Kathleen Rooney’s book of poetry, Oneiromance: an epithalamion, is one among several beautiful, extremely human, and extremely thoughtful pieces of literature I’ve read lately on marriage and coupling, and one I would be happy to give to any brides or grooms (if I knew any). It’s divided into six parts: two on a Brazilian [...]
|
|
||||
|
Muumuu House, Tao Lin’s online and print publishing house, has added some helpful information to the galley of Megan Boyle’s Selected Unpublished Blog Posts of a Mexican Panda Express Employee—helpful for the reader either familiar or not familiar with Lin, Boyle, Muumuu House and their wider world. This is “debut poetry”—that is, not selected [...] Why, in this day and age, where life moves at the speed of light and we have limited time to spend with dead white men, let alone ones who spent their lives slaughtering one of today’s best-loved animals, should a person, young or old, actually read Moby-Dick? Nathaniel Philbrick has many answers to that [...] It was a case of social media serendipity: when I posted my rave review of Shann Ray’s short story collection, American Masculine, Alan Heathcock tweeted the link in support of the book. I realized Heathcock’s own collection of short stories, Volt, had been enticingly reviewed by Trevor at The Mookse and the Gripes. So, [...] Benito Cereno, one of Melville’s Piazza Tales, is among my favorite of his work and probably my favorite novella-length item from him. My first post on it, from way back during my maritime lit project days, is still one of my favorites, and I still look forward to reading the real-life journals of Amasa [...] In 1956, John Steinbeck began rewriting Thomas Malory’s stories of King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table. He worked on this until 1959 and stopped, unfinished. At first, he considered it a translation job. He said in a 1956 letter to his literary agent that “I’m going to make a trial run—not [...] May Day is officially the first book in the Art of the Novella series I have disliked. This shouldn’t be a surprise, since I’m also probably the only person ever who didn’t like The Great Gatsby (which I should re-read) and have thus never counted myself a Fitzgerald fan. To begin with, I often [...] Sarah Orne Jewett’s The Country of the Pointed Firs is the kind of writing I have a deep ambivalence about. On one side, I genuinely enjoy reading such aware, thoughtful observations of and interactions with a region and its people, and this exploration of the small coastal community of Dunnet’s Landing is firmly within [...] I don’t consider myself much of a Mark Twain fan, but I think things like his 1899 novella The Man That Corrupted Hadleyburg are him at his best, and very good. It’s the story of an “incorruptible” town full of impossibly upright and honest citizens who somehow offend a stranger passing through their midst. [...] So far, the revisiting project hasn’t brought me any radical new insights about the (still very few) books from my past that I’ve picked back up, but it has strengthened in me the feeling that you barely read anything until you read it for the second time. Are all first reads worthless? Is it [...] |
My Personal Canon (ongoing project) |
|||
|
Copyright © 2012 bibliographing - All Rights Reserved |
||||
Recent Comments