Our Natural Bent for Destruction and the Rights to Failure
“Is there an art that is dangerous? Yes. It is that art which upsets the conditions of life.”–Charles Baudelaire. What…
Is Anyone Else SHOCKED by Ben Marcus’s Traditional Short Story in The New Yorker???
I always think of him as the King of experimental form—and from some interviews in the past, thought he had…
Rain, I don’t mind.
After seeing today’s cloudburst in New York City tear down a huge tree, snap it into splinters, this definition of…
Over Forty Writers Over Forty to Watch
Writing the title of this post actually felt very silly; it seems such an arbitrary way of gathering a list…
A Sentence About a Sentence I Love, by Christopher Higgs
“Every word was once an animal.” —Ralph Waldo Emerson Because it serves as epigraph to one of the…
A Sentence About a Sentence I Love, by Lance Olsen
RHETORIC The art of making life less believable; the calculated use of language, not to alarm but to do…
The Dominant and the Longue Durée
It’s a very familiar story: Romanticism began in 1798 and ended in 1900, when it was replaced by Modernism. …Although…
Ben Marcus (and others) Reading in NYC, November 11, 2009
Harper’s Magazine Presents: The Family Table with Rivka Galchen, Ben Marcus, and David Samuels To coincide with Thanksgiving, Harper’s Magazine…