Reading a prolific writer is like visiting a big city. In Thomas Lux, readers find their own districts. For some it is his literary and historical poems or his obsession with maps or language itself that runs throughout his oeuvre, or the poems of social satire, like “The Happy Majority” or “The Nazi at the…
“I am a farmer, all I own is in the sun and rain.” In the uncultivated prairies of central Alberta, Stephan G. Stephansson (1853–1927) grew life into the land, raised a large family, helped build a thriving community, and composed more than 2,300 pages of poetry and 1,700 pages of prose. After long days in…
The following piece has been adapted from the author’s biography of Lola Ridge, Anything That Burns You: A Portrait of Lola Ridge, Radical Poet (2016). Lola Ridge slipped under the ropes and started straight for the cordon of mounted police and the prison doors. A young mounted guard, a boy, rode down upon her. As…
I. “Who is Susan Glaspell?” That was the question The New York Times asked in half-inch type in May 1918. At the time, Susan Glaspell’s star was ascendant. Her name was already well known in the New York theater world for the one-act plays she had written for the Provincetown Players, the little theater she…
Deep, deep down in the southernmost part of South Texas sits the city of Brownsville. The landscape is home to countless ranches, endless dry brush, and thousands of recent migrants to the US from Mexico. Brownsville is seventy miles south of where the US Border Patrol operates one of its busiest traffic checkpoints, in Falfurrias,…
Jewish American fiction, only a small presence in the American literary landscape before World War II, quickly became a colossus in the decades after. Besides the prize-winning big three of Bellow, Malamud, and Roth, talents as diverse as Cynthia Ozick, Leonard Michaels, and Gerald Shapiro contributed to a collective body of work that managed to…
In 1988, when I went to Uruguay for the first time, the country was emerging from a long military dictatorship, and the capital, Montevideo, was a quiet, gray city that reminded me of Central Europe. The arts have always been important in Uruguay. You feel their presence everywhere—from the striking modern architecture that invigorates the…
Anthony Burgess called him “one of the great prose virtuosos of modern America.” Harper Lee lauded him as “the Evelyn Waugh of our time.” Kingsley Amis said he was “the funniest serious writer to be found on either side of the Atlantic.” He wrote 27 books plus gobs of stories and essays, collecting two honorary…
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