MINDFUL PLEASURES

Here's my close reading of a very short poem that has long impressed me, Randall Jarrell's "The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner...

Too much disposable income.... Hollywood dreams and money to burn....  Those were my two likeliest answers when, upon finishing Robert McKee...

Having written a kind of manifesto for 'authentic reading' in my last post , I've decided to put my mind where my mouth is and d...

When, in casual conversation, the mention of a title elicits the reply, "Oh yes, I read that in school," we can assume that the sp...

  Here's the last batch (for now) of videos in which I (try to) read great poems: "Love Song" (a self-love song, actually) and...

In these videos from the Mindful Pleasures YouTube channel, I read:  "Kubla Khan" by Samuel Taylor Coleridge;  "Ode to a Nig...

Even more videos from my Mindful Pleasures YouTube channel, in which I read five more of my favorite poems: "Red Riding Hood" by ...

Here are five more videos from the Mindful Pleasures YouTube channel in which I read: "Among School Children" by William Butler Ye...

 ... Yes, I'm having a busy and enjoyable day making hostage video-quality recordings of myself reading some favorite poems. Here's ...

Here are five brief YouTube videos, recorded this morning, in which I read a few favorite poems:  "The Haw Lantern" by Seamus Hean...

Yet another YouTube video. In this one, I talk about the ten books I would take to a desert island. I hope you have as much fun watching the...

Another YouTube video in which I discuss a perfect simile that occurs in the third chapter of Yates's now-classic novel.

  A very short YouTube video in which I vid-rant about our culture's loss of the distinction between informed and uninformed opinions--a...

I have just 'dropped,' as they say, my second video on the new Mindful Pleasures YouTube channel. In this one I read and discuss th...

Mindful Pleasures has just birthed its first spin-off, a YouTube channel where I will read, talk about, and sometimes even perform great wo...

If any readers of the first edition of James Wood's How Fiction Works are wondering whether to check out the new(er) enlarged revision,...

William H. Gass's 1958 essay "Gertrude Stein: Her Escape from Protective Language" (reprinted in Fiction and the Figures of Li...

In his theoretical book The Role of the Reader , Umberto Eco (his very name an intertextual Nabokovian ec(h)o) quotes Mallarme: Le monde exi...

The high points of  Fragments of the Artwork , a thin posthumous selection of Jean Genet's writings on art--culled and Englished from th...

Because readers have asked for an update on my health, and because, unlike most authors of memoirs, I hate to write about myself, I'll k...

There are writers who drink and drinkers who write, and then there's Richard Yates, who spent a lifetime blurring the distinction. Habit...

In one of my favorite literary quotes, Randall Jarrell defines the novel as "a prose narrative of some length that has something wrong ...

Two-time National Book Award winner Jesmyn Ward's first and least heralded novel, Where The Line Bleeds , is the kind of book critics li...

If Junot Diaz's Brief, Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao is the definitive contemporary American immigrant novel, Colm Toibin's defiantly ...

In a conversation about Jean Genet (on KCRW's "Bookworm" program), Edmund White described himself as a "minor novelist,...

At the end of a week spent reading six volumes in the Cambridge Companions to  Literature series (namely, the CC's to Narrative (i.e., ...

Lorrie Moore, for whom I had hope, disappoints me with the first half-dozen of her COLLECTED STORIES, a hefty, great-looking Everyman's ...

Coming to Mailer's Deer Park after Play It As It Lays throws into relief the weaknesses of the former novel: a prose too-often clumsy ...

  I should have read this thirty years ago... Why didn't I read this back in the early nineties? ... These thoughts recurred several tim...

Eighty pages into Ashbery's Flow Chart , in the restored Library of America edition, I found myself just beginning to understand it--thi...