Nonfiction

For someone like myself, who writes in a language she was not born into, the second language assumes and retains a special fascination. We absorb our first language long before we speak it, and we learn to speak it fluently without ever becoming conscious of the learning process. The second language – in my case…

A long time ago I watched Margaret Mead's film, Four Families, with a bunch of high school kids. While I sat there, wholly mesmerized by the dark flow of those domestic images with their latent and compelling content, the kids' responses had been quite different. "Is that all there is?" one prescient fourteen-year-old demanded: "Eating,…

Along with its counterparts in Europe and the United States, Canadian fiction during the past half century or so has been moving beyond the limits of literal realism, though this departure has not been as radical or as consistent as it has been elsewhere. Many prominent Canadian writers – Margaret Laurence, Margaret Atwood, Hugh Hood,…

George Garrett wrote four volumes of short fiction along with about thirty uncollected pieces including “A Record As Long As Your Arm,” which appears in this issue of Ploughshares. He had his share of praise along the way, but not as much as his short fiction warranted. In a very real way, he was a story-teller…

For the great majority of people who love poetry, ` religious poetry' is a variety of minor poetry . . . I do not pretend to offer Vaughan, or Southwell, or George Herbert, or Hopkins as major poets: I feel sure that the first three, at least, are poets of this limited awareness. -T. S….

To make a clam play an accordion is to invent not to discover -Wallace Stevens There's a type of poem very much among us which means to sound compassionate and which tries to tell the reader how he ought to feel about the nonspecific predicament of an often unspecified person. Here, for instance, is Peter…

The novel is alive, of course, was never even close to dead, and seems now to be enjoying something very much like a golden age, a period that people in fifty or a hundred years can look back on as we now do on Victorian fiction, or English Renaissance drama. Since I cannot possibly prove…

Except for critics like Hilton Kramer and George Levine in The New York Times Book Review or Naomi Bliven in The New Yorker, Martin Green's reviewers have treated each book in isolation, remarking with surprise that here is a very smart man whom we must keep our eye on. This is unfortunate, because Green's work…

Roth seems to me the most gifted novelist now writing, at least if one puts a stress on tradition in using the word novelist. He translates his intelligence and his feelings into the terms specific to serious fiction, with more firmness than Bellow, more richness than Mailer, more patience and steadiness and taste and tact…