I Did Not Approve This Message
David Foster Wallace, James Joyce, and the trouble with public image. Jesse Eisenberg and Jason Segel filming The End of the Tour, a movie about David Foster Wallace not authorized by his literary...
View ArticleHow She Knows
Penelope Fitzgerald’s shifting reputation. From the cover of Hermione Lee’s Penelope Fitzgerald: A Life. Penelope Fitzgerald would have been ninety-eight today. We should mark the occasion by...
View ArticleYou Can’t Build That, and Other News
Alexander Brodsky and Ilya Utkin, Hill with a Hole (detail), 1987–90. Image via Hyperallergic“The role of a novel is to entertain readers, and fear is one of the most entertaining things there is … I...
View ArticleThe Most Misread Poem in America
Everyone knows Robert Frost’s “The Road Not Taken”—and almost everyone gets it wrong.Frost in 1913.A young man hiking through a forest is abruptly confronted with a fork in the path. He pauses, his...
View ArticleMartians—They’re Just Like Us! And Other News
Robert Abbett’s cover art for John Carter of Mars, 1965.Compared to writers at the beginning of their careers, successful authors have an enormous freedom to experiment with form and style: their...
View ArticleI Did Not Approve This Message
David Foster Wallace, James Joyce, and the trouble with public image. In 2010, just under two years after David Foster Wallace’s death, the journalist David Lipsky published Although Of Course You End...
View ArticleHow She Knows
Penelope Fitzgerald’s shifting reputation. From the cover of Hermione Lee’s Penelope Fitzgerald: A Life. Penelope Fitzgerald would have been ninety-eight today. We should mark the occasion by...
View ArticleYou Can’t Build That, and Other News
Alexander Brodsky and Ilya Utkin, Hill with a Hole (detail), 1987–90. Image via Hyperallergic “The role of a novel is to entertain readers, and fear is one of the most entertaining things there is … I...
View ArticleThe Most Misread Poem in America
Everyone knows Robert Frost’s “The Road Not Taken”—and almost everyone gets it wrong. Frost in 1913. From The Road Not Taken: Finding America in the Poem Everyone Loves and Almost Everyone Gets Wrong,...
View ArticleMartians—They’re Just Like Us! And Other News
Robert Abbett’s cover art for John Carter of Mars, 1965. Compared to writers at the beginning of their careers, successful authors have an enormous freedom to experiment with form and style: their...
View Article