Article Archive

One of my favorite passages in literature is from Italo Calvino’s if on a winter’s night a traveler—the one in which the narrator stands in the bookstore listing all the different kinds of books every true reader owns but will never read. Somehow it’s always captured, exactly, the disconnect between the truth and fiction of my own reading life.

On the second Saturday of this month, a renovated turn-of-the-century electrical parts factory in the Long Island City neighborhood of Queens was aglow with jovial literary energy, much of which was generated in response to the albatross of many a writer: student loan debt.

Earlier this month, Brian Turner, Buddy Wakefield, Ofelia Zepeda, and other poets gathered in the desert for the twenty-seventh annual Tucson Poetry Festival.

On April 1 I had the joy of being in the audience at the New School in New York City for a reading by six poets of the Oulipo, or Ouvroir de littérature potentielle (“workshop of potential literature”), a writers group founded in France in 1960 by writer and mathematician Raymond Queneau and scientist François Le Lionnaisnown.

Novelist Tom Perrotta visited the University of New Hampshire in Durham as part of its Writers Series on an early March afternoon that was sunny enough for New Englanders to shed their wool caps and warm enough for the giant sand-filled snow banks that lined the roads to recede ever so slightly.

Literary MagNet chronicles the start-ups and closures, successes and failures, anniversaries and accolades, changes of editorship and special issues—in short, the news and trends—of literary magazines in America. This issue's MagNet features the Normal School, McSweeney's Quarterly Concern, and Narrative.

By presenting seventy-three poets, all of whom the editors believe constitute what Charles Bernstein famously called "official verse culture" as well as its unofficial, avant-garde counterpart, the new anthology American Hybrid strives to showcase the diversity of contemporary American poetry while also revealing the unusual affinities within it.

With so many good books being published every month, some literary titles worth exploring can get lost in the stacks. Page One offers the first lines of a dozen recently released books, including Noelle Kocot's Sunny Wednesday and Jane Vandenbergh's A Pocket History of Sex in the Twentieth Century as the starting point for a closer look at these new and noteworthy titles.

Three new biographies tackle the private lives and literary legends of Donald Barthelme, John Cheever, and Flannery O'Connor.

Against a backdrop of snowfall and accompanied by the jazz strains of “A Nightingale Sang in Berkeley Square,” a memorial service for the legendary W. W. Norton editor Carol Houck Smith, who died late last year at the age of eighty-five, was held recently at St. Peter’s Church in New York City.