All the Rage January 1, 2012

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 [...]

Notes on Notes on Sontag July 28, 2011

  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 [...]

David Foster Wallace Symposium Makes Waves June 6, 2011

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, [...]