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National Book Critics Circle Award authors

Form, Eros, and the Unspeakable: Whitman’s Stanzas

By Mark Doty

Spring 2005

Whitman did not number the fifty-two sections in the 1855 version of the great, free-flowing outpouring that is “Song of Myself,” or even separate them by much. But he must soon have realized the reader's need for a helpful scaffolding, since he added stanza numbers in the edition of 1860, and section numbers in 1867. Of these sections, the briefest are two six-line units, utterly different from each other.

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A Private Experience

By Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

Summer 2004

Chika climbs in through the store window first and then holds the shutter as the woman climbs in after her. The store looks like it was deserted long before the riots started; the empty rows of wooden shelves are covered in yellow dust, as are the metal paint containers stacked in a corner.

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The Lonedale Operator

By John Ashbery

Summer 1981

The first movie I ever saw was the Walt Disney cartoon, The Three Little Pigs. My grandmother took me to it. It was back in the days when you went "downtown." There was a second feature, with live actors, called Bring 'Em Back Alive, a documentary about the animal tamer Frank Buck. In this film you saw a python swallow a live pig. This wasn't scary. In fact, it seemed quite normal, the sort of thing you would see in a movie—"reality."

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