Reading Archive

The Right Words

Author: | Categories: Reading No comments
For my daughter, who just turned two, language is plastic. She pokes it and stretches it to find out what it can do. Joyfully, she tells stories (only some of them true) about her day. She loves to list the parts she and the cat do and don’t have

The Best Short Story I Read in a Lit Mag This Week: “The Lips the Teeth the Tip of the Tongue” by Jessica Richardson

Author: | Categories: Reading, Series No comments
There is some form of self-expression in everything we do. Within the arts—writing fiction, for example—there is a spectrum to how overtly that self-expression is shown. Some authors prefer to make their authorial voice as invisible, or “objective” as possible, while others make quite clear through various means that

THE NEUTRAL CORNER: Michael Hofmann’s “Where Have You Been?” And Gottfried Benn’s “Impromptus”

The neutral corner is one of the two corners of the ring not used by boxers between rounds. It is also the corner a boxer must retreat to after he has floored his opponent. The Neutral Corner was also a bar in Saratoga Springs, New York, that I frequented

Tidy This: An Imagined Conversation with a Popular Tidying Expert

Author: | Categories: Reading, Writing No comments
We walk into my bedroom, where the Tidying Expert senses immediately that I have too many books. The term “book hoarder” is on the tip of her tongue. She wears a fresh mint-green cardigan and peers menacingly over a clipboard. “We’ll start by putting the books in the center

Oscar Wilde and the Stereotype

Author: | Categories: Reading No comments
Each semester, I ask my freshmen writing students what at first seems like an obvious question: “What is a stereotype?” Students tend to love the word. They use it all the time. They talk about challenging stereotypes, resisting stereotypes, and being stereotyped. And yet, I’ve never once had a

The Funniest Writer You’ve Never Read

Author: | Categories: Reading No comments
The funniest writer you’ve never read is a deceased Canadian named Mordecai Richler. The author of ten novels, a short story collection, and several books of essays, Richler was—and is—hugely famous in Canada. That he is not well known in this country is possibly a product of our curious

“Beruffled Little Wet Apron” or “Vast and Prodigious Cadence of Water”?: Bicycling at Niagara Falls

Author: | Categories: Reading No comments
    As a child in the Midwest, I was shocked to find out that my parents hadn’t honeymooned at Niagara Falls, which I’d thought was sort of a requirement. It turned out that they’d instead spent three days in Hannibal, Missouri, Mark Twain country. Niagara Falls seemed even

The Best Short Story I Read in a Lit Mag This Week: “Thank You For the _______” by Becky Adnot-Haynes

Author: | Categories: Reading, Series No comments
Some stories get their complexity from the weaving of plot twists, some from the myriad of possible outcomes facing a character making a tough decision. Some—Raymond Carver’s “Fat” for instance—gain their complexity by the layering of different stories on top of each other. Becky Adnot-Haynes, in “Thank You For

Literary Blueprints: The Temptress

Author: | Categories: Reading, Series No comments
If the Byronic Hero is the bad boy of literature, then the Temptress is his female counterpart. The Literary Blueprints series looks at dangerous ladies and their wanton ways.  “She looked slick as hell; polished, neat, and with that feminine deadliness that can drive you nuts. They work on

Impossible to Pin Down: Truth & Memory in Nonfiction

Author: | Categories: Reading, Writing, Writing Advice No comments
Nonfiction as a genre confronts the discordance between memory—a slippery, subjective entity that can be the antithesis of truth—and actuality. Roy Peter Clark writes of the “essential fictive nature of all memory.” Mark Kramer and Wendy Call, editors of Telling True Stories: A Nonfiction Writers’ Guide from the Nieman