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on Juvenilia, poems by Ken Chen (Yale University Press)

The first-person in American poetry has become a marked man, a “person of interest” in the criminal sense. All he ever wanted in his youth was to be a metaphor for something. We tried to keep him sober and productive. But in his epiphanic moments, we could no longer ignore his untrustworthiness. Sensing a shift in our toleration, he toned things down even to flatness.

on One More Story, short stories by Ingo Schulze (Knopf)

Ingo Schulze was born in Dresden in 1962. Now living in Berlin, he is often described as the writer most representative of the united Germany. Two years ago he visited Dresden, located in what used to be the GDR. “It was a very sobering experience,” he said in a recent interview. “The whole Disneyfication of the city.

on Theatre, essays by David Mamet (Faber and Faber / Farrar Straus Giroux)

David Mamet’s 1997 Paris Review interview includes this exchange:

“Interviewer:
Is there a moment in one of your plays that you really didn’t know was there?
Mamet:

on Shoulder Season, poems by Ange Mlinko (Coffee House Press)

“Postmodernism has an allergy to depth,” sneezed Terry Eagleton in an otherwise thoughtful article in The Guardian a few years ago. Profundity for Eagleton requires language working at a “deep moral or metaphysical level,” but the “centreless, hedonistic, self-inventing, ceaselessly adaptive” creature who emerges from postmodernism cannot or refuses to go deep.

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