Reviews

The Art of the Eulogy: On ‘Dead People’

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The traditional Aristotelian method of eulogy is to step back and consider someone’s life from a distance. Instead, the authors of 'Dead People' dig in: 'We’ve chosen to wear our bias on our sleeve. We’ve chosen to take these lives personally.'
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Essays Lists

50 Reasons Why You Should Read Joy Williams

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I have read it twice now and taken photographs of single pages and recited them as prayers, because prayers should be strange, and they should often sting.
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Essays

Burn After Reading: On Writerly Self-Immolation

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Burning is a slow, ritualistic death. Why not simply throw away a manuscript?
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Essays

I Will Never Sing Adviser Karaoke at Yearbook Camp

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In some ways, yearbook camp felt like an extended Tony Robbins seminar. Each morning we met in the auditorium, where one of the staff led us in a group chant to get us fired-up for the day. I am from New Jersey, and only get fired-up for pizza and pork roll sandwiches.
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Annals of Japery

Dear Novel: On Breaking Up with Your Manuscript

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You said that I was trying to turn you into a thriller when you were really a literary novel. You wanted character; I knew agents wanted plot. We fought.
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Reviews

The End of the Self Is the End of the Universe

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Sadness might seem too sincere an emotion to ascribe to a novel written by a postmodernist, but Zero K pushes its readers to feel.
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Essays

Writing for Readers and Other Taboos

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Readers -- living, breathing readers who are imperfect and stubborn and yet often rewarding with their time and attention, and hopefully, their monetary support -- are the lifeblood of writing.
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Lists On Poetry

Enormous Zippers Unfastening: Ten Poems for the End of the World

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Novelists and essayists ponder the apocalypse, but poems are particularly suited toward capturing the anxiety of the end.
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Screening Room

The Devil Works in Mysterious Ways

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New England horror is less about surprise and more about the slow burn of suffering. In Hollywood, horror sneaks into your home, leaps from behind doors; in New England, horror festers in your soul.
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Essays

Theaters of the Mind: Radio & Literature

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Radio is like literature, like our thoughts: moving, shifting, often clouded in static, and yet sometimes out of the maddening noise comes clarity.
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Lists

55 More Thoughts for English Teachers

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There are far more dangerous professions than teaching, but few are more difficult.
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Lists

Transfigurations of Self and Soul: Four Essential Essay Collections

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A masterful essay collection is a metered intellectual exercise. Here are four essay collections worth reading: writers who challenge, surprise, and eventually reward their readers for staying the course.
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Lists

The Golden Child: Seven Literary Editors Pick Their Favorite Issues

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How can you possibly have a favorite amongst your children?
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Lists On Poetry

The Whispered Language of Secrets and Fears: Ten Poems for People Who Hate Poetry

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Novels might bore, and short stories can frustrate, but poetry is the only genre of literature that elicits consistent hate.
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Year in Reading

A Year in Reading: Nick Ripatrazone

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A great anthology will happily and humbly exist in the service of its writers, and will appreciate when readers put the collection down and seek more and more of the words that truly stir them. I’m thankful for such an experience twice in a single year.
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Lists

Born from Books: Six Authors on Their Childhood Reading

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Reading was a sort of sanctuary to me. Our flat was small and our family had a lot of kids and reading was a way for me to be by myself for a while.
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Essays

The Art of the Strange Writing Exercise

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We need to shake things up in the creative writing classroom. We need to remember that writing is a messy, fractured, intensely personal pursuit that must not be neutered by the institutional needs of our classrooms. One solution is to embrace the strange; one method is to imbue the strange into writing exercises.
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Staff Picks

A Poisonous Antidote: On Anne Sexton’s ‘Transformations’

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Sexton injects the modern world into Grimm’s fairy tales, but does so by inserting mundane references and contemporary mood. The result is poems with the architecture of archetype but modern anxiety.
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