Reality, Out of Focus: August Kleinzahler’s The Hotel Oneira
“Our little life / is rounded with a sleep,” Shakespeare writes in The Tempest, and August Kleinzahler’s The Hotel Oneira sketches a similar view of existence. Reality comes in and out…
Mailer Versus Mailer
The evolution of Norman Mailer’s legacy has reached a pivotal moment. Simon & Schuster has recently published Norman Mailer: A Double Life, J. Michael Lennon’s authorized biography of the controversial…
Remembering Roger Ebert
“We know more, much more, about Marilyn Monroe and Jack Nicholson than we know about Julius Caesar and Thomas Jefferson. We know what they looked like when they stood up…
Fiction Illuminating History: Paul Yoon’s Snow Hunters
Recently a call went out for contributors to a conference panel on the links between contemporary Asian American fiction writers’ experimentation and their groundedness in Asian American history and culture….
Preface to Lissa Wolsak
1. It Must Be Abstract Lissa Wolsak is a major American poet, living in Vancouver; Squeezed Light is a comprehensive gathering of her published work, which includes seven poem-sequences, a…
Baroque-Ass Poet: Adam Fitzgerald’s Debut
“The fate of a writer is strange,” writes Borges. “He begins his career by being a baroque writer, pompously baroque, and after many years, he might attain if the stars…
Why We Read: Spells by Annie Finch
Let’s talk about Beck, shall we? The artist’s last record was nothing of the sort. As in, it wasn’t recorded at all. Song Reader was released only as sheet music….
The Storm before the Storm: Jane Miller’s Thunderbird
In her written work as well as her commentary, Jane Miller regards the past as a truth that demands to be told. Her view echoes, in some respects, Faulkner’s famous…
Restraint and Closure: The Missing Year of Juan Salvatierra
Books and movies very often remain interesting right up until the end, but concluding a narrative in a satisfying way seems to require an almost impossible fortitude. Plots fizzle; characters…