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The premise of this essay is that criticism needs to play a central role in the revival of literature.

-Anis Shivani, “What Should be the Function of Criticism Today? Subtropics

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Here are a few of the many facts strangers can learn from reading Lin’s blogs and comments on blogs: His penis measures five inches when erect, and he last had sex in December 2009; he regularly blends smoothies and is obsessed with hamsters.

-Joshua Cohen, Bookforum review of Richard Yates

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You know when you’re at a party and there’s exactly one person you know there? So you talk to that person until you run out of things to talk about, and then, if you’re as uninteresting as I am, that person looks for the nearest other person he or she knows and leaves you standing there? (Is that just me?) What if there was no one else there that person knew? And what if you both had to stand there, blathering on at each other until you both just wanted to off yourselves? (And you wonder why I never say much in conversation.) That’s what it feels like to me, the big book.

-Gabriel Blackwell – “Your Basic Bore, or ‘The Literature of Exhaustion’”

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In Scrabble, I’d know a man was the one for me if he ever spelled…
A two-letter word that got him over 40 points. Because I’ve done it, okay? If you use “qi” (that’s technically a word in Scrabble, which is insane) and you can put it on the triple-letter and have it going across and down—bam, you’re done. You’ve just won that game. You’ve won the game, and you’ve won the girl.

-Hannah Simone, Men’s Health March 2012

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Christopher Nolan is a different animal entirely. I think he wants to be an artist—I believe he really does aspire to make today’s Godfather: Part II—and he even has some decent innovations (e.g., “tell the story backward”), although they’re never as defamiliarizing as he seems to think they are.

-A.D Jameson – “Viktor Shklovsky wants to make you a better writer, part 1: device & defamiliarization”

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I detect a strain of embarrassment in some of the more hostile reactions to The Tree of Life.

-Kent Jones, Film Comment review of The Tree of Life

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To criticize is to appreciate, to appropriate, to take intellectual possession, to establish in fine a relation with the criticized thing and make it one’s own.

-Henry James, Preface to What Maisie Knew

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Ford’s language is of the cracked, open spaces and their corresponding places within. A certain musicality and alertness is required of the reader; one has to hear it instinctively and rhythmically.

[Example:]In the night when I got up to use the toilet, I found my father alone at the card table with his Niagara Falls puzzle spread out like a meal in front of him.

-Lorrie Moore (and Richard Ford) “Canada Dry” New Yorker May 21, 2012

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You finally discover that even the author you return to pads his sentences, hoards pages and collapses on an idea in order to flatten it, to stretch it out…The writer…always says more than he has to say: he swells his thought and swathes it with words…Let us write…, let us dupe each other.

-E.M. Cioran “Some Blinds Alleys: A Letter”

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Teaching writing is a hustle.

-Cormac McCarthy “Cormac McCarthy’s Venomous Fiction” NYTimes

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The writers whose work is published are all writers who can somehow manage NOT to write for months, even years. There may be writers who HAVE to write, but if there are we never see their books: no agent would touch them. Mainstream publishers only accept submissions from agents. Indie publishers don’t pay the kind of money that would enable a writer to do nothing but write. Mainstream publishers pay money that could buy time, but won’t let the writer use the time. So the system selects for the writer who doesn’t HAVE to write.

-Helen DeWitt – Comment on The Paris Review Blog

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Conscience is the bite of things known together, in remorse and in incentive; conscience is that unification of the sense of things which is moral beauty; conscience comes at many moments but especially, in James, in those deeply arrested moments when the will is united with the imagination in withdrawal.

-R.P. Blackmur “The Loose and Baggy Monsters of Henry James”

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Hope you get this on time, sorry I didn’t inform you about my trip to Spain for a program. I am having some difficulty here because i misplaced my wallet on my way to the hotel which contained some cash, credit cards and some other valuable things. I am so confused right now.

-Spam email from Uncle Tom

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I’m sure Henry James is a genius and all, but untangling his prose is like trying to talk to a verbose, over-educated person who’s drunk off his ass but refuses to pass out…The other problem with the book is that it was written in a time when Americans had a hard time believing anybody on Earth was actually fucking, since nobody in America was.

-Elizabeth Urello, Goodreads review of The Ambassadors

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Beckett will not hear of being interviewed, whether orally or in writing. I fear that on this he is not to be budged. He gives his work, his role stops there. He cannot talk about it. That is his attitude.

