October 22, 2007 – 12:27 pm
“Sing, Heavenly Muse,” (1.6) Milton begs, “I…invoke thy aid to my adventurous song” (1.12-13). Does the Muse answer? From Milton’s output—twelve books of verse, one book per apostle, one per tribe of Israel—one may believe so, but where in all of Paradise Lost does the Muse answer the poet’s call?
Perhaps in the line break [...]
September 30, 2007 – 01:03 pm
From Stephen King’s essay, What Ails the Short Story: “‘The American short story is alive and well.’ Do you like the sound of that? Me too. I only wish it were actually true. The art form is still alive — that I can testify to. As editor of ‘The Best American Short Stories 2007,’ I [...]
September 5, 2007 – 10:57 am
Charlotte Perkins Gilman wrote Herland as the recollected narration of a male sociologist. The narrator’s profession allows Gilman to present her vision of a feminist utopia from a generalist’s perspective, devoid of any of the difficulties of the details of life. Instead of showing us the life and habits of a single Herlander, the narrator [...]
Wittgenstein’s Mistress by David Markson, is an experimental novel about the last human being on the planet. It is devoid of a story in any traditional sense, being more a fictional woman’s meditation on the intertextuality of culture, where Helen and Paris and Vincent Van Gogh have just as much—if not more—reality than the woman’s [...]
Nevil Shute’s novel, On The Beach, begins in Australia on December 27, 196—, which is already sometime after nuclear war has eradicated humanity from the Northern Hemisphere. The novel ends the following year, sometime in late August or early September, when the fallout finally arrives on the southernmost-inhabited continent and kills off the only human [...]
April 24, 2007 – 11:53 am
Jason looks down and finds that it is indeed his wife beneath him, but that she is rotting. Her eyes are open but glazed over, staring up at him, without meaning, but bulging as though in terror of him. The flesh on her face is yellowish and drawn back toward her ears. Her mouth is [...]
March 20, 2007 – 11:00 am
The Green Mountain Boys: a Historical Tale of the Early Settlement of Vermont was penned in Montpelier, VT in 1839 by Judge D.P Thompson. In 2000, a small press in Weybridge, VT, issued “a new readable version†of Judge Thompson’s classic, with its editors arguing on the back cover that “In our fast moving lives, [...]
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