Jazz Remains the Sound of Modernism
Armstrong and Ellington, Coltrane and Davis, Gillespie and Parker, were central to the same project as other modernists; they reconfigured time and space to craft an alternative way of expression.
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Rise of the Ghost Machines
You’d think two centuries would be long enough for us to sort the singer from the song, to divine where the soul ends and our machines begin. You’d think wrong.
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Want to Write Better Fiction? Become a Translator
For K.E. Semmel, Jenny Croft, Idra Novey, and Bruna Dantas Lobato, translation was a crucial training ground for writing fiction.
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Against ‘Latin American Literature’
The classification of “Latin American literature” puts both Anglophone and Hispanophone writers in a double-bind.
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Hymn for Walpurgisnacht
Walpurgisnacht is a gloaming time when the membrane between the here and the hereafter is more porous.
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The Other Boy and the Heron
The heron has a robust mythological history across many cultures, and while the meanings differ, many deal with death, rebirth, and transformation.
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The Virtue of Slow Writers
The slow writer embraces the protracted and unpredictable timeline, seeing it not as fraught or frustrating but an opportunity for openness and discovery.
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Tennis Lessons from David Foster Wallace
I was, and still am, the most reviled type of tennis player.
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The Path Is No Path: On Not Becoming a Poet
What makes a poet a poet? There is of course no simple answer. You could argue that self-declaration is enough. You could also argue there must be a measure.
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Pressure-and-Release: Writing Shanghai’s Rooftoppers
I remember crying the day I made a decision about his character: It seemed clear what needed to happen.
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Falling Out of Love with Lyric Poetry
Bang out hundreds of pages of rhyming couplets about something other than your identity or your perceptions, and you, too, will likely fall out of love with lyric poetry.
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YA Isn’t Just for Young Adults
When we have a child or teen at the center of a story, is the categorical difference between YA and adult in the plot, the stakes, or the voice and tone?
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The Quiet Exhilaration of Reading in Italian
Reading Italian literature submerged me into a kind of intoxication—an explosion of sound and thought.
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José Donoso Saw the Future of Latin American Literature
American readers have largely forgotten the single greatest writer to come from the Latin American Boom: Chilean novelist José Donoso.
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