To write about the poems of Denis Johnson, I’m inspired to quote Richard Howard on James Dickey on Randall Jarrell (skipping Emerson, who also gets cited in there somewhere) on the “yearning to transcend, by the flights and frauds of . . .
Charles Reznikoff’s Testimony may be one of the most influential obscure works of poetry produced in the twentieth century. Its first volume appeared in 1934, and the last appeared posthumously in 1978. The sales of all the volumes summed together . . .
In Martha Baillie’s novel The Search for Heinrich Schlögel, a young man from a provincial town in Germany flies to Canada in 1980 to hike in the Arctic. Heinrich’s solitary trek lasts twelve days, during which he experiences a . . .
John Keene was born in St. Louis in June 1965—the summer, evoked in the opening pages of his first novel, Annotations, “of Malcolms and Seans, as Blacks were transforming the small nation of Watts into a graveyard of smoldering . . .
Driving with Dominic
in the Southern Province
We See Hints of the Circus
The tattered Hungarian tent
A man washing a trumpet
at a roadside tap
Children in the trees,
one falling
into the grip of another
— Michael Ondaatje . . .
Maggie Nelson’s Bluets takes aim at one of today’s most beloved forms of writing—the autobiography—coyly challenging the genre’s attachment to truthful stories of the self and the form thought best to convey them: that of the realist novel. To hear . . .
In the inaugural Brick podcast, Teju Cole reads his review of Alice Oswald’s Memorial. The review appears in Brick 90, on newsstands now.
The conversation between Naomi Jaffa and Alice Oswald that appears in Brick 90 was first published . . .
Cajun Music: A Reflection of a People, Volume 1, Compiled and edited by Ann Allen Savoy
The first thing is the photographs. A book like this, you flip through and stare at a lot of faces.
Of men, and . . .
Tomas Tranströmer published his first book of poems—the stunning 17 dikter—when he was twenty-three years old. Eight volumes have followed, each rather austere and beautifully made. The poems were, from the beginning, thick with the feel of life lived . . .
The following piece appeared in Brick 76, and as the introduction to the 2005 edition of Charles Portis’s True Grit, published by in the U.K. by Bloomsbury Publishing and in the U.S. and Canada by Overlook Press.
It’s a . . .