Literature Archives - Page 12 of 13

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 ...

Literature

“Our War Would Be With a Virus”

The New School poet’s latest collection retraces the losses of the AIDS crisis

March 9, 2020 • by Mark Bibbins

From 13th Balloon What might anyone have made of you and me as babies born into the mess and ferment of the late 1960s Working-class babies born to parents who themselves were babies during World War II Were they worried already about Vietnam or about some other monstrous hand that would grab us from our cribs by our feet and throw us into the war that ...

Literature

On the Feeling of Anti-Semitism

When Being Jewish Becomes a Liability

October 26, 2019 • by David Stromberg

Whatever you are, it always turns out to be the wrong kind.––Saul Bellow, Seize the Day (1956) The essay below is the third part of a series and is most profitably read in sequence after parts one and two -- comprising a kind of memoir that participates in a literary genre that has become obscured: ...

Feature

“who is this woman?”

A poem by Solange Claws

May 10, 2019 • by Solange Claws

We are proud to introduce Huddled Masses, a journal of writing and arts on the themes of Migration and Mobility sponsored by the Zolberg Institute and published in partnership with Public Seminar. Our goal is to provide the middle ground, to bridge the gap between the academic journal and the news, to raise ...

Interviews

Heaven and Hell in the Living Room: An Interview With Helen Schulman

The New School creative writing professor talks about her latest novel, Come with Me

March 8, 2019 • by Evangeline Riddiford Graham and Helen Schulman

At the center of the story is Amy -- partner of Dan, parent of the teenage Jack and twins Miles and Theo, and, most recently, employee of Donny, her college roommate’s nineteen-year-old geek-savant son. Donny has hired Amy as PR rep and guinea pig for his new project, Furrier.com, a ...

Heaven and Hell in the Living Room: An Interview With Helen Schulman

Feature

What’s the Point of a Creative Writing Workshop?

Writing and resistance in the Age of Trump

November 26, 2017 • by Maureen Buchanan Jones

Two days after the 2016 election, people arrived in my writing workshop talking non-stop. Their disbelief, grief, anger, and guilt at not ‘having done enough,’ ricocheted around the room. It was a challenge for them to focus on the page. In the weeks that followed, this scene repeated itself over ...

Literature

Will Trump Defund Culture?

History Says No

March 20, 2017 • by Claire Potter

It doesn't surprise me that the first Trump budget proposes to eliminate all federal cultural and public broadcast funding. It's the same script we have been seeing for almost forty years. First, the amounts of federal money devoted to arts and culture are infinitesimal, particularly when you compare them to ...

Literature

A Pure Solar World

Sun Ra and the Birth of Afrofuturism by Paul Youngquist

December 21, 2016 • by Vince Carducci

One of my favorite moments of personal cognitive dissonance goes back to my time at Michigan State in the mid-1970s when at brunch at IHOP one Sunday morning I looked over to see John Gilmore, June Tyson, and Marshall Allen seated a couple of tables over from me. They were ...

Literature

Sunday Readings: Texts and Commentary

November 12, 2016 • by Laura Nelson

The Left is very good at both recrimination and self-recrimination. While salutary, both can be carried to extremes, and thus become self-defeating. Public protest about the election of Trump is both understandable and righteous – after all, he has publically and I assume sincerely expressed contempt for the norms and ...