-Suzanne Dumesnil, Letter to Jerome Lindon April 24, 1951, The Letters of Samuel Beckett 1941-1956

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$10 IS NOT SO MUCH when you consider that each year Narrative publishes more fiction and poetry than any other literary magazine—more than 350 authors and artists last year alone. How do we manage to give our content away for free while paying writers well?

-email from Narrative Magazine May 21, 2012

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The Listeners, Leni Zumas’s new novel, has just been published by Tin House Books. The book is available at a discount through Powell’s. An interview with Leni is at Powell’s website. Publisher’s Weekly review. A review of the book is at Full Stop.

Her reading tour:

May 16 – Powell’s Books, Portland, OR
May 21 – Annie Bloom’s, Portland, OR
May 24 – Book Soup, Los Angeles, CA
June 4 – Elliott Bay Book Company, Seattle, WA
June 19 – Word Books, Greenpoint, Brooklyn, NY
June 23 – Politics & Prose, Washington, DC
June 24 – Juniper Summer Writing Institute, Amherst, MA

Zumas’ debut novel reads a bit like Faulkner. Fractured imagery, shifts in time and place, and a motley crew of characters—Fod, Quinn, Geck, and Cam, to name a few—lead the reader through a patchwork map of the marred childhood and failed adulthood of Quinn, a thirtysomething washed-up musician with a drinking problem. A former anorexic and adolescent “cutter,” Quinn is smart, witty, and filled with obsession and anxiety over the events of her sister’s death and its aftermath. Zumas plays with narrative conventions here, peppering the text with short chapters that are at times ethereal and disjointed but often tinged with humor. Readers looking for gritty experimental fiction in the manner of the late Gilbert Sorrentino will find The Listeners whetting their appetites for more from this promising new author.     —Booklist

Here’s Luca Dipierro’s animated short film for the book:

In bed sick, but unable to sleep; I viewed a beautiful film, The Mill and the Cross, about the 16^th Century Pieter Breughel painting “The Way to Calvary.” For some years I have loved Breughel and to see this cipher put onto film (more is known about Shakespeare), portrayed with ease, and placed into a 16^th Century landscape with a fitting mise-en-scene of long takes and slow movements (form matching epoch) was an untold pleasure.  Most of the film was without dialogue or voice-over or music—a testament to the grand cinematography containing a dose of special effects to make the images unearthly, though fully rooted on the planet as it was 500 years ago.

As many of the wordless scenes transpired, I began to see certain episodes from my own life. Memories of people long gone, moments of living that had left my consciousness for some years. I am almost certain this bubbling up of our lives is what great art does to us as we age—the artistic experience acting as the vital fuse necessary to tie the time of our life into the specter of our soul. Watching this film by Polish director Lech Majewski I was reminded I didn’t always feel a certain circumspection at the joys and pain I’ve harbored. It used to be that I switched off when watching a film—I gave everything up to escape myself, but now thoughts follow me even throughout a major surgery. Now I knew I had a “quartz contentment”—a feeling I can ascribe to because a woman born in 1830 taught me so. Emily Dickinson pushed her verse to pondering the properties of emotion, her art acting as a slick for memories to fill out her faceless face:

After great pain a formal feeling comes—
The nerves sit ceremonious like tombs;
The stiff Heart questions—was it He that bore?
And yesterday–or centuries before?

The feet, mechanical, go round
A wooden way
Of ground, or air, or ought,
Regardless grown,
A quartz contentment, like a stone.

This is the hour of lead
Remembered if outlived,
As freezing persons recollect the snow—
First chill, then stupor, then the letting go.

Life in a chair is the life of the mind. Being with Emily we discover a mind racked by a paralyzing social awkwardness, but bewitching in its summaries of human feeling by way of muscular language, as in “After great pain, a formal feeling comes—” where the speaker queries how to go on living after enduring incredible hurt. How? We make. “The hour of lead” is the hour we have to change our lives and all the rest of Emily’s words and Lech’s images, particularly this one of protestant who was killed by Spanish Militiamen, suspended in the air on a wagon wheel for birds to eat:

…increase my lust for something better, while reminding me of what I had and how it feels to have lost it.

