Michael Robbins

It is happening again. Into the mawkish nature documentaries and faddish elliptical doldrums of American poetry, John Ashbery is sticking his clown nose. For nearly a half-century Ashbery has been...

There's a certain type of reader — often also a writer, with a leaf-fring'd MFA — who has it all figured out. The realist novel is a scam, a factory...

Whenever a new collection of stories by Alice Munro appears, which is often enough, reviewers compete to see who can gush about her most hyperbolically. She is "the living writer...

Whenever a new collection of stories by Alice Munro appears, which is often enough, reviewers compete to see who can gush about her most hyperbolically. She is "the living writer...

David Foster Wallace's posthumous career — Wallace committed suicide in 2008 at the age of 46 — has produced nearly as many books as his live one did. In 2010,...

David Foster Wallace's posthumous career — Wallace committed suicide in 2008 at the age of 46 — has produced nearly as many books as his live one did. In 2010,...

I'm usually reading four or five books at a time. At the moment, I'm in the middle of Husain Haddawy's enchanting translation of "The Arabian Nights" (forget Cervantes and Sterne...