The poets Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell met in 1947 at a New York dinner party held by Randall Jarrell. She was 36 and had just published her first book of poems. He was 30 and had just won a Pulitzer Prize. Later, she wrote that she’d gone to the party with “fear and trembling.”
“Then Lowell arrived and I loved him at first sight. . . .
Read More ...War was Vonnegut’s subject, but not one that came easy to him. It was, it seems, a subject that got hold of him, one that wouldn’t let him go until he tossed out all his beliefs and saw the Second World War as it really was…
http://www.villagevoice.com/2008-03-25/books/war-and-pieces/
You’re bright, thirty-something, and haven’t lived up to your promise. You wanted to be a poet. Now you teach writing and can’t finish your novel. You live in brownstone Brooklyn, in a neighborhood of young white professionals where you are stared at for your skin color. You have three small children and can’t come up […]
Read More ...Equality between men and women was the feminist ideal. It was our utopia. Now that my husband and I have achieved something like it, on a one-household scale, I can see that in some ways it’s a pain in the ass. Equality is terrifically inefficient […]
Read More ...Germaine Greer leads a double life. We know her best as a tricky, funny, impossible feminist provocateur, liable to stand up at any moment and announce that contraception is bad, female genital mutilation is acceptable in an African context, or that Princess Diana was a “devious moron.” But she’s also a professor of literature who […]
Read More ...One of the many things science fiction and Westerns have in common is the dream of an empty world. Cormac McCarthy’s 1992 novel All the Pretty Horses is a stunning tale of open grasslands, lava fields, swamps, river fords, overhanging rock ledges (convenient for camping), and mountains in the distance. Its heroes, two boys who […]
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