Is this a shuttered life? Is this how I thought it would be at age three, Legos in hand, food on my face? I have a stormy idea that what I make and what I do is foolish and futile but I will never know. Is that why I look at Breughel, read Stevens, and listen to Mahler? The highest art attained. I seek cause before satisfaction and to hold my head over a bowl, a golden bowl, a chalice, a stone—something beautiful is worth the walk to the museum or the trip to the shore.

Threats – LA Times Review

There is a great new Bookworm interview with Gass about Life Sentences.

At Word Patriots, Mark Seinfelt interviewed Gass twice: once about his new book and once about Stanley Elkin. There are also three shows dedicated to Paul West.

Finally, my essay at The Kenyon Review–“On Influence: Starting and Stopping Cracks“–takes some lines of Gass as a starting point for a meditation on writing and art. The first paragraph:

Why not stand up straight for art? Rainer Maria Rilke’s older lover, Lou Andreas-Salomé, cared greatly about his relation to words and made him improve his handwriting, urging the poet to take control of everything in his life before communing more with the muse. Soon Rilke purchased a stand up desk to improve his circulation while he wrote poems—by changing his methods, he changed what the methods produced. This might speak to a few things about influence and who we are willing to listen to (Andreas-Salomé, also a former lover of Nietzsche, was a distinguished psychoanalyst and writer), but undoubtedly, art is at least as much physical as emotional.

This is how they did it.

The Overlook Hotel is simply the best site about The Shining on the internet. There are dozens of never before seen photos from the making of the film (including how Nicholson was propped up frozen in the snow at the end), new posters, artwork, tattoos, copies of screenplays, anything you can think of. Lee Unkrich is the caretaker of the site and I salute him.

Just in case you need more ephemera on The Shining here is that little article On Newfound Footage.

As an artist limited by his circumstance in the warring, emaciated USSR throughout the 60’s, 70’s and 80’s, Andrei Tarkovsky did well to establish himself as one of cinema’s greatest masters. In some sense, his works represent grand acts of imagination against the pressures of reality. Faced by an increasingly philistine world enveloped in the struggles of aggressive international politics and the constant threat of nuclear war, he felt it his duty as an artist to help reintroduce the poetic essence as a vital part of humanity. He imbued his cinema with an element of poetry that stuns the viewer both visually and emotionally, and with his vision as an artist he invented—as legendary Swedish film maker Ingmar Bergman said—a new language. It is no surprise that Tarkovsky’s father was a much-loved Russian poet with nine collections of poetry. As evidenced in his film Stalker, where one of his father’s poems is recited near the threshold of The Room (a place where one’s innermost desire is alleged to be granted upon entering), Tarkovsky used his father’s poetry as a source of inspiration for his cinema. You could say that he found poetry to be one of the highest forms of art, and wanted to instill the essence of it in his films. But what is the essence of poetry? Some might say it’s intangible, or that it simply doesn’t exist. Others might say that the essence of poetry is its unique presentation of ideas. Tarkovsky would likely say, however, that it is the art form’s ability to inspire a state of rational and irrational bliss through language.

In his book, Sculpting in Time, Tarkovsky talks about the importance of emotion and irrationality in the creative process. This is a well-known idea for most poets, but to apply it to cinema was something that had not been done often before Tarkovsky. In poetry, for instance, it is generally accepted that the writer will not know what the poem is “about” until it has been finished. The process of creating a poem is taken over by the natural succession of language in the context of itself, leading the artist into territory he may not have intended on visiting. You start with a word or a phrase that has a kind of gravity to it, and you build on top of it other words and phrases with a similar gravity. Of course there are technical aspects to it as well—and though a poem no longer requires rhyme and meter, there still must be some poetic techniques applied for it to be an effective piece of art. The key to effective art is achieving a balance between irrational, emotional urges of spontaneous creation and the more rational, thought-oriented sense of structure that must be imposed on the former. During the creation of a poem, however, most would agree that it leans more on the emotional side, and the intellectualization of it typically comes later. Tarkovsky believed in this irrational method of creation, but how could he incorporate such a thing in cinema where the actual making of the film must be a highly controlled process involving many people? This is where the definition of poetry must be stretched a little bit. Tarkovsky is often described as a very “poetic” director, and in his films it could be said that he follows the model of an irrational creative process in the visuals he presents. It’s not linguistic poetry, but visual poetry. For instance, in Stalker when the three characters emerge from the meat grinder, they find themselves in a spacious and eerie room filled with miniature sand dunes. The static camera angle viewing The Room from the far side is incredibly striking for the viewer, though it is unclear whether the dunes have a purpose beyond just being aesthetic objects. Do they symbolize something? Maybe they do; maybe they don’t. That’s up to the viewer to decide. If Tarkovsky followed the poetic model of creation, he likely envisioned that scene without any clear or deliberate association of meaning for the dunes. The point is that the emotional gravity of the scene was worth the film it took to shoot it, and that’s all Tarkovsky required as an artist. He could figure out what the dunes meant—if they meant anything at all—after the scene had been shot. Stalker is full of visual poetry like this that puts up a kind of resistance against intellectualization. In fact, even the most important concept of the film, The Zone, seems to resist. In Tarkovsky’s own assessment of it (from his book Sculpting in Time), he writes “People have often asked me what The Zone is, and what it symbolizes, and have put forward wild conjectures on the subject. I’m reduced to a state of fury and despair by such questions. The Zone doesn’t symbolize anything, any more than anything else does in my films: The Zone is a zone, it’s life…” The great embarrassment for a poet is to be over-analyzed—to have your work spoken of in terms of intention of ideas when there was none to begin with. True to his own poetic roots, Tarkovsky feels no need to impose a meaning on everything in his films. In fact, as an artist, it offends him when this is done. A cinematic poet like Tarkovsky knows that not everything is meant to be reduced to a collection of pieces for the purpose of analysis. Some things you just accept whole.

