Amaranth Borsuk and Brad Bouse Siglio ($24.95) by Abraham Avnisan Amaranth Borsuk and Brad Bouse’s Between Page and Screen is a singular book of literature: aside from the colophon and cover, the book contains no text. Leafing through its seventeen pages, one finds instead a series of white abstract geometric shapes enclosed in black squares, beautiful in […]
Robert Kelly & Contemporary American Poetry by Jordan Reynolds It would be a disservice to Robert Kelly’s virtuosity to label him as a certain kind of poet who writes a certain kind of poem. Instead, it is instructive to investigate his work as kindred to his contemporaries. Of the kind of poetry he writes, Kelly finds good company with a poet […]
On Jennifer Egan’s “Black Box” by John Parras Jennifer Egan’s 8,500-word story “Black Box,” released earlier this summer over a 10-day serialization on Twitter, was met with much hand wringing by those worried about The Fate of the Book. How could anything serious be said in 140-character bits and pieces? Doesn’t the superficial Twitter platform […]
Clickthrough Culture and Difficult Literature by David Huntsperger In the world of web technology, UX designers, content editors, advertising managers, technical writers, marketing specialists—people like me—pour over reports and peruse usability studies and conduct A/B tests and solicit user feedback and review eye movement data to find out one thing: how do you read? Because […]
an interview with Matt Bell by Gavin Pate Matt Bell is the author of the short story collection How They Were Found (Keyhole Press) and the recently published Cataclysm Baby (Mud Luscious Press, $12), a series of twenty-six stories about parents enduring the apocalypses of children. His stories seem to be one part fable, one part prose poem, one […]
an interview with Matthea Harvey by Louis Bourgeois Matthea Harvey is the author of the author of Sad Little Breathing Machine (Graywolf, 2004) and Pity the Bathtub Its Forced Embrace of the Human Form (Alice James Books, 2000). Her third book of poems, Modern Life (Graywolf, 2007) was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and a New York […]