Songwriter and novelist Chico Buarque has affected a transition from the Brazilian Bob Dylan to the Brazilian José Saramago or Orhan Pamuk or Gabriel García Márquez. These authors write books where a protagonist’s limp is a metaphor for a country’s crippled left, or a protagonist’s name is a pun about ethnic rivalry…
In “Stranger in the Village,” James Baldwin quotes the insight of an anonymous observer of American race relations: “the Negro-in-America is a form of insanity which overtakes white men”…
A poem and cut-out by Matthea Harvey.
In fact, if contemporary finance is analogous to something in literature, it isn’t symbolist poetry but theory itself. Denationalized, decontextualized, divorced from its origins in philosophy and criticism, theory has assumed totally deregulated positions on everything from literature to politics and beyond…
With the following letter Ezra Pound sent several poems to Harriet Monroe, editor of Poetry: A Magazine in Verse. She rejected them all, including “Vergier,” “Mr. Styrax,” and “Ritratto,” deeming them “unpublishable” as they were too “frank.” Even so, Monroe … Continued
When I was living in England, a literary agent once said to me at a party, “I was born to be a literary agent: my father was a car salesman and my mother was a social worker”…
Tales: alchemical. / Criticism: polemical. / Subjects: tarn, tomb, raven, Ulalume…
Upon arrival in France, I unpacked my little sack on the wooden floor of my new, empty bedroom…
John Gregory Dunne was always the less successful of the pair. The last and most famous role he played was as negative space in his widow’s memoir. For us, he was never there—but then his absence was of immediate emotional enormity. He was a being whose most incentivizing move was to step off camera.
The stitched illustrations, more often abstract than mimetic, make up perhaps the most interesting part of The Fifty Year Sword. They intrude upon the page like the dire ganglia of some malign intelligence.
