10 days ago by Alfred Corn

The temptation to snoop overtakes all of us by moments, and unsought-after opportunity suddenly finds our eyes riveted to letters not meant for us. There have been figures in literary history fully prepared to forgive the intrusion: Madame de Sévigné eventually heard that her letters were being hand ...

13 days ago by litlove

I confess I am not a fan of the middle section of most orthodox biographies, when the subject is being busy and productive and the biographer feels obliged to detail every lunch they attended, every trip they took. Laura Thompson’s biography of Agatha Christie sidesteps this tendency neatly, by taki ...

63 days ago by litlove

In 1975 in France, an unusual novel about an orphaned Arab boy, brought up by an elderly, overweight survivor of the Holocaust was a runaway success. Young Momo’s narrative voice was a delight, funny, bittersweet, streetwise, full of words and phrases that he had misunderstood (although in a way tha ...

67 days ago by Staff

Mark Twain, who had arguably one of the sharpest tongues in literary history, is celebrated with a wide-angle Google Doodle on Wednesday showing Tom Sawyer and a young companion he's duped into whitewashing a picket fence. Twain the rabble-rouser once wrote: "Concerning the difference between man an ...

70 days ago by Jake Seliger

Joe Fassler’s How Zombies and Superheroes Conquered Highbrow Fiction is almost believable, but I don’t buy the premise of his essay: “Realistic stories once dominated American literature, but now writers are embracing the fantastical. What happened?” Realistic stories might’ve once dominated perceiv ...

73 days ago by litlove

Derrida; the closest a literary critic ever came to being a movie star It’s a firm belief of mine that no matter how complex an idea, you can explain it if you pick your examples carefully. Jacques Derrida taxes this belief to the limit, but I thought it would be entertaining to try, particularly af ...

77 days ago by litlove

In the months before writing The Postman Always Rings Twice, James M. Cain felt he was all washed up. It was 1932, the middle of the Depression, he was out of work, forty years old, crippled financially by alimony payments and ill with stomach disorders. A newspaper man, he had been forced to leave ...

90 days ago by Bob Grumman

While doing my usual bit about how narrow in taste the most recent anthology of twentieth-century poetry was, I got to thinking, once again, just who it is that controls what goes in, what stays out, of the poetry anthologies that become our college English departments’ texts, and dictate/reflect wh ...

95 days ago by Sanchari Sur

*For the lack of a better title (and also, I am a bit lazy today). I read Edmund Burke’s A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origins of the Sublime and Beautiful in my third year undergrad Romantics class. For the misguided, no, this was not a class on love. The Romantic era refers to a time period in ...

112 days ago by litlove

It’s not often I make myself a reading plan, but October and November contain more challenges and commitments than I’ve made in many a year on this blog. I need to keep it all straight in my head, plus, I have suddenly been overtaken by a sudden passion for a topic which will knock my plans out of s ...