Fiction Responding to Fiction: Raymond Carver and Jonathan Durbin
Raymond Carver’s “What We Talk About When We Talk About Love,” is the classic titular story in his collection published in 1981. The original story, entitled “Beginners” was famously edited by Gordon Lish, and it is longer, containing more hope and introspection.
Review: LITTLE: NOVELS by Emily Anderson
Little: Novels Emily Anderson BlazeVOX, August 2015 158 pp; $20 Buy: paperback The vogue for erasure poems continues, which is good news. Done skillfully, the erasure poem encompasses what Samuel Johnson called “the two most engaging powers of an author: new things are made familiar, and familiar things are
How One Publisher Sparked a Rebirth of Turkey’s Greek History
On the flight back to Istanbul, I hold one of the first books put out by Istos Publishing in my hands. Out of the press’s slim, silver-colored bilingual Greek-Turkish edition of Nikos Kazantzakis’s The Ascetic (Ασκητική-Çileci), the publishing house’s logo pops out in gold, almost holographic. I turn the
Mango and Masala: Food in the Immigrant Novel
The buffet of novels in which food takes center stage is abundant and delicious. As a nonfiction food writer and a dabbler in fiction I find a wide array as I try to research how fiction writers, especially novelists, depict food. Simple preliminary Googling suggests more than fifty such novels.
Booze, Books, and Boys: Literary Friendships Throughout History
Oscar Wilde and Bram Stoker Oscar Wilde was the son of Lady Jane, an eclectic socialite who collected artists like trophies. Bram Stoker was a frequent feature in her Saturday night salons, although the two met at a young age and were fast friends through the rest of their
“The poems toggle between wreckages”: An Interview with Kerrin McCadden
Kerrin McCadden’s poems illuminate life’s sharp-edged particulars, making the touchstones of this physical world resonate with the meditative music of our everyday existence. She’s the author of Landscape with Plywood Silhouettes, winner of the 2015 Vermont Book Award and the 2013 New Issues Poetry Prize, as well as the
Round-Up: #WritersOnTrump, Suzanne Collins, and the Northern Illinois University Press
From writers protesting Trump to a university-funded press closing, here’s a look at the latest in literary news: This week, over found-hundred writers signed an open letter denouncing Donald Trump. Titled “An Open Letter to the American People,” the letter outlined the writers’ issues with Trump, and claimed that Trump’s campaign “demands
À La Recherche de l’Amérique Perdue: Fantasizing America
To say that the French have a love-hate relationship with the United States is an understatement. We’ll be tssk-tssking Americans for their alleged anti-intellectualism and Puritan mores, while unabashedly dreaming Technicolor dreams of New York and California and happily binging on series. There’s also a strong mainstream appetite for
Planetary Poetry
It’s a comet, no it’s a planet, no it’s not a planet, yes it is. What is it about Pluto that so draws us to it? Is it that Pluto is so far away? Or is it just that we always pull for the underdog? Over the past few
In Bookstores Near You
In 2004, the state of Texas most likely executed an innocent man, Cameron Todd Willingham, for the murder of his three young children, who died in a fire in their family home. Arson experts later determined the fire was not intentionally set, and the story quickly became enmeshed in