Loads of Learned Lumber

I WAS WEIGHING whether to read last year's Pulitzer winner for poetry, Tracy K. Smith's Life on Mars (which I hope is named for the...

THE NOVEL'S TITLE refers to a common plot in the favorite 19th century novels of the novel's heroine, Madeleine Hanna: the courtship...

I PICK UP a Juliana Spahr with a certain eagerness and a certain trepidation.  Eagerness because she is, after all, a worthwhile writer, eve...

LLL 's HIGH REGARD for the work of Heather Christle is already established (see July 9, 2010 and March 22, 2012) and her new collection ...

ONE AFTERNOON IN 1980 or 1981, when I was in a graduate school, another graduate student and I were outside University Hall chatting with an...

I LOOKED UP "Nicholson Baker" on Wikipedia--one of the many topics on which Baker has written wittily, informatively, and thoughtf...

LATELY I WORRY about something I think of as "virtue porn," e.g., the film versions (not necessarily the original books, which I h...