The Long Gaze: When Poets Write Memoir
With many contemporary poets publishing (sometimes multiple) memoirs, there’s clearly a desire for these writers to share their worlds in a form other than poetry. Is it as simple as the appealing arc of a compelling narrative? What other issues might come to bear, particularly in our current social
Poet Activist Spotlight: Marcelo Hernandez Castillo
Poet and essayist Marcelo Hernandez Castillo’s work has appeared in Paris-American Review, Best American Poetry Blog, Ascentos, Muzzle Magazine, Jubilat, New England Review, BuzzFeed, and elsewhere. Alongside Javier Zamora and Christopher Soto, he has worked to eliminate citizenship requirements in poetry contests and awards through a project called Undocupoets.
Bombing the Subway
The subway has always been the great equalizer of New York City: it’s how the 99% of us get around. The best people-watching happens here, and the city’s art and culture scene extends deep underground.
Revolutionary Road and Doing What You Love
In these moments, my wife is in the thrall of what 1843 and Economist writer Ryan Avent recently called flow, “the process of losing oneself in a puzzle with a solution on which other people depend.” The subject of Avent’s essay is the tendency of modern work to fill
Island Time with The Durrells
Somewhere between Downton Abbey, Little House on the Prairie, Arrested Development and The Swiss Family Robinson are The Durrells in Corfu. The Durrells is based on the first book of classic semi-autobiographical trilogy "My Family and Other Animals," by conservationist Gerald Durrell.
Book vs. Movie: Never Let Me Go
Kazuo Ishiguro’s 2005 novel Never Let Me Go is both an unsettling allegory of systemic oppression, and an intimate portrait of three young people negotiating an impossible living situation. There’s a lot going on, both on the surface and beneath, and a reader couldn’t be faulted for thinking, “this
Fracking, Glove Making, and Elevator Inspection: Industry in Novels
I delighted in Alexandra Petri’s column, “An Easy Guide to Writing the Great American Novel.” A writer must be able to laugh, kindly, at herself, and perhaps less kindly at others, especially when those others are extremely successful.
Reading OCOSINGO WAR DIARIES in the Wake of Colombia’s Failed Peace Deal
I have a writer friend who is a punk, a recovering anarchist, a staunch Zapatista supporter. He plays bass in a punk band, writes poetry in the afternoons. He said to me one time: Why is it that American writers are the only artists in the
It’s All In the Voicing
It’s the time-in-a-place, couldn’t-have-happened-any-other-way moments we keep close like the pillars of our personal pantheons that create lives out of impulsive decisions, unfortunate situations, and well-timed placement. It’s the first times that are finales to culminated forces – sometimes well planned, sometimes purely by chance – and the beginnings
Big Picture, Small Picture: Context for J.M. Coetzee’s Waiting for the Barbarians
On October 26, South African author J.M. Coetzee’s novel Waiting for the Barbarians is published. The unnamed narrator, an imperial magistrate stationed in a colonial settlement on the outskirts of the unspecified “Empire,” enjoys the languorous ease of his privileged position.