Those of us who are not fathers or husbands understand Father’s Day through memories and envy. Neither of  those mental activities are exclusively positive, at least in the case of fathers. Even as fatherhood has evolved, its old stereotypes haunt our relationship to and understanding of the title: fathers are macho,…

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Storytelling has mysterious, unmeasurable power and storytellers have expended a lot of that power trying to explain it to us. Let me try. Hearing a story is a way of organizing the brain and stimulating thought. Formulating a story is an exercise in ordering thought, making associations and generally “thinking…

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In the failed-males-sabotaging-their-own-lives genre of storytelling,  sub-genres abound. The latest variation takes its cues from our on-going economic conditions; guys lose their jobs and go into free fall as does Matthew in Jess Walter’s The Financial Lives of the Poets.

Sam Lipsyte’s take on this theme finds Milo Burke (this is…

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Short story writers are most like magicians, plying their craft with illusion and misdirection. Both want their audiences to believe what they present, to think it as real. They don’t want them to notice or even think about what goes on to make the magic.

Which makes Thomas Lynch a magical…

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In his New York Times review of Justin Taylor’s Everything Here is the Best Thing Ever, Todd Pruzan explains how Raymond Carver “advanced a literary genre with ‘What We Talk About When We Talk About Love.’  The movement wasn’t dirty realism or minimalism, but ‘vaguely titled fiction’: stories concealing their intensity and…

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Old men deserve  memory. Philip Levine has a good one and he knows how to put it to use. The Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award winner, at 83, still finds his past to be fertile, as he has for some 50 years. But there’s something new in News of…

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Not to be forgotten in any consideration of Raymond Carver is his poetry.  Mostly written in the last ten sober years of his life, the poems support the notion of the self-absorbed Carver that Carol Sklenicka’s recent biography suggests. Never one to admire poets dependent on “I” as subject for each…

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Which is better?  Minimalist and working-class author Raymond Carver’s original manuscripts? Or the stories published after Gordon Lish’s edits? Some 20 years after Carver’s death, the answer has supporters on both sides. It’s the question on which Carol Sklenicka’s big and sometimes frustrating biography of the famous minimalist, working-class writer…

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Louise Gluck’s 11th volume of poetry is a litany of contrasts and their affect the human condition: mountain and meadow, fog and light, village and city. The poems are pinned to the cycles of light and dark, sun and moon, soul and body. When she makes a conclusion, she finds…

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What is it that’s “invisible” in Paul Auster’s latest novel? It’s not the truth. The truth is there… somewhere … though choosing it from all the various claims and denials batted around by three different narrators and one or two other characters might be an impossible task. Or maybe it’s…

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