Articles by Frank Kovarik
June 7, 2010
The Risks of Fiction: On The New Yorker Writers Under 40 List 6
The rewards of fiction can be greater than that of nonfiction—the ecstatic feeling of transport when you’re pulled into the world of a story, given a new window into human experience—but you can also come away from a story angry that the writer has just wasted 45 minutes of your life.
February 4, 2010
It’s All Right to Cry: Restoring Raymond Carver’s Voice 11
The conventional shorthand is that Gordon Lish’s versions are bracing and bleak, Carver’s verbose and sentimental. But, in a just world, Beginners would be published as a stand-alone volume to replace the shell that Lish made of it.
July 29, 2009
Geometric Solids: Thomas Hardy’s Far From the Madding Crowd 6
I first heard about Thomas Hardy’s Far From the Madding Crowd about twenty years ago, when I was in seventh or eighth grade. My classmates and I were all reading Stephen King and Dean R. Koontz, and our English teacher attempted to guide our reading choices to higher-brow material.
“I think it’s great that you’re all [...]
