Emma Straub’s Other People We Married
Emma Straub is best known for her novels, but I came to her by way of this short story collection, as is my preference with new-to-me authors that I’ve discovered…
Carver’s “Ultramarine” and Narrative in Poetry
This was my favorite collection of poetry read in 2015. Carver’s poetry reads very easily for me, especially compared to a lot of other contemporary stuff. His poems have such…
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…
Dave Eggers’s “A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius” and another incarnation of my cynical misanthropy
I didn’t like this book. I found it irritating, twee, and everything wrong with the post-Wallace obsession over authenticity. I became irritated multiple times while reading it. This does not…
Reading Log: Paul Harding’s Tinkers
Tinkers by Paul Harding Tinkers is a short book, but it was hard to get through. One might be tempted to call the prose purple if it weren’t…