While I could start by quoting Benjamin on Baudelaire, or make some sweeping — and likely very silly– statement about the status of the poet in (post?)-postmodernity, I will simply say this: Michael Robbins is as unabashedly modern as a poet should
At one point in Ben Lerner’s new book, “10:04,” the narrator visits the studio space of his lover, Alena. Alena’s latest project is curating the “Institute for Totaled Art,” a conceptual art show composed of pieces that, because of damage that renders
Here’s a joke: what’s the name of that one Haruki Murakami novel with the aimless, somewhat developmentally-arrested thirty-something protagonist who likes pasta and jazz, and for whom women are those things attached to breasts? Murakami is not known for his artistic breadth,
At first glance, Donna Tartt seems to be the anti-Bret Easton Ellis. The two were friends, and dated briefly, as undergraduates at Bennington College. At school, Ellis and Tartt shared the manuscripts of their debuts-in-progress, manuscripts that would become “Less Than Zero”
On April 7th, Toni Morrison spoke to a packed house – so packed that many faculty were stranded outside, forced to watch her speak on the monitors. Her reception was understandable. At 83, Morrison is one of the last twentieth-century literary heavyweights,
Faced with the spiritually truncating demands of modernity, the twentieth-century idealist, as described by André Breton in the “First Manifesto of Surrealism,” was susceptible to complete enervation: “Menace accumulates, one yields, one abandons a part of the terrain to be conquered. That
Despairing of the writer’s condition under the Soviet Union, Mikhail Bulgakov burned the first draft of “The Master and Margarita” in 1930. Today, with the newest Penguin edition safely tucked away on our bookshelves, we can look back and imagine what might
Jonathan Franzen’s reception at Swarthmore last spring was lukewarm. He spoke fatalistically of the social impact of fiction and disavowed the readings of his books that would point to any social messages. When he admitted that the one explicit goal of his
In a very different world, today would be 5 December 92 p.s.U., or the fifth day of the twelfth month of the ninety-second year after the epochal publication of “Ulysses.” For a short time, Ezra Pound, author of “The Cantos” and the
In 2011, Julian Barnes won the Man Booker Prize for “The Sense of an Ending.” It was the first novel he had published since his wife’s death. Only 150 pages long, it is an exercise in brevity and restraint. In part one,