Suspend Your Disbelief

Posts Tagged ‘lectures’

Shop Talk |

Bread Loaf Lectures and Readings Available on iTunes

by Celeste Ng

Didn’t make it to the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference this summer? You can now download many of the lectures and readings from the 2009 session for free on iTunes. A partial list is available now; more will be added soon. Lectures include Ellen Bryant Voigt on irony, Charles Baxter on lush styles in prose, and Thomas Mallon on the letters of presidents . And there’s a wide selection of fiction readings, including faculty members Maud Casey, Thomas Mallon, and Luis Alberto Urrea; special guest Lorrie Moore; and fiction fellows Lauren Groff, Aryn Kyle, Skip Horack, and many more–plus readings by […]


Essays |

Magic and Music Steer this Vessel: On Jorge Luis Borges’s This Craft of Verse

by John Madera

In This Craft of Verse, Jorge Luis Borges’s collected Norton Lectures, Borges diverges–with sparkling erudition–from conventional forms, offering lectures that are not arguments, but gentle provocations. Remarkably, these visionary pieces were composed at a time when Borges was nearly blind. By this time, as editor Calin-Andrei Mihailescu writes in the book’s postscript, Borges could see “nothing more than an amorphous field of yellow.” We quickly learn, however, that his mind’s eye was as sharp and discerning as ever.



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