Perhaps poetry best can hold fearsome torment and speak it in a way that increases our capacity to persevere in our lives.
Daniel Stephensen takes a close look at one of Paul Celan's remarkable sentences.
Anatomy of a Sentence: Yves Ravey's Alerte
Take a deep breath. Now read.
Translator Phoebe Weston-Evans discusses a breathless, surreal sentence from Yves Ravey's Alerte.
"There’s something about the unbridled energy of its form that blurs the notions of past and present and arranges them, briefly, uncomfortably, on the same plane." —Phoebe Weston-Evans
Anatomy of a Sentence: Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s Wind, Sand and Stars
Anatomy of a Sentence: Don DeLillo's Underworld
“The sound of the ash bat making contact with the ball reaches Cotter Martin in the left-field stands, where he sits in a bony-shouldered hunch.”
—Don DeLillo, Underworld
In today’s Anatomy of a Sentence, we explore sound and its ability to connect disparate people. Alongside a memorable sentence from Underworld, we look at passages in Lolita and Madame Bovary.
Anatomy of a Sentence: Robert Penn Warren's All The King's Men
Whatever you believe about reading, you know the ways that great sentences stay with us. They’re the ones that we find ourselves repeating as we walk down the street on a Wednesday afternoon long after the book has gathered dust on the shelf. The ones we underline or copy into a notebook for some future purpose we can’t name. The ones that send a charge up our spines.
We begin our new series Anatomy of a Sentence with Robert Penn Warren’s All the King’s Men and our favorite third sentence.