Micah Mattix

Following his piece on the policy at the  Los Angeles Review of Books   not to review first books negatively, D.G. Myers, Mark Athitakis, Joyce Carol Oates, Chris Bea, and Rohan Maitzen discussed negative reviews on Twitter yesterday—whether or not critics should write them and why. . . . . Continue Reading »

All writers know it’s difficult to get form rejection letters from magazines and journals, but take comfort: if you ever make it, you can send form rejection letters back  à la Edmund Wilson : . . . . Continue Reading »

In a short piece for The New Republic, Noreen Malone examines the most frequently highlighted phrases from books available on the Kindle for what they tell us about the contemporary mind. These include passages from books like The Hunger Games, Pride and Prejudice, The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes and The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People… . Continue Reading »

In a short piece on novelist James Kelman’s latest work, Giles Harvey reflects on the tension between consciousness and plot in the modern novel. The object of the novelist, Harvey writes, at least since Jane Austen, has been increasingly to capture the human mind—express the odd turns . . . . Continue Reading »

The final great line in this short series may seem an odd choice because, well, it’s not so great, at least on its own, in terms of either craft or intellectual heft. Some readers may recognize it as the final line in Frank O’Hara’s “Poem (Lana Turner has collapsed!).” … Continue Reading »

You cannot have poetry without form, just as you cannot have prose fiction without narrative structure or drama without dialogue or action. And what creates form in poetry, after the constraint of a central idea, event, or image, is sound. The way that sound shapes poetry has generally become less evident as poets have discarded regular meter and end rhyme … Continue Reading »

That one of the most striking lines of poetry on beauty’s impermanence was written by a priest-killer and a thief is among literary history’s many seeming incongruencies. “Where are the snows of yesteryear?” (“Mais où sont les neiges d’anten?” in the original medieval French) appears in a ballade in the middle of François Villon’s Testament … Continue Reading »

The famous first line of T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land was almost certainly not written in April but in January. In a letter on January 23, 1921, Eliot refers to the nascent poem as “the first writing of any kind I have done for six months.” Two weeks later, he showed the completed first section “in 4 parts” to Wyndham Lewis. … Continue Reading »

Last week, in an interview with Oprah, Lance Armstrong admitted what everybody already knew: that he took performance-enhancing drugs during his cycling career. Last year, the head of USADA (United States Anti-Doping Association) stated that under Armstrong’s direction the U.S. Postal Cycling Team “ran the most sophisticated, professionalized and successful doping program that sport has ever seen.” … Continue Reading »

Two years ago, my wife and I had the good fortune of acquiring a small place in the Appalachians, just south of the Virginia border. This was a blessing and one of those rare things in life that was almost entirely unexpected. This part of the Appalachians is Christmas tree country, and our 1920s home came with a plot of three hundred Fraser firs and the first fertile land we had had in five years (not counting a flowerbed in Connecticut that we had to leave before the spring, though we were told it did very well). We were chomping at the bit, as it were, to plow, plant, weed, tend, and trim every green thing on our humble two acres… . Continue Reading »