Dear Harold Bloom,
I love you. Let’s get married.
But: what about this?, my reader enjoins. And it’s true, Harold Bloom. I think you are a lunatic. I think you are straight-up crazy nuts. Also, you are approximately one million years old, and I am twenty-six. But I do [...]

[Read more →]

Our conversation, which had degenerated into a cross-cultural comparison of methods for cooking udders among the English, Romans, Mexicans, and Yemenite Jews (who on top of everything else need to make them kosher), ceased as soon as we began to share the true Valencian paella. The rice lining the bottom of the pan was [...]

[Read more →]

…is that all authors google themselves. Hi, Sarah Manguso! I liked your book a great deal! I am sorry I read it in the bookstore! Alas, Keith Gessen, I have not read yours yet, but would be happy to accept any review copies you might like to provide in gestures of [...]

[Read more →]

When I was just graduated from high school and in Iowa City doing a writing workshop, in the summer of 2002, I bought Sarah Manguso’s first book, The Captain Lands in Paradise, from Prairie Lights. I bought it because my poetry teacher told me to, and because I had never seen so many slim [...]

[Read more →]

Say, hypothetically, that you read Sarah Manguso’s The Two Kinds of Decay crouched on a stepstool at St. Marks Bookshop, quickly, because you have a home to get back to and a job to get up for the next morning and no desire to be half-slept.
First impressions: “spacetime” is an irritating word; those [...]

[Read more →]

Rereading Wharton’s Old New York novellas–very few authors I like better, if any. Wharton’s absolutely brilliant at getting at why people make decisions, and how, and making visceral the fear and thrill of making small, important decisions that resonate personally, interpersonally, and socially. Lizzie Hazeldean, from “New Year’s Day,” is essentially the same [...]

[Read more →]

That was where the people closest to her came in, where, without immodesty, for it was a position I found it almost unbearable to be in, I came in.
This is a very bad sentence. Reading it for the first time, I got mired in the middle, had to yank myself out of its quicksand [...]

[Read more →]

When I was a sophomore in college, I used to have arguments with my Humanities 220 professor about affect. The class was a year-long interdisciplinary survey of Modernism, and we, its students, used to joke that it existed to give us a thorough enough greatest-hits grounding to participate in cocktail-party conversations of its topic: [...]

[Read more →]

I first read this article way back when it actually came out, but I return to it periodically because there’s something so weird about it.
I also have a thing about Harold Bloom. I got sidetracked into a substantial discussion of his peculiar aesthetic neurosis in the introduction to my undergraduate thesis, because [...]

[Read more →]