For most of its history, the Gothic monster has clearly functioned in the Western Christian iconography as a demarcation of evil, thus reinforcing the dominant Christian worldview. But in the historical shift into the Romantic period – a shift from … Continue reading →

In the introduction to his translations of Guido Calvalcanti, Ezra Pound writes: “I have in my translations tried to bring over the qualities of Guido’s rhythm, not line for line, but to embody in the whole of my English some … Continue reading →

Sinister Resonance, an expansion of Marcel Duchamp’s reflection that “one can look at seeing but one can’t hear hearing”, interprets the ethereality of sound as it exists in our heads, at its source, all around and in the imagination, … Continue reading →

Given the choice between, say, a dozen okay chocolates and one small piece of pure Belgian dark, I’ll take the smaller, perfect thing. The brief one-time delicacy. It’s always been this way with me. I’ll eat it at once, no … Continue reading →

Men Undressed is a collection of stories by female authors writing from the perspective of male protagonists. Each story deals with sex, usually explicitly. But though explicit, the stories are never simple, never just about pleasure and bodies. … Continue reading →

At 103 years young, Elliott Carter is one of the most influential American composers of the 20th century. Though Carter’s compositional career is frequently divided into three principal stages – an early neoclassical period, a temporally complex mature period, and … Continue reading →

“I bore easily,” admits Sheila Callaghan in the preface to her first collection of plays. “So basically, my aim is to write something I could actually sit through without clawing the flesh off my palms.”
To say that she … Continue reading →

Liu Xiaobo, arguably the leading human rights activist in China, was sentenced in 2009 to eleven years in prison, plus the deprivation of political rights for two years. The charges against him: that he “took advantage of the Internet…to do … Continue reading →

Of all the diverse memorials I thought of while reading The Memory of Place, Dylan Trigg’s new book on uncanny spaces, this one affects me the most; the parting shot of Aeneas, the “this is Mezentius, as fashioned by my … Continue reading →

There are said to be certain Mexican shamans whose magic is based on a performance of the crossroads, wherein the act of situating themselves in a crisis of choice between multiple, indeterminate directional possibilities summons an intense cosmic energy with … Continue reading →

Over two decades after his death, Friedrich Dürrenmatt remains known as Switzerland’s greatest twentieth-century playwright. His plays are avant-garde staples. He’s also a confirmed part of the Western mainstream: in the sixties, one of his most successful works (The Visit) … Continue reading →

In early 2010, film critic Robert Ebert declared tendentiously that videogames “could never be art.” Among the torrent of gamers outraged by this comment, Chris Bateman – author, philosopher, and game designer – rose to the occasion with this lucid … Continue reading →

The Ellington Century is not a biography of Duke Ellington. It is not a history of jazz. It is something altogether more ambitious: an attempt at a wholesale reorientation of the way we think about twentieth-century music. Traditional musicology proceeds … Continue reading →

Frank O’Connor (1903 – 1966) is famous principally, perhaps, as the last major light of the Irish Renaissance, a literary movement of the latter 19th and earlier 20th centuries, inspired by nationalism and the revival of traditional and folk heritages. … Continue reading →

Wagner is a problem. Adored, despised, mocked and emulated, he is one of the most controversial artists of the last two hundred years. From Hitler to Woody Allen, everyone has an opinion. His influence in the twentieth century is everywhere … Continue reading →

Outside of Argentina, Macedonio Fernandez (1874 – 1952) is famous principally for his role as mentor to Jorge Luis Borges (1899 – 1986). Fernandez, a generation older than Borges, was born into wealth, and studied law with Borges’ father, with … Continue reading →

It’s tempting to talk about Michael Dickman’s life.
For starters, he seems to be writing about it—and the details are so dementedly disturbing, and his tone so disturbingly straightforward, that even the most courteous reader can’t help rubbernecking, and even … Continue reading →

There should be nothing surprising about the title of Bill Luoma’s recent collection of poetry, Some Math. In fact, it’s hard to imagine a more perfect title for a volume of poetry published during an era preoccupied with quantitative analytics … Continue reading →

Victoria Donda, the author and subject of My Name is Victoria, is the daughter of two activists who were kidnapped and murdered by government forces during Argentina’s 1976-1983 military dictatorship. Known in Argentina as the “Last Military Dictatorship,” this regime … Continue reading →

“Each individual has an idealized version of the self which they would prefer to offer to the world at large, and with the aid of a mirror, this publicly visible façade can be carefully constructed.” The mirror, once a symbol … Continue reading →

The BBC Radiophonic Workshop is obsolete. Visits to the Broadcasting Corporation’s Maida Vale Studios in West London scarcely reveal a groundbreaking electronic music factory these days. Rather, since 1999, when reel-to-reel tape recorders, analogue synthesizers and voltage-control amplifiers … Continue reading →

September 16th, 1955. A violent military coup ousts the repressive Peronist government and ushers in a new chapter in Argentine history. Although it ended a decade of censorship and political imprisonment, the ejection of Perón’s populist regime also struck a … Continue reading →

In the world of poetry, the links between readership and long-term influence have always been tenuous. This is particularly true of the long poems of American modernism—such as Ezra Pound’s Cantos and William Carlos Williams’ Paterson—which may be referenced more … Continue reading →

