Review: ‘A Manual for Cleaning Women’ by Lucia Berlin
In one of Lucia Berlin's short stories, a bunch of junk in a dentist's office includes "domes you turned over and it snowed." Think how many writers you could ask...
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Review: ‘The Shapeshifters’ by Stefan Spjut
As a rule, if a novel about telepathic shapeshifting lemmings is blurbed by Karl Ove Knausgaard, I'll read it. So far that category includes only Stefan Spjut's "The Shapeshifters," published...
Bedeviled by books in translation
Of all the inspirational quotes that infest the Internet — self-help bromides and things Confucius never said — the one I hate most is attributed to the 13th-century Persian poet...
Poetry roundup: ‘What About This’ by Frank Stanford, more
What About This by Frank Stanford, Copper Canyon, 750 pages, $40 The Arkansan poet Frank Stanford shot himself in the heart in 1978, when he was 29 (his 30th year,...
Review: ‘The Daemon Knows’ by Harold Bloom
Every book by Harold Bloom I've read — 19, now, of 36 — is a mess. The popular works produced over the last 25 years, in particular, seem to have...
Verses of note: The best poetry of 2014
Most of this year's high-profile poetry titles slid right off my eyeballs. Plus ca change. The New Yorker and The New York Times Book Review regularly ignore exciting books like...
Patricia Lockwood and Michael Robbins on poetry
In early 2013, I wrote to my editor at Penguin, the legendary Paul Slovak, and asked if he'd take a look at my friend Patricia Lockwood's new poetry manuscript. Her...
Review: ‘Kill My Mother’ by Jules Feiffer
Born in 1929, Jules Feiffer got his start at 16 as assistant to the illustrious Will Eisner, creator of "The Spirit," who thought the teenager's draftsmanship inferior to his wordsmithery...
Review: ‘Excellent Sheep’ by William Deresiewicz
What is college for? To learn to think, to grapple with meaning and purpose, to ask how to live? Or to prepare for a career, to rack up an impressive...
On non-readers
One of our universities recently made a survey of the reading habits of the American public; it decided that forty-eight percent of all Americans read, during a year, no book...