Fred Chappell

The Hard to Catch Mercy, William Baldwin’s entrancing first novel, is bound to remind some readers of Mark Twain, especially of some of the bleaker pages of moral fables like The Mysterious Stranger and The Man That Corrupted Hadleyburg

“Even one verse alone sometimes makes a perfect poem.”
—Ben Jonson

It was Donald Hall who gave us that useful and precise critical term “McPoem” to describe the garden variety contemporary poem in flabby free verse whose dismal ambitions are

Madison Smartt Bell has a penchant for keeping his fiction mysterious at its deepest core. The protagonist of his 1985 novel, Waiting for the End of the World, is a fellow called Larkin who is out to destroy New

“Amazed at the moment’s peak,
flesh became word—and the word fell.”
—Octavio Paz, A Draft of Shadows

Upon a confirmed gringo like me, contemporary Spanish language poetry makes much the same impression as contemporary Spanish or Latin American concert

“A poet in our times is a semi-
barbarian in a civilized community.”
—Thomas Love Peacock

Something happened. The juice went out of it, the largest joy. There may arise figures analogous to Emily Dickinson, or even to John Clare,

“Eldorado banal de tous les vieux gargons.”
—Charles Baudelaire

The last sentence in Russell Banks’s magnificent novel is surprising in its inevitability: “Go, my book, and help destroy the world as it is.” Here is a sentence to conclude a