For The Book Obsessed
[ad_1] When I was a liminal fifteen in Reagan’s dire 1980s, my desperately-needed imaginative transport took the form of cable reruns of The Twilight Zone. Having been met at the departure terminal of the fantastic some years earlier by Ray Bradbury’s The Martian Chronicles, I quickly discovered that Rod Serling’s “land of both shadow and … Read more
[ad_1] There is an inarguable ephemerality about Dante Alighieri, the author of the Divine Comedy (in Italian, Commedia—the “Divine” was a publisher’s later addition). C.S. Lewis put it well in Studies in Medieval and Renaissance Literature (1966): “There is a curious feeling that [the Commedia] is writing itself, or at most, that the tiny figure … Read more
[ad_1] Oxford Professor of English Literature Joe Moshenska has done something arguably long overdue in Milton studies. Approaching the Olympian of English letters from a mix of new historical and reader-response positions, Moshenska buries himself deeply into an imagined psyche of the poet and polemicist, propagandist and Latinist, John Milton while also digging down into … Read more
[ad_1] If there is an academic in America most committed to the idea of literature as a vast, human project, an artistic process of knowing and revealing that spans across social and political boundaries—even historical epochs—it is Harvard University’s David Damrosch. In his latest offering, Around the World in 80 Books, the founder and director … Read more
[ad_1] The experience of reading, like any intimately subjective experience, is a challenge to fathom, perhaps as tricky for us as it was for Augustine, staring in wonder at his Milanese mentor Ambrose seeming to read without speaking the text aloud. What actually occurs in a reading mind? What goes on in that spooky, liminal … Read more
[ad_1] Tentative and fogbound, writer Robert Prowe, the protagonist of Chris Powers’s A Lonely Man, finds himself in the middle of his life much like the Dante of The Divine Comedy. But for the city of Berlin in 2014 instead of a darkened wood, an unfinishable manuscript in his hands instead of those same hands … Read more
[ad_1] The title of Raymond Antrobus’s debut collection, The Perseverance, derives from the name of the London pub the poet’s father used to frequent, an establishment whose doors were shut upon young Raymond, with “50 p. to make [him] disappear,” many an afternoon. Deaf from birth, the boy would stand in front of this everyday … Read more
[ad_1] Alexandria Hall’s National Poetry Series-winning book, Field Music, possesses a poetic maturity born less from extensive experience than from piercing vision and sensitivity. Hall, a finalist in the 2018 “Narrative 30 Below Contest” has lived some, undoubtedly, but somehow manages to sidestep the typical language registers of youth—the naiveté, the callowness, the arbitrary ambiguity. … Read more
[ad_1] An extraordinary, often mesmerizing engagement with the nature of identity and other existential trappings, The Math Campers, Dan Chiasson’s new collection of poetry, is a meta-kaleidoscope of literature and literary influence. A geometric swirl of the many faces of the author’s family and friends (particularly his teenage sons), it is colored and blended by … Read more
[ad_1] Stanley Plumly—author of eleven books of poetry, four books of nonfiction, Maryland poet laureate, professor, and winner of numerous literary prizes—died of multiple myeloma in April 2019 at the age of 80. According to his own poem leading off this, his last collection called Middle Distance, he was a “White Rhino,” the last of … Read more