Micah Mattix

In this week’s New Yorker, Adam Gopnik attempts to answer the question: “Why Teach English?” The fate of the English major is, as Gopnik notes, all the rage, but defenses of it are surprisingly unconvincing. He rightly points out that the two most common ones”that English majors make for better people and better societies”are patently false. Nor is studying literary texts, I might add, always the most effective means of improving reading or writing skills (though it certainly helps). “So why have English majors?” Gopnik asks … Continue Reading »

American poet and critic John Hollander died this weekend. He was 83. Beginning with A Crackling of Thorns, which won the Yale Younger Poets Series in 1958, Hollander published over twenty volumes of verse and several works of criticism and anthology. He was both an original and a man of his time, which is perhaps true not just of all writers but of all people. Yet it is nevertheless particularly true of him… . Continue Reading »

I swore I’d never link to a Flavorwire click-bait list, but this one on the 25 best websites for literature lovers  is worth reading. It’s also worth a few comments. Some of the sites listed are very good, and I  follow them— The Paris Review Daily , The New . . . . Continue Reading »

On Wednesday, the Academy of Arts and Sciences published its report on the state and value of the humanities and social sciences. The “Commission on the Humanities and Social Sciences,” as it is called, was formed two years ago in response to Congress’s request to know how “to maintain national excellence in humanities and social scientific scholarship and education … Continue Reading »

In short piece for The American Scholar , William Deresiewicz reflects on the holy words of a (supposedly) secular culture . These are words, Deresiewicz suggests, that are “possessed of something like magical powers, a kind of ideological open sesame .” He lists freedom , equality , and . . . . Continue Reading »

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 »