As soon becomes apparent, The Dream of the Great American Novel simply isn’t aimed at the common reader or even at many uncommon ones. The grateful audience for this book will be other scholars and teachers of American literature, who will...
Artist Gabriel Orozco doesn’t necessarily want to disappoint, nor does he want to fail, not in a literal sense. Rather, he wants to protect his right to be a beginner.
My father was never one to complain. On the morning of the day he died, an ulcer he’d suffered from for years, and left untreated, ruptured and began to bleed. Two days later I met with the town coroner. He told me the end had been painless...
It is through Edwidge Danticat that Haiti emerges beyond the illusion, and her fiction and nonfiction open our eyes to the history and complexity of the island.
Merwin’s awesome range, intensity, and feral strangeness are evident in a new two-volume Library of America edition, beautifully edited by J. D. McClatchy. Nearly 1,500 pages in all, it represents an oeuvre so large as to make Robert Lowell...
Andrew Hudgins’s The Joker, part memoir, part joke book, is so fresh and original that it seems without precursor. Like a good joke, it doubles our vision, inserts anarchy into logic, pleases us with its felicities of phrasing, and stuns us...
Despite Dracula’s success and endurance, Stoker’s other works are unknown to just about any reader who has taken the time to travel to Transylvania with poor Jonathan Harker.
Before he died at the age of forty, London was the highest-paid author in America. During an active literary life of less than two decades, he produced roughly fifty works of fiction, journalism, and autobiography, as well as scores of...
The title of Ron Rash’s compelling new collection of stories, Nothing Gold Can Stay, comes from Robert Frost’s evocative poem pondering the bittersweet knowledge of life’s impermanence.
First and second books of poems come in two general flavors. The first is an omnibus collection; it shows us a young poet’s series of attempts to find her own way into the craft. The second type of early collection is cohesive, since it...
