laughs at I Am America, And So Can You might not find Pride…
In six weeks, I’ll be done with my MFA. No more workshops, no more craft classes, no more hanging out in the creative writers’ house, no more external structure or deadlines. It’ll be back to the years B.P.S. (Before Poetry School): making my own schedule for writing, revising, and submitting work, and not being accountable…
Minuet For Guitar (In Twenty-Five Shots) Vitomil Zupan, trans. Harry Leeming Dalkey Archive, December 2011 400 pages $23.95 Scope: microscopic to galactic Tones: philosophical, dark, sarcastic With: tiny flecks of the bucolic Concerning: Slovenian partisan Berk, fighting in World War II As well as: former German soldier Joseph Bitter, meeting Berk at a Spanish resort…
For this blog post, I am interviewing Krys Lee, author of the short story collection, Drifting House, published this year by Viking/Penguin. Drifting House follows the lives of Koreans both in their homeland and in the United States. According to the book’s website, “Alternating between the lives of Koreans struggling through seventy years of turbulent,…
Rebecca Newberger Goldstein’s astonishments as a philosopher and as a novelist are too numerous to list here. Already launched in her career as a philosophy professor, she reached a moment in her own life when philosophical inquiry no longer felt like a broad enough arena in which to explore the full range of human experience….
The Louisiana Purchaseby Jim GoarRose Metal Press, Nov. 201180 pages$15.95 Dear Dr. Poetry, I’ve been a middle school art teacher for twenty years, but thanks to budget cuts, I’ve recently had to begin teaching history, too. I’ve done my best to engage the students, assigning everything from presidential fusilli portraits and traditional macaroni necklaces to…
Some of you would accuse me of never having had any formal instruction in Latin. Some of you would be correct! If you crack open an issue of a nationally distributed literary magazine these days, you’re unlikely to see a lot of traditional sonnets, villanelles, ballads, or other formal poetry that at one time dominated…
No products in the cart.