Tag: literature

• WRITING: Poems About Power

  about 1 year ago

  Lea Carpenter in Think, See, Feel

  There are poems that interpret a feeling or an idea, and there are poems that interpret an entire history. American poet Frederick Siedel is celebrated for many things, so we love celebrating him now, this week, simply since one of our favorite poems of his is here (and read by the author), on the ... Read More

• Why Didn’t J.D. Salinger Write More About War?

  over 1 year ago

  Lea Carpenter in Think, See, Feel

  It was an elegant accident of editorial timing: two major articles on post-traumatic stress (and the attendant increase in prescription pill use among members of our military), and a beautiful, heart-breaking book review by Jay McInerney of J.D. Salinger : A Life . All of these addressed the stresses ... Read More

• Has Facebook Killed Sentence Structure?

  over 1 year ago

  Lea Carpenter in Think, See, Feel

  “A kind of death of the sentence by collective neglect,” is how Adam Haslett puts it in his piece, “The Art of Good Writing,” in the Weekend FT. Haslett, one of his generation’s finest writers, divines sentences at no risk of neglect, or illness. But his piece is provocative. He does not say that ... Read More

• Gawker V. Wieseltier

  over 2 years ago

  Lea Carpenter in Think, See, Feel

  While it's not quite Norman Mailer on Liston v. Patterson, Gawker’s analysis of New Republic editor Leon Wieseltier’s recent exchange with Andrew Sullivan makes for brilliant reading, a smart companion to the conversation started between Susan Orlean and George Packer in their recent New Yorker ... Read More

• The Literary Possibilities of Sexual Ambivalence, Part II: Andy Warhol

  over 2 years ago

  Lea Carpenter in Think, See, Feel

    It was Andy Warhol who said “sex is the biggest nothing of all time,” and whether his coy abstinence is worth comparing to the young novelists analyzed in Katie Roiphe’s New York Times Book Review piece, this much is true: a stance against sex, in any art, is a cold stance, and whether it is ... Read More

• The Literary Possibilities of Sexual Ambivalence

  over 2 years ago

  Lea Carpenter in Think, See, Feel

  Katie Roiphe’s cover essay in today’s New York Times Book Review affectionately notes one thing about several male novelists of an earlier generation—Roth, Bellow, Updike—that we should consider missing: unapologetic, uniquely masculine writing about sex.In contrasting the Roth generation’s raw ... Read More