September 8, 2015
Why We Chose It
Lindsay Turner’s review of Etel Adnan’s, To look at the sea is to become what one is, appears in the Spring 2015 issue of KROnline. I’ve been a book-review editor […]
January 11, 2015
Why We Chose It
“Monocot” by Noy Holland Sometimes a magazine digs for its fortune; sometimes you have to get yourself out under that window and serenade. I wrote to Noy Holland a winter […]
July 1, 2013
Why We Chose It
How wise of Emily Anderson to begin her lovely story “Calliope” with an epigraph from one of Laura Ingalls Wilder’s classic books. She must take care of herself, Wilder tells […]
October 8, 2012
Why We Chose It
By Hilary Plum, Consulting Editor “Undertaking” by Anne Germanacos “I can only make things taut; I have no interest in roundabout or loose,” we’re told in Anne Germanacos’s “Undertaking,” a […]
July 7, 2012
Two visions of the city
1. The City and the City by China Miéville. (Be advised: though I would not, some might think this description a tiny bit of a spoiler.) Two distinct city-states, Besźel […]
June 30, 2012
“The real world we think we inhabit”
“We need a dream-world in order to discover the features of the real world we think we inhabit” is the old line by Feyerabend, discovered sometime in college, that often […]
June 18, 2012
Worlds within worlds (or, the regional city)
Last week I had occasion to visit Charleston, West Virginia, for the first time. The occasion: a needed stopping point on a drive from the eastern shore of Maryland to […]
June 6, 2012
The Dorothy project: An interview with Danielle Dutton
Just out today on the Kenyon Review Online is Elaine Bleakney’s review of two novels by Renee Gladman, Event Factory and The Ravickians. Both novels were published by Dorothy, a […]
May 27, 2012
Out loud
Through periods of illness I have recently taken to listening to books on tape. I know they’re not “on tape,” but I can’t help but use that phrase: bound by […]
May 21, 2012
Taking back the sponge cake & other adventures
This post should come with a dateline: Seattle. This weekend I was lucky enough to go to my first reading at the legendary Elliott Bay Books. Four great poets—Zach Savich […]
May 12, 2012
Writing nature: On Melanie Rae Thon’s “The Voice of the River”
In a recent interview, novelist Lance Olsen describes one of the endeavors of his just-released Architectures of Possibility: After Innovative Writing: I spend one chapter talking about how conventional notions […]
April 25, 2012
Performing justice
Last week I was one of many Americans who unwittingly clicked through to the “new” Bank of America website and was, for a moment, completely taken in. “Dear Fellow American,” […]