Books

The literary world is going nuts these days over how we respond to other writers. We're too mean. We're too nice. We respond to writers' Twitter personae instead of their work. We're jealous of their success. We're marketing for friends so they'll market for us in return.

And so on.

The latest hullabaloo is over William Giraldi's piledriver of Alix Ohlin in today's New York Times Book Review. (It's online here.)... »Read more »

Amorak: The Hunger Games. Go.

Mark: Great book. Good movie. Probably as good as it could have been, given that so much of the book is in Katniss’ head/thoughts. I wonder what the experience of seeing the movie would have been like if I hadn’t read the book?... »Read more »

"This world tries to bore me to death, but not hard enough."

-- Timothy Donnelly, "Chapter for Being Transformed into a Sparrow"

Timothy Donnelly this week won the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award for his second book, The Cloud Corporation. This award brings with it a prize of $100,000. Yup, there are the right number of zeroes there. A hundred grand, like the candy bar. For a book of poems. Every poet in America secretly thinks they will win this prize some day (or maybe that's just me).

At any rate, I'm taking this opportunity to proclaim here my love and respect for this book. I bought it at AWP* last year and I've read the whole thing probably three times by now. It's long (150ish pages) and more than a little challenging, which I mean in a good way. It challenges readers, and it challenges societal power structures.

At a time when "occupy" was one of those words of the year, when we're all talking about the 99 percent and the 1 percent, when people might just maybe be paying a little more attention to just how powerful the powerful are, The Cloud Corporation is a great choice for a major award. It's not preachy or dogmatic, or even really devoted to a particular message, but its language is infused with an awareness of the power dynamic in contemporary America. It is at times conversational, colloquial -- but also entirely formal in terms of its control over line and diction. ... »Read more »

I'm this poetry-writing group where each month we write a poem in response to a prompt given by one of the group members. This month's prompt was to write a "first poem" -- the first poem of a new project, or a poem intended as the starting piece for an in-progress project. Which, of course, begs the question: What is a first poem? What does it look like? How is it different from, say, the seventh poem of a project, if it's different at all?... »Read more »

It's easy to make fun of Dan Brown.

Literary types -- and I do sometimes fancy myself something of a literary type -- can look down their noses at his overwrought sentences, his dissertationesque dialogue, his conspiracy-theory plots. And, of course, his popularity. Anyone who makes that much money from his books can't be a real writer, can he?... »Read more »