Category: Literary

  • Aimee Bender L.A. Reading

    Novelist Aimee Bender will give a reading at Atwater Crossing in Los Angeles on Thur., Jan. 12 at 7 pm. The event is hosted by the editors of Slake magazine and will include a reading and a discussion of Bender’s craft. Her most recent work is The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake. Below you can…

  • Grappling With James Joyce

    Grappling with James Joyce at the beginning of the 21st Century is similar to reading Shakespeare’s tragedies or even working your way through the Old Testament—you recognize immediately you are knee-deep in cultural source material. It feels less accurate to call Joyce a modernist than to say he was modernism, for it’s clear how much of our…

  • David Foster Wallace & Lit’s Thematic Poverty

    There will probably come a time when our current appetite for insight about David Foster Wallace ebbs, but I don’t see that coming any time soon. I just got around to reading John Jeremiah Sullivan’s fascinating review of Wallace’s The Pale King in GQ. Sullivan is a first-rate essayist and it’s great fun to see him write about…

  • Full Stop For Book Lovers & Writers

    While many people mourn the disappearance of Sunday book sections in newspapers across the U.S., the number of quality sites online—The Millions and The Los Angeles Review of Books come to mind— for high-quality book reviews, criticism and literary essays continues to grow. I recently spent time clicking through the excellent site Full Stop, which is…

  • Writing, Making Money & Raising Kids – How It’s Done

    There are times when I’ve found myself skimming through The Paris Review interviews and hoping the interviewer would stop being profound and ask the writers more pedestrian questions about their early writing life: How did you make a living in the beginning? What was your writing routine? How did you write every day and make time…

  • Criticism As Literature Itself

    “One doesn’t have any business writing about literature unless one’s business is literature,” writes William Giraldi in his fascinating treatment of critic Adam Kirsch’s new book on Lionel Trilling, Why Trilling Matters. Giraldi notes that Kirsch himself is a throwback to critic-as-intellectual and calls him: “An Ideal critic of the Coleridgean mold, he possesses a swift…