There is, however, an obvious conflict to address concerning the nature of the creative process and the finished product. How does a person conditioned to rationalize experience come to terms with a film like Stalker whose visuals are so charged with pure, irrational energy? Because even though rational thought may not be the most crucial element in the creation of a poem or a film like Stalker, the analysis that comes afterwards should not be entirely overlooked. Rationalizing experience and art is every bit as important as creating it; what would be the point of it if there were nothing gained afterwards? A fellow classmate’s initial response to Stalker reads: “Diving straight into the film, I had nothing but confusion and did not truly like this film. I thought that by watching Stalker, I would obtain an understanding of what exactly was going on. This, however, proved wrong.” This is a good example of a common reaction to Stalker by people who have little experience with the poetic essence that Tarkovsky instills in his art. While the plot itself should not be difficult to follow, what the film is actually about on a more intangible level may be accessed through the dialogue between the three main characters. And though Stalker, like many poems, has its center of gravity located in the emotional side of human experience, it is by no means impenetrable to thorough analysis.

Film as an art form has at its disposal many mediums of communication simultaneously. In Stalker, not only are the visuals so affecting for the viewer, but the dialogue of the film contains amazing potential for deep examination and, as much as any other piece of art that came before it, gives a person access to the tools they need to divine the purpose of their own existence. The use of dialogue in Stalker goes back to the two essential elements of the creative process—rational and irrational—except they are more directly related to poetry through the use of language. When Boris and Arkady Strugatsky (co-authors of the novel Roadside Picnic, which Stalker is loosely based on) wrote the script for Stalker, they must have approached it from two angles at once: feeling the need to stay true to the language and the poetic elements of the dialogue while also staying true to the ideas they wanted to get across. In this way, the ideas, which end up being the most important part of the film after multiple viewings, are not set aside as byproducts of the irrational creative process, but are seen as co-primal elements along with the poetic narrative they are trying to bring together through language. The finished product ends up pregnant with both meaning and aesthetic value. This is the poetic essence to Tarkovsky’s work that inspires two states of bliss for the audience: rational and irrational. The rational bliss is more commonly known as an epiphany—when a person very suddenly gains insight into the essential meaning of something that alters their perception of reality. The dialogue in Stalker—mediated by the slow-paced narrative and surrounded by an aura of conscious reverie—undoubtedly has the power to spark an epiphany in any receptive person. This type of rational bliss is a different facet of the poetic essence at work than the irrational bliss, which is brought on by what we don’t understand in the film, but are still drawn to. In contrast to the epiphany, the visual poetry of Stalker suspends rational thought and lets the viewer focus on the experience of the film itself. A good example of this is the scene when the three characters have stopped fighting with each other and sit down together on the threshold of The Room. Rain starts to fall into the shallow pool, and again, we look at the three archetypal characters together from a far, static angle. This scene inspires chills. But on the first, second or maybe even third viewing, the audience may still not have a rational explanation for the falling rain. This is not because it is unable to be explained, but because the power of this scene is rooted in the raw, irrational essence of poetry as opposed to something that is meant to be clear in its message.

