|
|
|
- "Passion Prose" for Elle Magazine
1991
"Ever since that moment in the history of neolithic chivalry when a love-smitten swain first took his favorite cavegirl for a walk in the woods while grunting in a way that more or less signified, “Look up at the beauty of the night sky, my darling,” romance has been a boom field…"
- Review on Whores for Gloria by William T. Vollmann for The Village Voice Literary Supplement
February 1992
"Having already published a short story collection and two fat novels distinguished as much for their whopping assemblages of arcane data as for their flights of casually incandescent prose, William Vollmann, at the tender age of 32, bids fair to become our very own Diderot—a fleet Encyclopedist of the Information Age who writes with equal diagnostic fire on postcolonial politics, punk rockers, electricity, bugs, and Viking history…"
- "Vintage Weinberger," A review written by Eli Gottlieb for The Village Voice
May 1996
"On his own, quietly and steadily well off to the side of the canonical turf wars of the last few years, Eliot Weinberger has been amassing an oeuvre of supple prose writings on the linkages of literature, translation, the visual arts, global politics, and myth which is both of deep diagnostic usefulness at the current moment and provides a jolt of rare literary pleasure into the bargain…"
- "American Essayist," for The Jerusalem Post Magazine
July 28, 1989
"THE PERSONAL essay has always ranked among the most democratic and forgiving of literary forms, available in theory to anyone with sufficient resources to muster an interesting written voice. In recent years, however, the genre has metastasized with bewildering speed and variety…"
- "The Irresistible Sway," Article in Lincoln Center Theatre Review
Spring 2005, Issue 40
"When I first returned to America after living in Italy for three years, my friends told me the shape of my head had changed. As laughable as this may sound, I think they were onto something. My cranium was certainly the same dimensions as previously, but they were correct in observing that I'd changed deeply, organically, even metabolically, while I was away…"
- "Tools of His Trade", Article in 5280 Magazine
December 2007
"In one of the drawers of my Boulder home is an ancient document, foxed and brittle with age. Removing it from my desk drawer, I slowly unroll it…"
- Review of Junot Diaz, Boston Review
"If it is true, as is often said, that cultures speak loudest at their moment of their assimilation, then it should come as no surprise that America, with its seemingly limitless powers of cultural absorption, is so rich with the ghost-voices of other nations. American English, the language in which those voices are expressed, is correspondingly less a standardized usage, imposed from on high, and more a consensual form of national practice, shaped by waves of immigrants leaving their particular palm-prints on the texture, nuance, and velocity of our national lexicon…"
- Commentary on the Poetry of Peter Cole, Conjunctions Magazine
CONJUNCTIONS:21 Fall 1993
"No country will more quickly dissipate romantic expectations than Palestine," wrote Herman Melville on his trip there in 1857, "Particularly Jerusalem. To some the disappointment is heart sickening … " The poetry of Peter Cole might be considered an elaborate marginalia to this diaristic comment of Melville's, marginalia wherein optimistic disillusionment, or religious realism, takes shape…"
- Essaylet on Saul Bellow/Delmore Schwartz, The Millions Blog
December 20, 2007
"Once every few years, usually when I'm beginning a new book, I reread one or two of Saul Bellow's novels to prime the pump. This year it was Humboldt's Gift, the last great work in the high Belovian style…"
- Introduction to Tobias Wolff
September 21, 2007
"First of all, I want to say what an honor it is to share the stage with Tobias Wolff, who is—not to mince words—a hero of mine. That’s a heavy word, hero. It happens in this case to be true…"
|
