Out of Sheer Rage: Wrestling With D.H. Lawrence Geoff Dyer Picador, 2009 Dyer and his brand of blurrily personal nonfiction is much in the ether lately, or at least the certain subsection of slightly literary inclined internet ether I breath, for better and worse. But more than the chatter overhead, Dyer has been urged on [...]

Well the day is finally here. My first book of short stories, The Portable Son, has been published by Aqueous Books and is now for sale. I have flipped the switch from someday forthcoming to recently published. The hard sell: The Portable Son is available at Amazon as paperback and Kindle, Barnes&Noble.com, and directly from the publisher. It is also for sale at Burke’s [...]

I’m happy to report that Lady Chatterley’s Brother: Why Nicholson Baker Can’t Write About Sex, and Why Javier Marias Can, an ebook I have written with Scott Esposito, is now officially on the cyber shelves. It’s sort of like an electronic pamphlet, long and argumentative yet sprightly and topical, covering how two contemporary authors treat [...]

  Notes on Sontag by Phillip Lopate Princeton University Press, 2009   In many ways this is the perfect book about Susan Sontag, because Phillip Lopate is so much her opposite—warm where she is cold, personal where she is stiff-armed, steely maned where he is bald, self-doubting where she is authoritarian in her judgment, discursive [...]

I realize it’s the 50th anniversary of Hemingway’s death, but this is ridiculous: This is the most absurd misinterpretation of Hemingway’s life, much less his value as a “great writer,” and what’s worse is that I think this is how the broader U.S. culture “appreciates” Hemingway. (The previous winner in absurd Hemingway cultural appropriation–Thomasville’s Hemingway [...]

Laura Miller wrote a nice piece in Salon not that long ago, capably outlining the recent flare up in the To MFA or Not To MFA debate, this time describing Mark McGurl’s latest rebuttal in the L.A. Review of Books to Elif Batuman’s takedown of his book The Program Era and MFA programs in particular. [...]

Hello. I am happy to announce that the latest issue of the Quarterly Conversation has been published and it contains a gigantic symposium/where-are-we-now collection of essays on David Foster Wallace. And I’m happy to be included. My essay is about Consider the Lobster, Wallace’s second collection of essays. I talk about how Wallace’s nonfiction is, [...]

Benjamin Kunkel writes: Jess Row calls me “dogmatically bigoted” for supposedly characterizing writers from “backward”–his term–countries as formally “backward.” These are fighting words. This is the very first comment hanging like internet fruit from the ending of Row’s recent essay, “The Novel Is Not Dead,” which appears in the latest Boston Review. I don’t want [...]