What do we think of when we pass cows grazing out along the highway, if we think anything of them at all? Perhaps we think there is something incomprehensibly dull about them—or stubbornly languid. They are fixtures of the landscape … Continue reading →

If the recent Walter Isaacson biography of the late Steve Jobs has a companion volume in the world of fiction, Helen DeWitt’s new novel Lightning Rods may be it. ,em>Lightning Rods is, ultimately, an account of business genius: specifically, of … Continue reading →

Rob Young, editor of English music mag The Wire, has given us a half maddening, half masterpiece of a book on the history of English folk. Beginning with the Victorian writer William Morris (1834 – 1896), who sought to escape … Continue reading →

What makes us want to get high? And once we do – what next? One part addiction memoir, one part survey of the history and state of the science of psychedelia, Peter Bebergal’s Too Much to Dream takes a roundabout … Continue reading →

Born in a generation of writers that included the Nobel Prize winners Czeslaw Milosz and Wislawa Szymborska, Tadeusz Rozewicz (1921—) has been known as one of the darkest and most experimental voices of post-war Polish poetry. Sobbing Superpower, translated by … Continue reading →

Modern Poetry of Pakistan is a new collection of contemporary poetry translated from Urdu, Panjabi, Sindhi, Pashto, Balochi, Seraiki, and Kashmiri – the seven major languages of Pakistan. This is an important anthology because it is the first to bring … Continue reading →

Over the past decade, American poetry may have been luckiest in the patience and devotion of its editors. Writers whose receptions have been limited to regional or aesthetic camps, who have been called poets’ poets, or who have simply faded … Continue reading →

W. K. Wimsatt, the New Formalist critic, opened his famous essay, “What to Say About a Poem,” with an assumption Sandra Doller’s newest book of poetry seems positioned directly against. Wimsatt wrote, “At the outset what can we be sure … Continue reading →

If the protestors of the Occupy movement ever decide to nominate a poet laureate, writer and translator Daniel Borzutzky would certainly make a compelling candidate. A writer and translator of Chilean descent who lives and teaches in Chicago, Borzutzky’s latest … Continue reading →

“The language with which you will tell the story of your times”
Dorfman’s Feeding on Dreams provides a timely look at dictatorship, language and memory
The thrust of Ariel Dorfman’s newest work Feeding on Dreams: Confessions of an Unrepentant Exile is instinctual. … Continue reading →

“You can always count on a murderer for a fancy prose style,” says Humbert Humbert, the pedophiliac protagonist of Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita. And murderers aren’t the only ones. Authors ranging from the Marquis de Sade to Edgar Allen Poe to … Continue reading →

Jakob Arjouni has been hailed – mainly in Germany – as the successor to American crime fiction masters Dashiell Hammett (The Maltese Falcon and The Thin Man) and Raymond Chandler (The Big Sleep and The Long Goodbye) since the release … Continue reading →

In 1884, Paul Verlaine published his ground-breaking essay and anthology, “Les Poètes maudits.” The three original “damned” poets were Tristan Corbière, Arthur Rimbaud, and Stéphane Mallarmé. Perhaps the most famous nineteenth-century French poet after Victor Hugo and Charles … Continue reading →

The Roman poet-philosopher’s basic premise in The Order of Things, one he takes pains to derive from Epicurus and to distinguish from the claims of other pre-Socratics, is that the world is made of infinite space and of loosely moving … Continue reading →

“Opera,” writes Herbert Lindenberger, “is the last remaining refuge of the high style,” while movies, according to Stanley Cavell, arise “from below the world.” Somewhere in the mix of high and low, old and new, epic and profane, elite and … Continue reading →

“I take SPACE to be the central fact to man born in America,” wrote Charles Olson at the beginning of Call Me Ishmael, his mythopoetic account of Melville’s Moby Dick. And Wallace Stevens, in “The American Sublime,” argued that in … Continue reading →

Robert Duncan’s heresies are innumerable. Often overlooked in his poetry as the pardonable consequence of a theosophical upbringing, the publication of his massive scholarly appreciation of Hilda Doolittle throws light on the depth and extent to which the poet was … Continue reading →

The second quarter of The Wide Road, Carla Harryman and Lyn Hejinian’s strange, charming, picaresque “novel,” consists of epistolary correspondence between the book’s authors. These letters comment on the work we are reading, even as they evoke an enviably intelligent … Continue reading →

Reviewing Rae Armantrout’s work after her last book, Versed (2009), won the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award is a decidedly different affair than it might have been, say, four or five years ago. Not that … Continue reading →

Neela Vaswani’s second book, You Have Given Me A Country, is a collage of memoir, history, and fiction which investigates the already complex and problematic nature of defining nationality. Thematically linked to other authors such as James McBride and … Continue reading →

Stephen Lapthisophon’s Writing Art Cinema 1988-2010 courageously and vigorously joins the project—begun in the twentieth century with Dada and Surrealism, and continued in the cultural criticism of Roland Barthes, Walter Benjamin and Guy Debord—of finding words and images to grapple … Continue reading →

The phrase “country of the pointed firs” is used only once in this meticulous, beautiful little novella: towards its end, in the chapter entitled “The Feast’s End.” The scene is the Bowden family wedding, the biggest event of the year … Continue reading →

Quintessence is two ambitious projects in one: on the one hand, it’s a specialized survey of “minor” poetry from the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and on the other hand, it’s a loose exploration of the relationship between “minor” … Continue reading →