Who would you like to begin your summer with? This year, I choose Henry David Thoreau. His essay “Walking” celebrates the art of meandering, sauntering and getting lost in fields and woods. He is drawn to the forest, the meadow and “the night in which the corn grows.” He … Read More
Month: May 2018
“But what could possibly go wrong?”
Think of the funniest books you’ve ever read. Did any of them win literary awards? No? As the Washington Post points out, there has long been a “critical resistance to comic novels.” Until now. The 2018 Pulitzer Prize for fiction went to the laugh-out-loud novel Less by Andrew Sean Greer… Read More
“I learned that the poem was made not just to exist, but to speak – to be company.”
“I want to be alone, but not too alone.”
I disagree with the description on the back of this book, which says that one of Jonathan Franzen’s “essential themes” is “the hidden persistence of loneliness in postmodern, imperial America.” Rather, it seems to me that in every one of these essays, the narrator discovers that he’s not alone … Read More