Monthly Archives: January 2014
One poem by Derek Walcott: Glyn Maxwell
Most poets, when they leaf back through their work to select the Best of Themselves, tend to want grown-ups around: poems from not so long ago, poems that show what the poet came to, what he or she did when he or she grew up, poems they can talk to. The awkward youngsters in the […]
Jesse Ball, “Silence Once Begun”
The Mother of the Accused I said to him, I said: When you were four, your father and I had a thought that we should perhaps travel to different waterfalls, that it might be a good thing to see all the waterfalls we could. So, we began to go to waterfalls whenever we had a […]
One of the most relentlessly and funnily experimental writers of our time
Here is the much-missed David Markson, author of Wittgenstein’s Mistress and other great, unclassifiable works, on Kenneth Bernard, in Little Star Weekly this week: One of the most relentlessly and funnily experimental writers of our time. Kenneth Bernard is one of the most gloriously antic fiction writers we possess. Think of Salvador Dali or Giorgio […]
“The Mission,” by Joy Williams
A Mr. Hill was doing my paperwork. “What will you take away from this experience?” he asked me. I looked at him, a little wildly, I guess. “What do you think you will learn from the incarceration experience?” he said. “I don’t know,” I said. Mr. Hill wore a pink shirt and looked tired. His […]
What Vergil gave Dante (1931), newly translated Erich Auerbach
Originally Dante belonged to an Italian literary movement that he called the dolce stil nuovo. It was a movement that, with a swiftness of growth unparalleled in literary history, conjured perfection out of a void. The flowering of medieval verse during the first quarter of the second millennium in France, Germany, and Spain had passed […]
For Epiphany, Patricia Storace
Like Homer, Ovid, and Dante, Patricia Storace, in her new novel The Book of Heaven, has produced a great harmonizing of myths into a single cosmic tale. Unlike these forbears, her ear is attuned to the myths outside our hearing—the ones neglected by the bards, inscribed in constellations beyond our horizon. For Epiphany today, our […]