Spoilers throughout. Deserved spoilers, maybe even a tad vengeful, because Playground humbled me on so many levels at once. First and most happily, Richard Powers’s descriptions of the strange, almost unfathomable beauty beneath the sea are the most lyrical and engaging I have ever read. As a boy, he wanted to be an […]
In the 2024 presidential race run-up, Kamala Harris supporters took solace in the prediction of Allan Lichtman and his famous election forecasting system built around thirteen “keys” to the White House. A historian and professor emeritus at American University, Lichtman had correctly predicted all but one presidential race since 1984. Lichtman […]
I, you, he, she, it, we, they, them, us, him, her, his, hers, its, theirs, ours, yours. Strike them from your (this is hard already) vocabulary. A radical suggestion, but it came to me with some urgency when I pieced together all the harm they do. First, my Jewish husband said, “I support […]
Climbing to the fourth floor of Saint Louis University’s Verhaegen Hall, we dragged chairs into a tight circle in Belden Lane’s dusty, book-lined office and unpacked wine, cheese, crackers, apples. Then we spent an hour or two talking about what we were writing, wanting to write, thinking about, wondering. Three men, two women, […]
“A respected novelist while alive, in death Bolaño has soared to cult status.” Whoever wrote that for Newsweek was not exaggerating. Though Roberto Bolaño’s name does not glide off most Midwestern tongues, those who know his work are fervent in their praise. Now Picador intends to expand that cult by reissuing Bolaño’s books, […]
Bill Gass would have turned 100 this year, and colleagues, family, friends, and admirers held a centenary celebration of his life and work last week here at Washington University, where Gass was a professor of philosophy for 30 years. (He died at 93.) He was, as everyone notes, known more widely as […]
When Putin’s Russia invaded Ukraine in late February 2022, I glanced at Homer’s lliad, piled onto my kitchen table with other books in a tower of procrastination, with grudging respect. When Hamas reignited the mostly dormant Israel-Palestine conflict on October 7 of last year, I grabbed the Illiad by the spine to […]
Washington University in St. Louis undergraduate student Alethea Franklin and St. Louis writer Marie Wenya Burns are the second annual recipients of the Heartland Journalism Fellowships. Established by WashU and the River City Journalism Fund, the Heartland Journalism Fellowships support development of aspiring minority and underrepresented writers. During their yearlong residency, which […]
I hate pencils. That scritch on the paper grates on my nerves, and I loathe the forced humility of using one to do a crossword puzzle. A futile rebel, I do mine in ink and make a mess crossing out bad guesses, just to prove…something. No doubt this traces back to the trauma […]
When I prepared my reading for the farewell poetry performance at the Way Out Club in July of 2021, I pulled only from my chapbook Shape of a Man because it occurred to me that Bob Putnam, co-owner of the club, was perhaps the first man I ever knew. I was old enough […]
