While I could start by quoting Benjamin on Baudelaire, or make some sweeping — and likely very silly– statement about the status…
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…
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…
At first glance, Donna Tartt seems to be the anti-Bret Easton Ellis. The two were friends, and dated briefly, as undergraduates at…
On April 7th, Toni Morrison spoke to a packed house – so packed that many faculty were stranded outside, forced to watch…
Faced with the spiritually truncating demands of modernity, the twentieth-century idealist, as described by André Breton in the “First Manifesto of Surrealism,”…
Despairing of the writer’s condition under the Soviet Union, Mikhail Bulgakov burned the first draft of “The Master and Margarita” in 1930.…
Jonathan Franzen’s reception at Swarthmore last spring was lukewarm. He spoke fatalistically of the social impact of fiction and disavowed the readings…
In a very different world, today would be 5 December 92 p.s.U., or the fifth day of the twelfth month of the…
In 2011, Julian Barnes won the Man Booker Prize for “The Sense of an Ending.” It was the first novel he had…