In addition to these methods of creation and the states of bliss his films inspire, Tarkovksy employed a clear devotion to his art form that would be expected of a poet. As shown in the documentary film Directed by Andrei Tarkosvky, he had a great passion for the collaborative work of film making. Though poetry is most often a solitary craft, there are still parallels to be found in the technical aspects of creating a poem and creating a film. For instance, in Directed by Andrei Tarkovsky, one sequence shows the process of designing a set for his last work, The Sacrifice. Tarkovsky has a hand in everything, but he is not dictatorial. He helps to accent the set with small items, says which colored couch he would prefer, and knows how to arrange the lighting. These details are like the technical elements of poems that a poet must pay close attention to, even if they are not fully conscious of how each small thing will affect the work as a whole. For example, when a poet puts a phrase together that, for some reason feels a little bit off, there may be a word that needs to be added or a word that needs to be removed to make the phrase feel right. This is likely the way Tarkovsky and his set-designers go about creating a set. They have a feeling in mind that they want to produce, and they need to put things together in a certain order to make it a reality. Unlike a poet, however, Tarkovsky has many people to cooperate with during the creation of his films. There are different personalities to deal with and perhaps different artistic visions that need to be reconciled with Tarkovsky’s. With so many things going on during the making of a professional film, Tarkovsky said in the documentary that it can be easy for a director to become more like an observer during the creation of a film, as opposed to an active participant. He made a point of being directly involved in everything that he could be, and this is one reason why each of his films are unmistakably his. He developed his own style of film making that is instantly recognizable by anyone familiar with his work.

One such trademark of his films is explained by one of his former collaborators, Eduard Artemyev, in an interview about Tarkovsky’s use of music. Artemyev was a young composer when he met Tarkovsky and was asked to score his 1972 film Solaris. He was never given specific directions for the score, but was actually granted a rather overwhelming amount of creative freedom. Tarkovsky trusted him to set a score for his films that would match his artistic vision and contribute to putting the essence of poetry in action. One thing Tarkovsky insisted upon, however, was for Artemyev to try and “orchestrate the sounds of nature” in his scoring of the films. In Stalker, evidence of this approach to the sound effects can be heard throughout. Dripping water—which is a common sound in the movie—is supplemented by a slight echoing, metallic effect. Not only does this give certain scenes in Stalker a more futuristic feeling (it is a science-fiction film, after all), but it also makes the viewer become more aware of water as a central theme to the film. Another example where Artemyev subtly complements the sound effects in Stalker is when the three characters are riding the trolley on their way into The Zone. There is a rhythmic industry to the sounds the trolley makes in that long shot that mesmerizes the viewer as they anticipate entering The Zone. The clacking of the wheels on the track creates a musical bridge between the bleak, sepia-toned world they are coming from and the lush, colorful zone they are entering. In addition to supplementing natural sounds, Stalker also makes use of more conventional music to enhance certain scenes. The dream sequence, where the Stalker, Writer, and Professor decide to take a rest by the bank of the river, makes excellent use of an ambient piece to accompany the reading of the poem “The Prayer of the Stalker.” While the poem is read by a disembodied female voice (also the voice of the Stalker’s wife), there are orchestrated bird and animal sounds in the background that were likely pre-recorded and then placed into the film. Once the poem has been finished, the music begins and helps set into motion the irrational state of bliss for the viewer that this scene is so famous for. In this way, the music used in Tarkovsky’s films help to actuate the poetic essence. It is a flawless example of Tarkovsky’s ideal aesthetic on full display.

Though it should be simple to enjoy a film like Stalker for anybody interested in feeling and thinking, the slow pace of the narrative and the cinematic style on the whole may take some getting used to. In an interview with Vadim Yusov, a cinematographer who worked with Tarkovsky on his 1983 film Nostalghia, he said that Tarkovsky was interested partly in the reproduction of reality when it came to the cinematography. This holds true for most of his post-Ivan’s Childhood works. The use of long, unedited shots in the majority of Tarkovsky’s films take the viewer on a journey with the main characters, as opposed to leaving them as observers. From beginning to end in Stalker, the viewer can feel each step in the story as it unfolds because of the way it is shot. There are a few time-lapses, but nothing that is terribly disorienting. It begins in the morning when the Stalker gets out of bed, and ends soon after he goes back to sleep. According to Russian film expert Vida Johnson, Tarkovsky’s interest in the reproduction of reality by using long shots only increased over time. Wikipedia says that in Stalker, a 163 minute film, there are a total of 142 shots with the average length of the shots lasting over a minute. But in The Sacrifice, Tarkovsky’s last film, there are only 115 shots for a total of 149 minutes. This shows a clear progression towards the longer, more virtuosic style of cinematography that Tarkovsky sought to perfect throughout his career.

