Getting Out Just In Time: Remembering Maurice Sendak

This is a formidable accomplishment – what might seem an oxymoron — an unabashedly unpretentious first novel set in a prep school.

The eighteen-year-old narrator, Jason Prosper, is an upper class, old money upper East-sider who “rarely ventures below Central Park South,” whose bedroom…

Unmooring and Unlocking: review of The Rules of Inheritance

When author, blogger, and therapist Claire Bidwell Smith was eighteen years old, her mother died of colon cancer. At twenty-five, Smith lost her father to prostate cancer that spread through his body: “He was forced to choose…

One more for Roberto Bolaño and literary competitiveness.

Not since Gabriel Garcia Marquez’ One Hundred Years of Solitude has a Latin American author managed to attain and capture such a wide international readership as has Roberto Bolaño. Stylistically the two are polar opposites,…

The concept behind Dear Editor, by Amy Newman, should be painfully familiar to anyone who has taken part in the precarious dance that is the process of seeking publication. Every poem in the collection takes the form of the submission cover letter, that inevitable, often obsequious kind of…

I’m just two weeks away from once again failing in my mission to read every single book that was published in the current year, which means that I’m not equipped, as so many apparently are, to tell you which of them were the best, ten or otherwise. But I’m confident that I know what…

- Emma Straub has a great post at The Paris Review about Miss Piggy, Literary Icon. Miss Piggy “wrote” a guide to life book filled with wisdom such as:

There is no such thing as a “correct” weight for any particular height—they are only averages. And moi, who has a perfect figure, can…

The photographs aren’t particularly artistic and the captions aren’t particularly poetic. But the recent collaborations of Jon Cotner and Claire Hamilton – slideshows that document walks – are deceptive in their simplicity and extraordinary in their impact. In photos and quick text, they…

Paige Taggart’s Polaroid Parade (Greying Ghost, 2011), Ben Fama’s New Waves (Minutes Books, 2011), and Genya Turovskaya’s Dear Jenny (S U P E R M A C H I N E, 2011).

In an era when much fuss is made about the “death” of print, independent presses such as Minutes Books, SUPERMACHINE,…