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Janet Maslin, New York Times
Sarah Blake has coaxed forth a book that hits hard and pushes buttons expertly.
Malcolm Jones, Newsweek
Ellison died trying to finish his last book. That shouldn't stop you from reading it.
Dorothea Lasky, New Yorker
Claire Keegan, New Yorker
Ciaran Carson, New Yorker
Erin McKean, Boston Globe
Do we need a new punctuation mark?
Allan Kozinn, New York Times
It was not until 1990, when the music historian Richard Taruskin published “The Spin Doctors of Early Music” in The New York Times, and argued that contemporary notions of period sound were actually modern fashion statements, that the myth of authenticity was exploded decisively. And at that, it took a few years for the stunned early-music world to adopt Mr. Taruskin’s view, banish “authentic” from its collective vocabulary and adopt the phrase “historically informed performance” instead.
Joel Brouwer, New York Times
Asked why so many of his poems seemed animated by unhappiness, Philip Larkin once told an interviewer, “Deprivation is for me what daffodils were for Wordsworth.” A supremely cynical thing to say — but also backhandedly romantic, isn’t it? A dreadful muse is still a muse. Like Larkin, Tony Hoagland seems to draw inspiration and fluency as a poet from his disappointment and frustration as a human being. And like Larkin’s, Hoagland’s poems, though chock-full of grousing, are so fully alive to the rich, dark depths of their grumpiness that they constantly threaten, against their author’s gimlet-eyed better judgment, to become beautiful.
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