In Conversation

  1) Poetry, my brother tells me, is too human for him. When he reads poetry he always feels like he’s missing something. Communication is very difficult for me, he tells me. 2) We are talking tonight about the lives … Continued

In our third and final installment of Aidan Koch’s series on alternative eReaders, we have perhaps the most inconvenient of all. This non-existent technological wonder is based on the noble tradition of ticker tape, the earliest digital communications medium. Old-school ticker tape tracked rising and … Continued

  The British gambling company Ladbrokes recently released odds that predict a Nobel Prize for Japanese novelist and Occidental love-affair, Haruki Murakami. Just below Murakami is Chinese literary barnstormer Mo Yan. This contest—where the Western world annually holds court over … Continued

This Saturday night, Magnet Theater feature piece “Kiss*Punch*Poem,” the year-old brain child of poet Meghann Plunkett and theater co-owner Alex Marino. The show presents an unbroken improvised performance bookended by an exquisite corpse.  The format is a kind of magician’s … Continued

Yesterday, The Atlantic posted an article by Robert Pondiscio entitled, “How Self-Expression Damaged My Students.” Pondiscio offers an interesting, if ultimately flawed, thesis: In early childhood writing education, the deliberate cultivation of creative or imaginative expression will ultimately impede scholarly … Continued

  Analytic philosophy rarely relates to culture at large. But one trend provides insight into how bone-dry epistemology or metaphysics may actually relate to the way we view the world and our place in it. This year Thomas Nagel, a … Continued

  The Devil in Silver has been acclaimed for its brutally honest portrayal of mental illness. Your stories are often labelled as “dark.” Do you find that they have a particular mood?   I’ve always thought of my stuff as … Continued

Second time around: Aidan Koch takes another stab at a think-outside-the-tab eReader. This one attaches to your keychain and, like the tamagotchi did before it, keeps your wallet and phone company. Nothing wrong with standing in front of your house for a few minutes until you … Continued

  “[Painting] does not have to be ‘literary’– an invective which many people use in regard to paintings that do not depict apples on a tablecloth or a broken violin.” –Edvard Munch, 1929 Starting October 24, the Museum of Modern … Continued

The uproar surrounding Philip Roth’s open letter to Wikipedia in The New Yorker is a small fire, but it is one that illuminates the shifting power dynamics in the larger media landscape. Mr. Roth’s letter addresses an inaccuracy concerning the … Continued

Last night at Manhattan’s Center for Fiction, Victor LaValle read from his latest novel The Devil in Silver, published by Spiegel & Grau.  Mr. LaValle wrote his novel at the George Washington Bridge Port Authority’s Dunkin Donuts where he observed … Continued

Since reKiosk went live three weeks ago, Aziz and Darya Isham, the brother-sister team behind the site, have been at the center of a whirlwind of attention. reKiosk is a network of digital storefronts (or “kiosks”) where anyone can sell … Continued