MINDFUL PLEASURES

" The Nobel Prize in Literature for 2016 is awarded to Bob Dylan for having created new poetic expressions within the great American so...

So you want to read the canon of classic 'Western' literature. Good for you. Reading the canon, voluntarily immersing oneself in its...

There's a kind of 'wit of the staircase' that affects only Joyceans. It happens in late June when we recall, a week or so after ...

In the second of the lecture/essays collected in his 1991 book A Writer's Reality , Mario Vargas Llosa permits himself a "long pare...

A few years after the West was won, notorious outlaws Frank and Jesse James were joined on their nefarious trail by their East Coast cousins...

Here's hoping that a year from now, after the fact-free sound and fury of all the too-tall tales told by Trump, I might click on my inso...

Michael Herr, author of Dispatches , the brutal and beautiful Vietnam War narrative that stands as the most artistically impressive book yet...

Word comes this Bloomsday of the death earlier this week of Gregory Rabassa, the dean of American translators. This spectral presence on our...

Like the calendar's notional circle, like the Earth on its imaginary axis, like the bottomless Bloomsday glass of Guinness we drank unti...

"... the American writer in the middle of the twentieth century has his hands full in trying to understand, describe, and then make cre...

Theodore Roethke, good American poet with a name that tries to anagram itself before stuttering to a stop halfway through, published more th...

It's darker than dark in America as we stare down the brain-stained barrels of our first fascist presidency. One election, just one, now...

Chuck Close, Alex , 1987. Toledo Museum of Art, Toledo, Ohio When I think of William Gass's The Tunnel , I'm reminded of the gi...

Most critical writing today is bad, bad, bad.* And by 'bad' I mean bad. Not the kind of 'bad' Michael Jackson told us he was...

Here, in no particular order, are fifteen essential books to form the foundation of a great library on Euro-North African-Middle Eastern-Wes...