Eli S. Evans: Is That It

Things, Boundlessly | by Justin Taylor

Poetry

The question of whether Zukofsky is truly neglected (and of whether said neglect has been just) is far less interesting than the simple fact that one can approach Zukofsky with a readerly freshness—an innocence, if...

When Kerouac Met Kesey | by Sterling Lord

The American Scholar

During his trip back to Oregon in 1963, Ken and his entourage began to think about what would become the Merry Pranksters’ bus trip to New York the following year...

by Lisa Klarr As Teresa Goddu argues, the ‘American’ gothic is usually a ‘regional term,’ referring quite specifically to the South. In the 19th Century, the region functions as a ‘repository’ for a variety of cultural anxieties having mostly to do with the moral degeneration of the nation. But...

by Daniel Green The sheer bulk of Ron Silliman’s The Alphabet, as well as its apparently arbitrary structural principle, could initially leave the impression it deliberately defies reading. The same could be said of the larger project, the “life work” in progress and of which The Alphabet is a...

Fishing boat salvage year overflowing after collapse of salmon stock. Noyo, Fort Bragg, 2007 by Linda Ivey The Left Coast: California on the Edge, by Philip L. Fradkin, Berkeley: University of California Press, 115 pp. Of the many images of California that have captured the national imagination, few are...

by Richard M. Cook I discovered Alfred Kazin’s journals in the summer of 1984. I was researching a book on American public criticism, criticism written for the reading public, or what Virginia Woolf called the “common reader,” rather than for academics. Kazin was one of the critics I wanted...

The Lion King, walt Disney Pictures, 1994 From Bookslut: “When nude/ I turned my back because he likes the back. /He moved onto me. // Everything I know about love and its necessities/ I learned in that one moment/ when I found myself/ thrusting my little burning red backside...

Flann O’Brien, Brian O’Toole From Boston Review: “A really funny book,” was James Joyce’s verdict on At Swim-Two-Birds, the comic masterpiece by his compatriot Brian O’Nolan, a.k.a. Flann O’Brien. Graham Greene said he read it “with excitement, amusement and the kind of glee one experiences when people smash china...

Real poetry originates in the guts and only flowers in the head...

Starship Troopers, TriStar Pictures, 1997  From The Smart Set: If the zeitgeist has a face, it supposedly belongs to Ayn Rand and her capitalist philosophy of Objectivism. Talk radio hosts adore the author’s demands for limited government; Congressman Paul Ryan insists that his staffers read her overstuffed opus Atlas...

Dave Quiggle From Poetry: In March 1970, the poet Ted Hughes found himself in a tricky real estate situation. There was a charming seaside house he wanted to buy, in Devonshire, but the necessary funds weren’t at hand. Of course he could have sold one of his two other...