Matthew Vollmer’s “Future Missionaries of America”
Future Missionaries of America Matthew Vollmer This was my favorite short story collection of 2016 (of meaning “read during”). Vollmer’s book “Inscriptions for Headstones” was high on my list in…
Reading fees, classism, and literary privilege
http://rhizomaticideas.com/the-fallacy-of-the-serious-writer/ Rhizomaticideas.com recently published a great short essay on the problems with literary magazines charging a reading fee. As someone with a serious Marxist chip on my shoulder, (see attached…
Why I’m keeping a Writing Log
I’ve started to keep a journal of my writing. More specifically, I’ve dedicated a paragraph-long section of my daily journal to writing about my writing, detailing the progress I’m making…
Tobias Wolff’s “This Boy’s Life” and Why I Was Wrong About Memoir
Tobias Wolff’s book is one of those literary memoirs that helped define the genre. His recollections of a troubled boyhood often reflect poorly on the child he was, but are…
“Quack This Way” and the merits of prescriptive linguistics
This book is really more a transcribed conversation than anything else, but it is absolutely worth your time. In it, David Foster Wallace and Bryan Garner (of Garner’s Usage Dictionary…
The Grapes of Wrath and the Journals Behind the Book
The Grapes of Wrath is another one of those American classics that I somehow avoided reading in high school. Getting to read all of these canonical tomes as an adult…
Literary Privilege, MFAs, and that Marxist chip on my Shoulder
Writing is less and less a thing that people can do as a job, and the price of admission is getting higher. With their spreading proliferation, MFAs in Creative Writing…
Rilke’s “Letters to a Young Poet” and Cultivating the Virtue of Solitude
Rilke’s 10 letters -written when he was rather young, to an admiring fellow poet, younger still- continue to enjoy a popularity within the artistic set. I came to this slim…
Anton Chekhov’s Short Stories and the Limitations of Norton Critical Editions
Ah, that special weight and tactile feedback of a Norton Critical Edition. It takes me back -although not to any readings of Chekhov in particular. This book was my…
Nabokov’s ‘Lolita’ and the Inspiration of Aspiration
Full disclosure: A) Lolita is one of my favorite books of all time B) This is a re-read -I have know read Lolita 2.6 times (I started and for some…