In 1953 Philip Lamantia joined four other poets for what is probably America’s most famous poetry reading, the word famous, of course, being highly relative when modifying anything to do with verse. Allen Ginsberg’s inaugural presentation of his declamatory epic “Howl” made the event at San Francisco’s Six Gallery historic, while the other writers on the bill—Gary Snyder, Michael McClure, and Philip Whalen—also took their first step toward wider recognition. For Lamantia, though, the reading wasn’t quite as decisive. Reluctant to offer his own work, he read poems by John Hoffman, his recently deceased friend and onetime fellow traveler in

Kate Zambreno. “I am beginning to realize that taking the self out of our essays is a form of repression,” Kate Zambreno writes in Heroines. “Taking the self out feels like obeying a gag order—pretending an objectivity where there is nothing objective about the experience of confronting and engaging with and swooning over literature.” To […]

This is not a book I would normally read; I rarely read mysteries, and the title, Gone Girl, is irritating on its face. I bought it anyway because two friends recommended it with enormous enthusiasm, and because I was curious about its enormous popularity: the millions of copies sold, the impending movie by David Fincher and Reese Witherspoon, the glowing reviews. I found it as irritating as imagined, populated by snarky-cute, pop-culturally twisted voices coming out of characters who seem constructed entirely of “referents” and “signifiers,” and who say things like “Suck it, snobdouche!” The only reason I kept reading

A colonel in Napoleon’s army is severely wounded during a daring act of valor at the Battle of Eylau, then trampled by cavalry seeking to rescue him. Given up for dead, the “old greatcoat” is tossed in a mass grave. Many years later, having clawed his way out of the earth and been nursed back to health abroad, he returns to Paris, appearing at a lawyer’s office to attempt to reclaim his name, his fortune, and his family. But there is no place for the formerly dead in the France of the Restoration. Colonel Chabert’s would-be widow has liquidated his

From the outset, it’s been clear that Claire Messud has all the necessary equipment—a fertile imagination, a grown-up sensibility, and writerly ambition in spades—to write very good fiction, perhaps even a novel that defined our times. One could detect in her prose the influence of many writers—Henry James and Elizabeth Bowen are just two that come to mind—without being able to pin her to a particular school or manner. She seemed, that is, very much her own person, trying out various devices as they suited her. If anything stood in her way, it was the fact that her imagination and

In an epigraph at the beginning of his new novel, All That Is, James Salter announces that he now realizes everything is a dream, the only reality is that which is preserved in writing. If this is true, Salter—the writer if not the man—has a lot to answer for. I have just spent the past few weeks reading a number of his books, and it seems to me that if anything is a dream, it is the motive force behind the work of this highly acclaimed writer who, for more than fifty years, has been producing novels and stories whose

Since its publication in 2008, Fiona Maazel’s first novel, Last Last Chance, has won a small and cultlike following, myself included. I love the book because it is constantly surprising—blackly funny but permeated by great sadness, like the fiction of Barry Hannah or Donald Antrim—besides which every sentence in it shines like gold. The story of an über-rich drug addict and her massively dysfunctional family (they smoke crack, worship Norse gods, release an apocalyptic super-plague), Last Last Chance is a smarter and bleaker book than it gets credit for, but it’s still, at bottom, a comedy: Each reader can decide

Catholic women show their bangles at a Christmas celebration in Multan, December 23, 2002. On March 2, 2011, Shahbaz Bhatti, Pakistan’s Catholic minister of minority affairs, was murdered—his car sprayed with bullets as he left his mother’s house in Islamabad. Bhatti had been the target of many previous threats and was, by his own account, […]

Abdellah Taïa writes short sentences, often without verbs. Single words sometimes. There is light and space in his prose. And despair. At times, he uses the ellipsis suggestively . . . bringing out the apertures within and between words and thoughts, eliciting the unbridgeable gap between individuals. That is where desire seems to lie, and where longing—and melancholia—is to be found in his writing.