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Melville Rejected
Cover letter for a short story submission by Herman Melville (dated 9 May 1854) Herman Melville was 34, with Moby-Dick several years behind him, when he submitted the manuscript for his short story...
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New Uses for the Old Story: NBA Poetry Winner Mary Szybist
Congratulations to Mary Szybist, who was chosen last week as winner of the National Book Award for Poetry for Incarnadine, her second book of poetry, cited by the NBA jury as a collection that “probes...
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Whitman’s Lilacs and Hindemith’s American Requiem
Paul Hindemith This week’s National Symphony program features Paul Hindemith’s beautiful When lilacs last in the dooryard bloom’d: A Requiem for those we love in a program conducted by Christoph...
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“Time’s Friction”
The last day of the year, the eve of a new start. Not a bad moment to recall a key passage from The Hamlet, the first novel of William Faulkner’s Snopes trilogy: the passage in which Mink Snopes,...
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Time for Tenn
Suddenly what seems like a flood of Tennessee Williams-related material has been vying for my attention. First is the long-delayed but always expected new John Lahr biography, Mad Pilgrimage of the...
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Alice Goodman: New York Times Profile
Alice Goodman in Fulbourn, England. Credit Nadine Ijewere for “The New York Times” My New York Times story on the poet and librettist Alice Goodman is now online: When “Nixon in China” had its premiere...
View ArticleRIP Philip Roth (1933-2018)
Philip Roth has always been such a constant in my literary landscape. From Charles McGrath’s NY Times obituary: And yet, almost against his will sometimes, he was drawn again and again to writing...
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