Loads of Learned Lumber

THIS IS MY ninety-third post of the year, seven over my previous annual high. And it’s only July. What’s going on? More time to read, no dou...

MEMOIRS WRITTEN AROUND the loss of a husband has become a richly developed genre in the last decade or so--Joan Didion's Year of Magical...

I RECENTLY READ an excellent new book of poetry titled Mad World, Mad Kings, Mad Composition , and a microsecond of internet search yielded ...

REASONS TO BE cheerful: I had not heard of Bhanu Kapil until about a year ago, when a poet who often has good recommendations mentioned her ...

THE TERMS OF the Agha Shahid Ali Prize probably do not include the submission's being one Ali himself would have enjoyed, but I suspect ...

EXTRAORDINARY BOOK. IMAGINE a Chinese Studs Terkel compiling an oral history of China since the 1949 revolution, along the lines of Hard Tim...

HER THIRD NOVEL, her first written in English, and it is excellent. Three textual planes, we might say. We have a married couple, two kids, ...