In summer 2004, fifty years after its debut, Godzilla played in cinemas all across the United States for the first time. Not the heavily reedited cult classic starring Raymond Burr but the original, Japanese-language picture that first...
Imagine that you were born in an infinitely long and skinny country stretched out between a jagged mountain range and a lively sea that flogs thousands of kilometers.
Max Frisch’s Montauk, packed with these dissolving moments, is one of a small handful of works toward which I feel proprietary, if not downright possessive. I alternately want to pass the book along to everyone I know and to keep it close...
For as long as I can remember I’ve been hearing the story: that James Wright, the Pulitzer Prize-winning poet, had nearly given up writing early in his career. What saved him? An unexpected copy of a new magazine called The Fifties and the...
What most people don’t know today is that Johnny Cash’s famous Folsom Prison concert was an event that had its beginnings many years before. Reverend Gressett ministered to prisoners in the California State Prison system. Gressett started...
Assuredly our twenty-sixth American president is far from being forgotten. On the contrary, of late there has been positively a resurgence of historical interest in him. Kathleen Dalton’s new biography, Theodore Roosevelt: A Strenuous Life ...
So how come there aren’t more dancing poets? The title of Rita Dove’s new volume promises a little more than the contents deliver, but one should be grateful for what lies within. Her earlier Grace Notes (1989) showed Dove’s interest in...
Here’s the trouble: in America, our unique history of rebellion (against colonial rule, against domestic tyranny), expansion (westward, etc.), and individualism (the Enlightenment and all that) leaves us a peculiar cultural legacy. Our gun...
I would argue that we are still under the mythos of populism, whether it be the relatively mild form promulgated by an aging William Jennings Bryan, who crossed verbal swords in the mid-1920s with Clarence Darrow over teaching Darwin in...
