I am still amazed to recall that everyone I spoke with while researching James Wright: A Life in Poetry could remember the poet so vividly. His physical presence in the room, his astonishing capacity for reciting poetry and prose from memory, and the...

Fairy tales are full of impossible tasks When Tonya Harding is twenty years old she’ll become the first female figure skater to land a triple axel in competition, a jump that requires impossible strength to launch the body into the air from a forward position...

Jon Pineda's Let's No One Get Hurt is an "achingly beautiful" coming-of-age story following a teenage girl scavenging and squatting on the fringe of the American South (Lauren Groff). Pineda's richly textured depiction of place was inspired in part by his own childhood—here,...

I can’t remember how many times I have read Daphne Du Maurier’s Rebecca, but I know I never tire of its brilliance. It is a book you can read throughout your life, in every stage, because it is one of the most intricately...

Still have some unresolved thoughts after seeing Star Wars: The Last Jedi? A. D. Jameson, a lifelong geek, is here to help. Jameson’s book, I Find Your Lack of Faith Disturbing: Star Wars and the Triumph of Geek Culture (publishing this May), is...

“Now I am going to write a book. It will be about eating and about what to eat and about people who eat.” That’s M. F. K. Fisher, near the beginning of Serve It Forth, and when I read it, I felt an electric...

We send our congratulations to James Forman, Jr, whose Locking Up Our Own was just named one of The New York Times's 10 Best Books of 2017. Not long ago, Forman visited San Quentin Prison to discuss the necessity of including incarcerated...

“Mom would not say that she had ‘c’ because she feared it would have power over her,” writes an anonymous annotator in my borrowed copy of Susan Sontag’s Illness as Metaphor. The book is from the University of Alabama’s library; it’s ragged, musty,...

At a glance, the two editions of Elie Wiesel’s Night are strikingly similar in appearance. Both are slim. Both are wrapped in black and white jackets with horizontal rules and emblazoned with the book’s title in type that mysteriously evokes a swastika. Yet the...

I dare to imagine the general public learning to write code. I do not mean that knowledge of programming should join the ranks of subjects that represent basic literacy: languages, history, philosophy, the fundamentals of science and mathematics. I mean it the other way...

English needs a word for the loneliness you feel when no one else hears what sounds to you like the loudest noise in the room. It happens when your personal receiver is set to a frequency no one else seems to be aware of;...

We donated my dad’s eyes. They were very pretty. What eyes aren’t? Somewhere, I suppose, they still are very pretty. The Eye Donation Bank sent a note thanking us for our gift, the eyes, creating an idea of a gruesome jewelry box. The Bank...

Fiction almost always gets Artificial Intelligence wrong. The AI narratives are generally Frankenstein (“It’s gone rogue!” e.g. Skynet) or Pinocchio (“I just want to be a real boy!” e.g. Commander Data), both of which are a little banal, and neither of which have much...

A few months ago I traveled to India for work. I went north and south, seeing auto rickshaws and UNESCO architecture. One of the best things I saw was a logo. The logo stands for the National Institute of Design in Ahmedabad, Gujarat....

My first experience with Robert Lowell’s poetry was a failure in reading comprehension. Breezing through a stack of poems I’d been assigned for a college class, I came to his “Man and Wife” and gave it my cursory attention. Its setup is not hard...

We are, famously, a nation of escaped convicts, younger sons, persecuted minorities, and opportunists. This fame is local and racial: white America’s myth of itself. It does not, obviously, describe Native Americans and African Americans: though they are theoretically free to participate in mythic...

Of the many resources I’ve mined in researching James Wright: A Life in Poetry, the most vivid have been recordings of Wright’s readings over the course of two decades, when he was a vital public figure in the world of American poetry. A...

So Where Are We? So where were we? The fiery avalanche headed right at us—falling, flailing bodies in midair— the neighborhood under thick gray powder— on every screen. I don’t know where you are, I don’t know what I’m going to do, I heard a man say; the man who had spoken...

ENGLISH 206 Why would anyone even want to do it anymore? Fifty-two years ago I didn’t know what it was, And yet I knew I wanted to do it too, like the idea of a mind The self aspires to, the self a mind endeavors to become. I...

Rather than reflect on his poems or essays, which are still here for anyone to read or reread, I want to say a few words about our friendship, one whose nature, though central, is hard to capture, apparently uneventful as it was. Everything that...