Hilary Plum
“If you’re not there, the story won’t be told”: Anthony Shadid (1968–2012)
Yesterday brought the profoundly sad news that the extraordinary journalist Anthony Shadid has passed away, at the age of 43, apparently of an asthma attack suffered while on assignment in Syria. Shadid’s 2005 book Night Draws Near: Iraq’s People in…
Jonathan Franzen on Edith Wharton
Upon reading Jonathan Franzen on Edith Wharton The older I get, the more I’m convinced that a fiction writer’s oeuvre is a mirror of Jonathan Franzen’s character. It may well be a defect of Jonathan Franzen’s character that my literary…
Writing American empire
The most recent issue of Guernica features an essay by Kamila Shamsie on “The Storytellers of Empire,” which considers the insularity (my word, not hers) of contemporary US “post-9/11″ literature. Shamsie is from Pakistan, and wonders why contemporary literature from…
The canon as home?
Tim Parks has a new post on the New York Review of Books blog (discovered via) making an argument for the role of the literary canon—”not an argument for staying at home, but for having a home from which to…
Reportage and poetry: on “abu ghraib arias”
In the January 3rd issue of the Nation, Stephen Burt reviews four new books of poems, by Juliana Spahr, Anna Moschovakis, Noah Eli Gordon, and Kathleen Ossip. In their work, he says, all of these poets are: reacting to big…
