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Call and Response: Jorie Graham’s P L A C E
“A poem is the cry of its occasion.” So says Wallace Stevens, an adage that quite succinctly captures the spirit of poetry since at least modernism, if not since its infancy in song. Such a heightened attention to the present is what readers today expect from great poets; and with lines like “I saw the [...]
American Sentiment: John Jeremiah Sullivan’s Pulphead
Reading John Jeremiah Sullivan’s Pulphead (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $16.00) is like walking through pristine woods: just when you begin to get lost in the beauty, you hear a strange noise, and you turn around, startled, with a sped-up heart, and take stock of the fact that the woods, while beautiful, are full of terrifying [...]
Reading for Pleasure: Tupelo Hassman’s Girlchild
There is something innately, and perhaps disconcertingly, satisfying in bearing witness to other people’s suffering. Not the Schadenfreude variety, like the cheer emitted upon seeing the Wicked Witch of the West dissolve into a smoldering puddle at Dorothy’s ruby-clad feet. I’m thinking more of those glorious passages by James Agee in Let Us Now Praise [...]
The Most Succinct Best-Of List: 2011
Last year we received such a great response, we had to ask again: What was your favorite book of the year? It’s a question that causes a range of emotion—especially for folks in publishing. Some people can name their favorite book instantly and have the words to describe why. Some can’t remember the last book [...]
Choose Your Own Melville: Nathaniel Philbrick’s Why Read Moby-Dick?
When readers think critically about Herman Melville, they seem to think about the writer as often as his works. That’s not necessarily to say we read him biographically—although biography certainly has its place—but instead transcendentally, as an author whose approach and concerns stretch across his entire oeuvre. My Melville, for example, has always been a [...]
Family and Food: Donia Bijan’s Maman’s Homesick Pie
My husband-to-be stood over the stove top holding a miniature paring knife, like a nervous surgeon looming over an operating table. Wearing shorts and an oversized basketball jersey, he was about to begin the process of carving the browned twelve-pound turkey and he wasn’t sure where to make the first incision. This was going to [...]
The Borderlands of the Self: Bonnie Jo Campbell’s Once Upon a River
After reading Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian recently for our book club, and after seeing Kelly Reichardt’s film western Meek’s Cutoff, a friend asked me if I could think of any women today writing books like McCarthy’s—books that, like Reichardt’s film, attempt to tell the story of female experience in the hardscrabble American West. Any answer [...]
Wishing for the Apocalypse: Tom Perrotta’s The Leftovers
“Hope for the best; expect the worst.” As we carried home bags of jumbo-size water and batteries back in August, this was the mantra that we repeated. If this is the big one, then you need to be ready, because it’s going to be bad. The forethought was like foreplay—despite the wind barely lashing against [...]
A Reasonable Doubt: John Milliken Thompson’s The Reservoir
The week during which I write this has been, among other things, the week of the Casey Anthony verdict. Front pages of newspapers and Facebook update statuses alike have adamantly, passionately, and consistently proclaimed a miscarriage of justice. It feels like a fitting stretch of time to be immersed in John Milliken Thompson’s The Reservoir: [...]
On Being Bored: Peter Toohey’s Boredom
Peter Toohey’s book Boredom: A Lively History (Yale University Press, $26.00) is sufficiently lively, although I doubt whether it’s really a history. In fact, the second part of Toohey’s title is both playful and knowingly aggressive, since one of the book’s primary concerns turns out to be whether boredom can be said to have a history at [...]
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