Trapped Between Two Worlds: The Life of John Morris
Even as a teenager, I was thinking, wow, the life this guy lived. The things he lived through and witnessed, and the way his day-to-day life changed must have been a whiplash experience.
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A Year in Reading: Matt Seidel
This spring, I became involved in a fence dispute with a neighbor. I have decided to transmute any lingering resentment into literary channels, and thus my year in reading focuses on fences literal and metaphorical.
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A Year in Reading: Matt Seidel
I decided to map out new avenues for autofiction writers to explore and new variants for autofiction critics to classify: a handy manual that doubles as my year in reading.
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The Necessary Staying Put: Beckett and Social Distancing
In this germ-conscious era, we must make brief mention of Molloy’s stone sucking. I won’t linger on his intricate, obsessive-compulsive ritual, but suffice it to say the cavalier use of saliva would give Dr. Anthony Fauci a panic attack.
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Novel Moves: Wrestling in Recent Fiction
Though my pro wrestling fandom has waned, I was excited to see several recent works of fiction that leverage the narrative power of the sport: the colorful archetypes and illusions of professional wrestling or the elemental combat of “real” wrestling.
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Renewable Books Leads Industry with Green Initiatives
At Renewable, our books are printed domestically, we use only post-consumer waste paper, and Greta Thunberg responds affirmatively to 95 percent of our blurb requests.
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Writers to Watch: Spring 2020
According to Majumdar’s editor, Jordan Pavlin, A Burning “has the force of an epic tragedy and the economy and restraint of a poem.”
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A Year in Reading: Matt Seidel
Three other works that stuck with me this year involved men in trouble, one farcical take on contemporary society and two sly, metaliterary comedies.
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Ten Writers to Watch in 2019
Their books have an international flavor, including Cold War intrigue and a sweeping novel about a historically black community in Nova Scotia.
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Dear Match Book
I love trilogies: Olivia Manning’s Fortunes of War, Evelyn Waugh’s Sword of Honour, and more recently, Rachel Cusk’s Outline trilogy. My problem is I can’t stand quartets!
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The Man Who Couldn’t Scan
The tragic story of a 34-year-old professor suffering from an extremely rare condition called aprosodia: the total inability to detect poetic meter.
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In Memoriam: Anthony “One-Take Tony” Hollander
The audiobook community mourns the passing of one of its giants, a talent who famously earned a rare NC-17 rating for his recording of ‘The Portrait of a Lady.’
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A Year in Reading: Matt Seidel
It could be this Love Actually earworm that afflicts me this time of year, but I’m feeling love in my fingers, my toes and my year-in-reading list. And since love is supposedly a universal language, the following highlights are eros-themed works in translation.
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A Year in Reading: Matt Seidel
These are urbane works shadowed by a sense of life’s and art’s precariousness.
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That Glorious Syllable: On ‘On’
A preposition wrapped in an adverb wrapped in an enigma, on is a tiny word, yet it contains multitudes.
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The League of Extraordinary Critics
Hume was sued after putting George Plimpton in a chokehold, convinced that one of the dilettante’s witticisms was cribbed from a Martial epigram. Hume wouldn’t release him until two Commentary editors and William Styron assured him that the bon mot was most definitely a Plimpton original.
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Poetry in Motion
If you should ever come across me on the path and see in my halting stride and grim-faced muttering a defeated man, know that the “viewless wings of Poesy” are transporting me and my aching feet to a better place.
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Mark O’Connell Doesn’t Want to Be a Cyborg: The Millions Interview
I think that artificial intelligence, when it comes -- and it will come, I believe -- is going to displace huge numbers of workers. And that’s a crisis, but it’s also a crisis that’s inherent in the logic of capitalism.
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