Although I knew she was recently a finalist for the 2012 Pulitzer Prize in fiction for her novel Swamplandia!, I hesitated, at first, to read Karen Russell’s new collection of eight stories. This was mostly out of fear that a collection with “vampires” in the title would be too whimsical, too ...
One of the many striking images in Toni Morrison’s slim but forceful novel, Home, involves three men playing scat and bebop in a small smoke-filled room. “Clearly,” the narrator writes, “there would be no musical end; the piece would stop only when a player was exhausted at last.” And though ...
Both Flesh and Not collects 15 of David Foster Wallace’s multiform nonfiction pieces, including essays and book reviews published between 1988 and 2007. Although most of these essays do not demand to be read in the same way that essays in Wallace’s earlier collections do — this reader recalls ...
Two major problems of rhetoric occur when a contemporary director chooses to put on a Shakespeare play. One problem concerns the comedy itself; what an audience found funny 400 years ago may fall flat today. But, surprisingly, this particular issue rarely plagues Professor of Theater and Women’s Gender ...
This Is How You Lose Her, Junot Diaz’s latest work of fiction since his widely-acclaimed, Pulizer-Prize-winning novel The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, consists of nine beautifully interrelated, confessional short stories. They do not disappoint. Most of the stories occur at different points ...
D.T. Max’s revealing and compelling biography of the writer David Foster Wallace comes at a time of surging popularity of Wallace’s writing and new academic analysis of his work. Wallace, tragically, ended his own life in September of 2008 after a long struggle with depression and an inspiring ...
The occasion for this review of Don DeLillo’s historical tour de force Libra, first published in 1988, is its beautiful reprinting in the Penguin Ink series. In a wise attempt to make books worth purchasing, as opposed to the ever-more-popular (and purportedly environment-friendly) e-book, Penguin ...
Jonathan Franzen’s new collection, Farther Away, gathers together 21 highly readable essays, originally published between 1998 and 2011. The essays cover a wide variety of topics — ranging from birds and the environment, technology and the death of Franzen’s friend, the writer David Foster Wallace ...
When Stephen Greenblatt was an undergrad at Yale University, he stopped by the local Co-op and, browsing through some unwanted and cheap books, he discovered a prose translation of Lucretius's two thousand year old poem, "On the Nature of Things." He purchased it for ten cents. Greenblatt begins ...