For the past five years my summer reading has been devoted entirely to the classics. No current critical darlings, no edgy new novels from indie presses – just time-tested chestnuts that I should have studied in high school or college. My formal education only flirted at the edges of the humanities – required reading at [...]
In the surprisingly interesting Reader’s Guide at the back of Dan Chaon’s Await Your Reply, Chaon writes: As a writer, I feel like I’m always in conversation with the books that I’ve read. Yiyun Li, the author of The Vagrants, feels the same way: “I believe a writer writes to talk to his/her masters and literary [...]
From the first page of Dan Chaon’s novel: On the seat beside him, in between him and his father, Ryan’s severed h and is resting on a bed of ice in an eight-quart Styrofoam cooler. Enough said? Dan Chaon’s second novel and fourth book, Await Your Reply, which was published in 2009, intertwines 3 seemingly unrelated [...]
August 1st was a kissless morning. My love, a Muslim, had decided to abstain from even the smallest smooch. It was the first day of Ramadhan. Twenty-nine more to go. I am a Jew living in Zanzibar, a predominately Muslim island. I accept that I have to figure out ways to get down with the [...]
When I last lived in Wisconsin in 2006, voting was easy. Wisconsin had a bevy of accommodations which made it easier, rather than more difficult, for people to vote, including same day voter registration, registration without photo-ID, and a ten-day residency requirement. My husband and I moved back to Wisconsin in the end of July [...]
“Great Grapes: Score another point for resveratrol, the antioxidant found in red grapes and red wine. Basque researchers have shown that, in mice and men, it blocks lipid accumulation …” (48 Psychology Today 7-8/11). Is this literary ? Something about it struck me. I wondered why readers of Psychology Today would notice and/or find interesting [...]
Ellen Gilchrist’s first book was not published until she was in her forties. In “A Reading Group Guide” at the back of Nora Jane: A Life in Stories, she is asked about this: “I didn’t begin to write seriously and professionally until I was in my forties because I was busy being alive.” Now she [...]
Pittsburgh is a city primarily known for its bridges, sports teams and sandwiches made with french fries. However, within the Mexican War streets of the Northside neighborhood, one can expect to find something a tad out of the norm for the Steel City — a narrow alley called Sampsonia Way. What Sampsonia Way lacks in [...]
Executives at Deutsche Bank in Germany thought they had a brilliant idea: give two German universities about $17 million over four years, starting in 2007, to fund a program that would really give something back. But not to society, exactly. Back to Deutsche Bank. The Quantitative Products Laboratory was housed at Humboldt University and the [...]
As long as I didn’t yell fire in a crowded theatre, I could pretty much say anything I wanted. That’s the democracy lesson I got when I was in middle school in the Midwest of the United States. Our teacher also assigned somewhat eerie post-colonial exercises like making up our own islands and then conspiring [...]
Illinois has dropped writing skills from its standardized testing for high school juniors and will focus only on reading and arithmetic. Officials claim that this will save the state $2.4 million. Writing tests for younger pupils were dropped last year. So now they can type (using their thumbs) “u r 2 dum 2 x-pres urself, [...]
Anyone in the United States who has tried to publish a first book of poetry has run into the bind of the contest reading system. One of the only ways to publish a first book (and increasingly, a second or even third book) is to enter it into one of a rapidly proliferating number of [...]
Tomorrow’s the book launch for my new book of translations, “The Big Game” (Le grand jeu), by the surrealist Benjamin Péret. It’s the first time this volume will appear in its entirety in English; the pub is Black Widow Press. This is a big deal for me–I have been rehearsing, arranging for surrealist happenings and [...]
By now you’ve likely heard about the ghastly murder of an 8-year-old boy in Brooklyn earlier this week. Walking home from day camp, Leiby Kletzky got lost and simply asked the wrong stranger for help. He was suffocated, dismembered, and distributed to various places near the neighborhood in which he lived. It was a horrible [...]