In the end though, it is not the technical details of his art that prove to be the most interesting. Tarkovsky was a master of his craft with a deeply personal connection to everything he created. He believed in making art that responded to a necessity of man—a kind of art that forces a person to the center of his being in a desperate attempt at rebirth while under the constant threat of dissolution. He lived during a time when the world threatened itself openly with its own destruction, and he responded to that threat the only way a solitary person can: he created art. He posed eternal questions of love, happiness, beauty, wisdom, etc., in his films that will continue to open people up in a way they have never been opened up before. If anything is made clear after absorbing Tarkovsky’s aesthetic philosophy and works, it is that when confronted with good art, our reductionist tendencies as rational, pragmatic people are made useless. Stalker is not a film to be reasoned with in order to find answers—it is a film to be experienced in order to find questions. The essence of poetry as Tarkovsky saw it was not only a thing to be experienced in the leavened moments of bliss induced by great art, but also a thing that comes to birth and rebirth inside oneself in daily life. It is when it is embodied in art, however, that one becomes so acutely aware of its inflammatory nature that they develop a vast, insatiable yearning for its constant activity. This is not unlike the Stalker’s own yearning for The Zone, which torments him to the point where he would sacrifice anything, even his life, for a chance to be with it again. In this sense, The Zone is accessible to each and every person capable of making art, for it is when making art that a person feels free of the dreaded and eternal human task of survival in a dispassionate world. To enter The Zone is an act of liberation, but to explore it—as in the film—is a dangerous thing. A successful journey through The Zone requires more than art. If one is not lead in the right direction and by the right forces at the right times, they may go mad from disorientation. In other words, there must be a balance of forces to inform one’s world view in order to make it through The Zone and find themselves suddenly on the threshold of The Room, where they are faced with the great question of desire. The essence of poetry is something that helps a person on the way to The Room, as when the Writer leads the way through the Meat Grinder, but it is not the only force at work. Tarkovsky understood the multiple ways of reaching forms of truth. Faith, Art, and Science may sometimes be at odds in his work and in our society, but in the end he realizes they must cooperate as evenhandedly as possible in order to reach the sought-after happiness. The paradox is that this happiness as destination may not even be desirable by any party because happiness is not a destination; it is an endless state of exploration carried out by the three forms of understanding. In the end, though, Tarkovsky understood the world as an artist. He pursued his vocation with the conviction of one wholly consumed by the essence of poetry and proved to the world that to have real love for anything in this world is the most essential part of being human. He died as a martyr of his beloved cinema due to cancer likely caused by the radioactive site where Stalker was filmed. In Sculpting in Time, Tarkovsky wrote “The aim of art is to prepare a person for death, to plough and harrow his soul, rendering it capable of turning to good.” If art has ever prepared a person for death, there was never one more deserving than him.

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*Matt Turner is a student and poet in Seattle

**This piece originally appeared at Matt’s site: In Anticipation Of

*Nov. 30, in a speech at MIT

Darlin’ Neal‘s Elegant Punk is now available from Press 53. Facebook Event Page

At Corium Magazine, we were lucky enough to publish work from this book – check out “Polka Dot“

— Lee K. Abbott, author of All Things, All at Once: New and Selected Stories

Gil Roth, former head of Voyant Publishing (Paul West and Samuel Delany both published books there), has an exciting podcast on his website:

The theme is that you tell me about a book or author you once hated but now adore. (Because it’s too easy to talk about books/authors you once loved but are now embarrassed by.) Give this episode a listen, and if you have a book or author you wanna discuss on the show, drop me a line! I love to learn about how people’s literary tastes change and what those changes say about the way we grow.

This episode is about Marilynne Robinson’s Housekeeping. It’s a wonderful, smart literary conversation with Ann Rivera. Get in touch will him about what you want to discuss.