Literature––History And Criticism
The great lost American fragment novel.
A new collection of criticism and reportage considers Trump, Bellow, and the pleasures of close reading.
February 1 marked the centenary of Muriel Spark’s birth, and we’re celebrating with a selection of the British master’s aphorisms, notes, and observations.
Featuring selections by Justin Taylor, Shelly Oria, Mary Walling Blackburn, Kevin Killian, Barry Schwabsky, John Freeman, and more.
A Quiet Passion, Terence Davies’s biopic about the poet Emily Dickinson, faces a problem typical of movies seeking to recreate the life of a literary figure: how to accommodate film to language, and, in particular, to Dickinson’s dense, elliptical, and unconventionally punctuated and often abstract poetry.
On genre, influence, and getting weird in fiction.
Venezuelan-born artist Javier Téllez’s first exhibition at Koenig & Clinton took its title from his recent film To Have Done with the Judgment of God (2016) and concerns an experience that marked Antonin Artaud’s life in 1936: the author’s encounter with the Rarámuri community living in the Sierra Tarahumara in northwest Mexico.
“What distinguishes the writer from the reader is that the writer goes first.”
The newly published journals match and exceed all preexisting Wieners publications.
One of the joys of reading Zone is discovering the utter range of Padgett’s stylings as both translator and poet.
Notley’s body of work consists of over thirty-five collections of poetry and prose. To consider her oeuvre, in her interlocutor’s words, is to court “cerebral and sensory overload.”
If a collection of seventy photographs, an installation, and a film prove one thing, it’s that Patti Smith rocks much more than one world.
This First Proof contains an excerpt from A Stroll through Literature, by Roberto Bolaño, translated by Laura Healy.
Gordon Lish has loomed large in the background of the American short story for nearly half a century. His recent Collected Fictions provides a re-affirmation of his incredible influence on a form he so clearly treasures. B.C. Edwards spoke with Lish over the phone about revision, reduction and the silence that precedes reading.
Kevin Killian and David Brazil have done a great service in their new Kenning Anthology of Poets Theater 1945–85. The selection is wide-ranging, eclectic, and generally highly intelligent.
If you’re interested in the writing practices associated with Oulipo (founded in 1960, it has included Raymond Queneau, Harry Mathews, Italo Calvino, and Georges Perec), you’ll want this book recording a 2005 conference on the poetics of constraint.
I would like to see the condition of a book after James Wood has finished reading it: the actual book, the spine we readers splay and cradle, the jacket where we leave our fingerprints, the pages we turn instinctively and crease at the upper corner when a paragraph catches the eye, or when the hour we have stolen for reading—and only reading—has passed.
Sometimes it is simply the inspiration behind a fiction that’s enough to cause a stir.
With scant exception, the writing of literary criticism is a balkanized art.