Essays

Essays | April 19, 2009

Monster-killing does not have to be a hypersigil; it’s more basic than that. The organizing moral principles of a game world often boil down to something desperately obvious: black-and-white, good and evil. This isn’t bad in itself because a good game, like a good book, then takes the player into a more familiar ambiguity. Good and bad become less easily separated and less relevant the longer you travel. The trick is to create, in the gamer, a commitment to a point of view, whatever its morality…

Essays | April 12, 2009

Deconstructing a Good Cry

by Stephanie Vanderslice

I’m a college writing teacher. Creative writing, to be exact. And yes, sometimes it seems as if paper goods companies ought to be lining up with the textbook publishers to wine and dine us at our conferences–or at least paying for our tote bags. Because while there may be no crying in baseball, the writing classroom is a different story.

Essays | March 07, 2009

AWP: Hope Takes Flight in the Basement of the Hilton

by Sarah Van Arsdale

At first, I didn’t care too much about the economic troubles of Wall Streeters, or people living off their investments, or people with things called “401ks.” Let them give up their limos and learn how to take the bus; let them eat at the table next to me at Ali Baba’s Kebab House. But then the publishing world followed. Has the prospect of getting a literary novel published plunged from very unlikely to totally unlikely to absolutely-forget-about-it-impossible with each drop of the Dow Jones average? Or is there hope?

Essays | February 20, 2009

A Review of One's Own

by Lee Thomas

Over the past decade, book reviews and newspaper book sections have faced, and continue to face, serious danger of extinction. Lee Thomas explores what our culture stands to lose if the edited book review is in jeopardy, positing that book lovers, writers, and critics might yet find a way to profit–rather than suffer from–the sea changes of the publishing industry and online review forums.

Essays | December 06, 2008

How It Feels to Get There: Reading Deborah Eisenberg's Twilight of the Superheroes with Charles Baxter's The Art of Subtext

by Liana Imam

Quite early on in The Art of Subtext, Charles Baxter gives a tongue-in-cheek suggestion for a compelling story: “give the character exactly what s/he wants, and see what happens.” In Eisenberg’s stories, having what one wants is an unexpectedly fraught condition.

Essays | November 20, 2008

Waiting on Norman Mailer

by Brian Bartels

Mr. Mailer entered shortly after the party began, walking with two arm canes, and his presence filled up every available space. When I wasn’t refilling bubbly, I watched, then I wrote. But even what I jotted down in my notebook remains fragmented to this day, a choppy result of overwhelmed giddiness in such company: A girl with bones sticking out of her back; nursing a new belly ring and a half bottle of wine. Chevy luminaries. Pencil guts…

Essays | October 15, 2008

We Are Dangerous: The Hidden Counterculture of Good Writing

by Greg Schutz

This season, a love of literature might seem vestigial, escapist. Moby-Dick won’t feed the Darfur orphans; Anna Karenina won’t hasten ratification of the Kyoto Protocol. These books merely delight us, nothing more. But in The Irrelevant English Teacher, J. Mitchell Morse argues that there is nothing mere about delight.

Suspend Your Disbelief

Games Are Not About Monsters

by Christine Hartzler