Our new work series features four new poems from Weatherford Award-winning poet Jesse Graves. Ron Rash calls him “one of America’s finest young poets.”
Merry Christmas!
Fifty Years of Reading Cormac McCarthy
Cormac McCarthy's debut novel, The Orchard Keeper, turned fifty this year. To celebrate its anniversary, we invited Booker Prize-winning novelist John Banville, Weatherford Award-wining poet and Tennessee native Jesse Graves, and the Buenos Aires-based writer Andrés Hax to discuss their experiences of reading McCarthy through the years.
Interview with Elena Ferrante
Encounters: Mark Twain and the Art of the Pause
She Opened a Bookshop...
It takes a special person to open a bookstore, someone with a mix of optimism, compassion, endless curiosity about the lives of others and, perhaps, a bit of delusion.
In the five decades since Mary Stuart Kellogg and her sister, Rhoda Norman, established Maple Street Book Shop, generations of readers have embraced the little wood-frame sanctuary as a second home.
In celebration of Mary Kellogg’s life and her gift to the New Orleans literary landscape, novelist Christine Wiltz reflects on this influence.
Year's Best Reads
Bibliophoria: Nick Gadd on Rebecca Solnit
“Rebecca Solnit taught me to walk. Not in the literal sense, obviously. But it was because of Solnit that I made walking a central part of my life.” —Nick Gadd
This installment of Bibliophoria features novelist and essayist Nick Gadd (of Melbourne Circle) on Rebecca Solnit’s wonderful books about walking and how they've altered his path.
On Air: Peter Cooley, Night Bus to the Afterlife
Earlier this year, Peter Cooley became Louisiana’s newest poet laureate. The Detroit native who calls New Orleans home has, over the past decades, become a beloved figure in the fabric of Louisiana literature. In this installment of On Air, Peter Cooley reads his post-Katrina poems from Night Bus to the Afterlife.
Encounters: Danilo Kiš and the Literature of Correction
In Praise of James Salter
"It was a lesson, like he was saying: remember, remember, remember. Don't let anything pass unnoticed. Get it down. You might need it later." —Andrés Hax
In celebration of the life and work of James Salter, and to mark this week's publication of Conversations with James Salter, Andrés Hax offers a remembrance.
Tête-à-Tête with Mary Norris, the Comma Queen
We were thrilled to share a few minutes with Mary Norris, comma queen and longtime proofreader at The New Yorker, during her recent appearance at the Louisiana Book Festival in Baton Rouge.
“I didn’t set out to be a comma queen. The first job I ever had, the summer I was fifteen, was checking feet at a public pool in Cleveland.” —Mary Norris, Between You and Me
Bibliophoria: Jami Attenberg's Saint Mazie
Reading Paris
“There is never any ending to Paris and the memory of each person who has lived in it differs from that of any other. We always returned to it no matter who we were nor how it was changed nor with what difficulties nor what ease it could be reached. It was always worth it and we received a return for whatever we brought to it.” —Ernest Hemingway, A Moveable Feast
When faced with the unfathomable, we look to great writers to articulate how we feel and what we should do. We ask—we expect—them to carry the weight and to lighten it into something beautiful that transforms an event though a new understanding. An impossible task that writers surprise us by doing over and over and over.
Travels with Eudora Welty
Reclamation: Juan Ramón Jiménez and The Poetics of Work
In our Reclamation series, we discuss writers who deserve renewed attention. In this installment, we marvel at Spanish Nobel laureate Juan Ramón Jiménez’s aphorisms.
“To work isn’t to do a lot in a hurry or, above all, many times; it is to make unique, very well made things.” —Juan Ramón Jiménez, The Complete Perfectionist
On Air: John Biguenet Reads from Silence
New Work: A Poem by Michael Martin
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.
Reading Around the World: Catalan
"... life has so much more imagination than human beings, is never, even in the face of the most conclusive proof, predictable or definitive."
Flavia Company, The Island of Last Truth
In our latest Reading Around the World, we explore the Argentinian-born Catalan writer Flavia Company and her masterful slim novel The Island of Last Truth.