Literature Archives - Page 11 of 12

Body & Mind

The World Is Absolutely Full of Wonder

An interview with Mary Ruefle

April 30, 2020 • by Mary Ruefle and Gina Chung

In Dunce, Mary Ruefle examines death, endings, and our relationship to the everyday objects and rituals that remind us, even while they provide comfort and solace, of the fundamental frailty and uncertainty of life. We spoke recently by phone (the “Contact” section of Ruefle’s website states, wonderfully, that she does not own a computer and that ...

Interviews

Donald Trump’s Former Book Agent Comes Clean

UTA’s Byrd Leavell calls Caroline Calloway “unwell” and regrets his association with the President

April 21, 2020 • by Alexa Mauzy

Leavell is a literary agent, currently at United Talent Agency (UTA), one of Hollywood’s most powerful agencies, representing artists and other professionals in the entertainment industry. Based in Beverly Hills, it has divisions focused on film, television, digital, video games, and music, in addition to books. As the agency’s mission statement puts it, “We help ...

Donald Trump’s Former Book Agent Comes Clean

Interviews

Elegies for Lost Children

An Interview With Valeria Luiselli

April 20, 2020 • by Valeria Luiselli and Vanessa Chan

Eventually, the narrator’s own children go missing, culminating in a 20-page single sentence climax that breaks every convention, and that the reader is unable to look away from. On top of this wide range of themes, Luiselli also creates a novel-within-a-novel – a book called “Elegies for Lost Children” that ...

Interviews

Pay Attention to the Language Itself

An interview with Lydia Davis

April 13, 2020 • by Lydia Davis and Pune Dracker

-- “The Fly,” Lydia Davis A classic short story -- yes, short story -- from the writer whom the Los Angeles Times Book Review has called “one of the quiet giants in the world of American fiction.” In Essays One, the reader is treated to a compilation of Davis’s commentaries, explorations, and ...

Literature

The Rest of Us Are Already Here

A lyric essay on fleeing a city in crisis

April 12, 2020 • by Nancy Barnes

The streets are empty No one’s there I stare -- is it true? Just yesterday, people streamed everywhere, high pitched humming currents of worry, rushing chunks of ice colliding The streets are empty No one’s there I stare -- is it true? Overnight Broadway goes dark, no money back ...

History

The Coronavirus Time Warp

Reading medieval literature in the midst of a pandemic

April 10, 2020 • by Eric Weiskott

We are in a fourteenth-century time warp, living through another pandemic originating in Asia and laying waste to Europe. Although this plague is less deadly than the Black Death, it has globalization on its side. The Black Death took ten years to reach Europe; coronavirus took two months. The Black Death ...

Body & Mind

The World Is Absolutely Full Of Wonder

An Interview with Mary Ruefle

April 9, 2020 • by Gina Chung and Mary Ruefle

Gina Chung [GC]: I thought we could start by talking about the title of your book. What do you think are the benefits of embracing one’s own “duncedom”? Mary Ruefle [MR]: You know, we’re all dunces, to begin with, and I guess at my age, I am not afraid to be ...

Interviews

This Body Is a Gift: Natalie Diaz

The award-winning poet on her new book, Postcolonial Love Poem

April 6, 2020 • by Natalie Diaz and Evangeline Riddiford Graham

To celebrate this achievement, we're reprinting this interview with the author, originally posted in April 2020. Native Americans account for just 0.8 percent of the population of the United States. Yet according to four decades’ worth of data compiled by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, almost 2 percent of ...

Climate & Ecology

A Promiscuous Formalist

An Interview With Brian Teare

March 29, 2020 • by Brian Teare and Richard Sharpe

Richard Sharp [RS]: In “Clear Water Renga” you place each stanza on the page to create what looks like a river flowing downstream. How do you decide on forming your work and how does it impact the message specific to that poem overall? Brian Teare [BT]: I’m a promiscuous formalist. Promiscuous ...

Literature

The Strangeness and Miracle of Being

An Interview With Ilya Kominsky

March 27, 2020 • by Ilya Kominsky and Jessalyn Johnson

The following interview with Ilya Kominsky, a 2020 finalist in poetry, is part of a series of NBCC interviews conducted by New School creative writing students. In his book Deaf Republic, award-winning poet Ilya Kaminsky explores political disorder in a community where the people are united in a time of tragedy, ...

Feminism

Celebrating the “Female Byron”: An Interview With Lucasta Miller

The National Book Critics Circle finalist on her biography, L.E.L.

March 13, 2020 • by Lucasta Miller and Kate Tooley

Lucasta Miller, author of The Bronte Myth, returns to the world of 19th century female authors with L.E.L., an extensively researched recasting of the life and career of Letitia Elizabeth Landon. Long ignored and dismissed by critics, recently unearthed information has shed light on Landon’s personal life and by extension offered a new perspective ...

Celebrating the “Female Byron”: An Interview With Lucasta Miller

Literature

On The Hatred of Literature

Liberalism is about life and everything it contains

March 10, 2020 • by Jon Baskin

When I was in college, at the end of the last century, the prevailing school of literary interpretation was called “New Historicism.” The foundational assumption of this approach was that artworks were primarily of value insofar as they could offer us insight into the context and conditions of their historical ...