Six years ago, back in 2013, I blogged about attending the American Academy of Arts & Letters ' annual Ceremonial  award celebratio...

Photo by Rachel Eliza Griffiths Fourteen years ago, on February 27, 2005, I began blogging at J's Theater . I was regularly readi...

When journalist Nicholas Carr’s  The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains  appeared in 2010, I remember exchanging emails w...

James Baldwin (Associated Press) "Until my father died I thought I could do something else. I had wanted to be a musician, thought...

Thanks to the dedication of editors Adam Morris  and Bruno Carvalho , Essays on Hilda Hilst: Between Brazil and World Literature , the f...

Sir Wilson Harris, with his final novel, The Ghost of Memory  (2006) Such is life, so death comes calling. Sir  Wilson Harris  (1921-...

UPDATE: The full and corrected version of this essay is now up at LitHub , as " Elements of Literary Style. " I'm keeping the...

Bolaño's Una novelita lumpen At the beginning of September, the fall semester always looks endless to me, like a river whose mouth ...

' William Melvin Kelley (1937-2017: RIP), from "My Next to Last Hit by 'C. C. Johnson'," in  Blacks at Harvar...

Remove the "10 Annual" portion of this blog post's title, and this could appear to be one of several I wrote during my de...

Tyehimba Jess CONGRATULATIONS  to poet and friend Tyehimba Jess , who was awarded the 2017 Pulitzer Prize in Poetry for his new collect...

Here a few photos from the 2016  American Book Awards ceremony, which was held at the San Francisco Jazz Center . The highlight of the eve...