Books
Reader’s Diary: Fred Dewey’s ‘From an Apparent Contradiction in Arendt’
Hannah Arendt, an untimely, unassimilable figure, looms ever larger in the life of thought.
Reader’s Diary
Books
Reader’s Diary: Frank Lima's ‘Incidents of Travel in Poetry’
“There are several Puerto / Ricans on the avenue today, which / makes it beautiful and warm,” wrote Frank O’Hara in “A Step Away from Them.” It was 1956, the day after Jackson Pollock’s funeral.
Books
Reader’s Diary: ‘The Brexit Crisis’
The presses roll fast when there are no presses to roll.
Books
Reader’s Diary: Darryl Pinckney's ‘Black Deutschland’
This is not so much a second novel as a mature reimagining of what a youthful first novel might have been.
Books
Reader’s Diary: Max Stirner's ‘The Ego and His Own’
In a recent long, too long, much too long article in the London Review of Books, Andrew O’Hagan quoted John Lanchester paraphrasing dear old Edmund Wilson to the effect that poets feel differences among themselves as tantamount to lying.
Books
Reader’s Diary: On Richard Bellamy
Richard Bellamy is one of the very few art dealers around whose name the word “legendary” floats like an aura. But how to convey what was so special about him is a nice problem for a biographer.
Books
Reader’s Diary: Robert Glück’s ‘Communal Nude’
Some of Robert Glück’s essays came my way in the 1980s via such publications as Poetics Journal.
Books
Reader’s Diary: Kevin Young's ‘Jelly Roll’
So many poets out there.
Books
Reader’s Diary: Rana Dasgupta’s ‘Capital’
My all-too-brief visit to Delhi last year ignited in me a desire to learn about the history of India.
Books
Reader’s Diary: Henry Miller's ‘The Colossus of Maroussi’
At some point in my teens I read a number of books by Henry Miller — though not as many as I read, at around the same time, by Hermann Hesse, despite the fact that Hesse’s books, in contrast to Miller’s, were not reputed to convey much information about sex.
Books
Reader’s Diary: ‘In the Empire of the Air: The Poems of Donald Britton’
When I wandered ingenuously onto the scene, Donald Britton was a young star, or so I considered him, just a few years older than me (actually a bit more than a few, it turns out — he always looked so boyish) yet somehow wiser.
Books
Reader’s Diary: Man Ray's ‘Writings on Art’
Jennifer Mundy acknowledges in her Preface to Man Ray’s Writings on Art that, compared to his friends Duchamp and Picabia, he has come to be seen as something of a lightweight.