American literature, American fiction, American novel, contemporary fiction, Classic fiction
Is Dune the perfect novel? Of course, perfection is what every piece of art—be it a painting, a sculpture, a poem, a song, a film, or a novel—strives to be. But what does it mean to say something is perfect? I consider some things perfect. Michelangelo’s David is a perfect statue. I remember standing...
“The book can’t complete with the screen,” Philip Roth said in a 2009 interview with Tina Brown for The Daily Beast. “It couldn’t compete beginning with the movie screen. it couldn’t compete with the television screen, and it can’t compete with the computer screen.” When I read that quotation, my first reaction was: A...
The European conquest of the United States began in 1492, when Columbus dropped anchor off the coast of an island he named San Salvador. Historians often date the end of the conquest as December 29, 1890, near Wounded Knee Creek, when US Cavalry opened fire on a Lakota camp. The government called it a...
As a new nation, America lacks a national epic. We do not have an Iliad or a Gilgamesh Epic or a Beowulf to connect us to antiquity, to a time before written language, to the so-called Age of Heroes. As we envy other nations for that connection, we struggle to fill this void with...
Holly Golightly as a name is ironic, because everywhere she goes, she goes loudly. She’s a seeker with only a vague idea of what she hopes to find. She’s also a runaway with a clear understanding of what she’s fleeing. She might not know where she’s going to, but she knows where she’s been,...
Halfway through Stephen King’s It, I realized that I find neither clowns nor balloons scary, and since they’re the principle devices King use to suggest the supernatural, that aspect of the novel failed to scare me. But It isn’t about clowns or balloons. It is about childhood fears, both real and imagined, and how we...
I know the mountain. I lived there for two years. We called it Onion Creek, and it’s not much of a mountain, as mountain goes—more of a foothill—but it was an isolated, rural land populated by outlaws. Everyone carried a firearm, often in Western-styled holsters, and several people were engaged in the then-illegal trade...
To show a man has nothing, give him everything men want. That formula, it seems, had been in my thoughts for as long as I’ve been writer, but I’m uncertain where it came from. It doesn’t feel like something I created myself. Perhaps one of my writing professors said it, or I read it...
During one of my writing classes at Eastern Washington University, John Keeble assigned us to read a novel each by three writers whom we had never read before. I do not remember the other two writers I chose, but Bernard Malamud was the third, and I chose to read his debut novel, The Natural....
Chances are, if you live on Earth, particularly in the United States, when I say Ben-Hur, you think Charlton Heston. He starred in the 1959 movie that might’ve been the favorite of your grandmother. It might even had been a favorite of your parents. Perchance even you consider it a favorite Classic. Since the...
