Ambitious Garden
When my husband asked me to move from Brooklyn to a remote mountain-top upstate so that he could pursue his dream job, I was miserable for many reasons: the friends I would leave behind, the sadness of...
View ArticleWhose Shirt Should You Wear?
The American who falls in love with football remains on the outside. Our women’s national team is the world’s greatest, but our presence in the professional leagues of Europe and South America...
View ArticleOn Queer Comics
Recently my friend Peter called; he was on his way to Comic Con. I’ve never been, but he’s been often like another friend of mine, Olivier, who’d posted a photo earlier in the day of himself dressed as...
View ArticleLooking Anew at Roberto Bolaño’s By Night in Chile
Reviewed: Roberto Bolaño's By Night in Chile Translated by: Chris Andrews New Directions Bolaño’s 2000 novel “By Night in Chile” is an unusual one. In its merely two paragraphs (of which the second...
View ArticleThe Customer is Sometimes Always Right
The mantra instilled in us by Big Successful Businessmen is that “the customer is always right.” Or maybe it was created by some early writers with a vendetta against a particular shop, or a shopkeeper...
View ArticleThe Back to School Special
There is a certain feeling, a certain tone to August: in my mind, it’s colored orange, the sun is warm (but not hot), and the leaves are turning. But the largest part of the mythological Fall season...
View ArticleNotes of a Filthy Young Woman
Before Cindy, there were at least a hundred women. Maybe more. There was Giselle, who sat by me in a linguistics course and confessed to me her academic frustration in windy little Germanic whispers:...
View ArticleSilence in the Library
Naming is powerful. A name can be a gift or a burden. Choosing or discarding a name can make you feel free. A nickname can make you feel loved or crushed. What people call you shapes how you see...
View ArticleThe Threat Aesthetic
Jay Sizemore’s bitter reworking of Allen Ginsberg’s ‘Howl,’ called ‘Scowl,’ sent parts of the poetry community into paroxysms of disgust last week. Jay Sizemore & Revolution John Mag can rot in...
View ArticleVlad’s Top Five: Russian Novelists
I recently met a woman and her first question was… Where are you from? Probably because I speak with a Slavic accent. I wanted to answer… I am from the Soviet Union… However, it is no longer the USSR....
View ArticleA World Buried in Structures
(With regard to Grant Maierhofer’s “Marcel” and “Postures”) Electronic globalization has turned us into relentless postdigital flaneurs; something quite different from the Baudelaires, the Prousts or...
View ArticleCatullus and Forgetting
The thing about September 11th, for me, and maybe for some other people my age, is that it all happened so quickly and at once. Suddenly a time in my life that was already moving faster than it should...
View ArticleVlad’s Top Five: 20th Century Russian Writers
And what do you say about Russian writers of the 20th century? the woman asked. I answered without thinking twice. 1 Leo Tolstoy We should start with Tolstoy. Why? she asked. After all, Tolstoy lived...
View ArticleBart Simpson meets DFW: Part One
If anyone could write one hundred pages on one 7-day cruise, it’s David Foster Wallace. And so you have “A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again” in his collection of essays by the same name. It...
View ArticleA Powerful Woman Standing on a Box
Yesterday afternoon, as I was driving to pick up my son from school, an out-of-the-blue thought popped into my head: What ever happened to Donna Shalala? She’s not someone I’ve given much thought to...
View ArticleAnne Garréta’s Sphinx meets A Lover’s Discourse: Fragments
Discussed or quoted in this review: Sphinx by Anne Garréta and translated by Emma Ramadan Deep Vellum Publishing, 2015 and A Lover's Discourse by Roland Barthes and translated by Richard Howard Farrar,...
View ArticleStuff Happens
‘Look, stuff happens, there’s always a crisis. And the impulse is always to do something, and it’s not necessarily the right thing to do.’ —Jeb Bush I. In Casas Adobes, Arizona, on 8 January 2011, a...
View ArticleThe Entity of the Single Poem: One Editor’s Thoughts
A few years back, I sat nervously in my first editorial meeting with The Literary Review. I had been awarded the title of Assistant Editor, a graduate assistantship, through Fairleigh Dickinson...
View ArticleJeremy Fernando presents: Anu Selva-Thomson
Sartre and the Perennial Virgin by Anu Selva-Thomson At the heart of existentialism, lies the claim that ‘existence precedes essence’. It was born as a response to the metaphysical theory that...
View ArticleDFW Meets Bart Simpson: Part II
I am strangely, stupidly optimistic at the start of every college term in which I teach. I’m excited, because even though some students find reading and grammar and English boring, there are topics...
View Article
More Pages to Explore .....