Category Archives: Contemporary novel
Adrienne Rich’s ghazals
February 27, 2014 Her earliest ghazals are in Leaflets, at the very end of the volume, which I must have looked at. But I’m reading them seriously only now — because of Agha Shahid Ali and Call Me Ishmael Tonight, … Continue reading
Stuart Hall and vernacular modernity
February 14, 2014 The passing of Stuart Hall makes me go back to his seminal essay, “Negotiating Caribbean Identities,” where he talks about “vernacular modernity” as the “modernity of the blues, of gospel music, of hybrid black music in its … Continue reading
Ruth Ozeki: Zen and Politics
December 18, 2013 Reading the papers for “American Literature in the World,” I’m struck by how few wrote on My Year of Meats. Did people think it was too political, with too much of an agenda, out to get … Continue reading
Writers getting old: Ashbery, Angelou, Morrison
November 13, 2013 I was standing at the very back, and saw only a wall of people in front. I’d also missed the introduction. For most of reading, all I got was the voice, surprisingly strong, vigorous, the voice … Continue reading
Ilium, Iowa City: Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse Five
October 23, 2013 For someone interested in the twentieth-century epic, Slaughterhouse Five is a no-brainer. How else would one call a story set in Ilium, talking about war, about death and the counterfactual? But did I ever stop to think about … Continue reading
Oscar Hijuelos, The Fourteen Sisters of Emilio Montez O’Brien
October 16, 2013 This week saw the passing of Oscar Hijuelos: guitar-playing, cake-loving (I suspect), also lover of bountiful, sometimes over-stuffed prose. His father was the morning-to-lunch shift cook at the Biltmore Hotel, so he definitely knew a thing or … Continue reading
Mama Day: The Tempest in the Global South
October 2, 2014 Her name is Miranda (“Mama”) Day — yes, that Miranda, the one who said, “Oh, wonder! How many goodly creatures are there here! How beauteous mankind is!” Gloria Naylor is not the first to take on Shakespeare, of course. … Continue reading
Brazil: Karen Tei Yamashita, Elizabeth Bishop
April 24, 2013 Both write about human efforts that come to nothing. Bishop’s Manuelzinho begins bravely, planting gardens that ravish the eye: beds of cabbages edged with red carnations, lettuces with alyssum. But then “silver umbrella ants arrive,/ or it … Continue reading
Linda Hogan, Herman Melville: People of the Whale
April 10, 2013 The Native Americans have always been there, of course. The very name of the ship brings up their ghostly presence, for “Pequod, you will no doubt remember, was the name of a celebrated tribe of Massachusetts … Continue reading