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Three Cheers for the Maker of the Modern Essay: Michel de Montaigne
I am a lover of essays.
Every morning, shortly after dawn, I sit at my laptop, coffee at hand, and explore the internet looking for pieces to read for enjoyment or as a kickoff for an article of my own.
On my bookshelves are scores of novels, once also a favorite genre, but over the years I have amassed equal numbers of volumes of essays, collections by such diverse writers as Joseph Epstein, Richard Mitchell, Alice Thomas Ellis, Hilaire Belloc, and Florence King. Here too are anthologies like Phillip Lopate’s “The Art of the Personal Essay” and Epstein’s “The Norton Book of Personal Essays.”
The Hard Crowd by Rachel Kushner. This is also a collection of essays, by the National Book Award and Booker Prize finalist, spanning the years 2000 to 2020.
Philip Roth: The Biography by Blake Bailey. Oprah Winfrey says that this is one of the most anticipated books of the year, and you should always listen to Oprah.
International Thieves Are Stealing Legos, for Some Reason
This could be the plot of
Ocean’s 14 (it would be a Lego movie, of course).
The Muppets, Ranked
I don’t want to get into a big debate here, but I was reading this list from NPR listeners of the 25 best Muppets and I have to shake my head. Oh, I have no quarrel with Kermit grabbing the number one slot (a predictable but not unwelcome choice), but I have to say that Gonzo is ranked way too high, and Oscar the Grouch and Bert and Ernie should be ranked much higher.
Kisner displays an impressive range of narrative modes in [
Thin Places], bouncing nimbly between gravity (in her ethnography and her bird’s-eye philosophizing) and comic relief, which she peppers in just when our heads are starting to spin . . . In The Other City, about the months she spent reporting on death investigations and autopsies in Cleveland, Kisner writes: Leaving the office every night, I’d get breathless rushes of reality. That’s a lot like what these essays feel like, too: reminders of the weird in-between feeling of being alive.
The New York Times Book Review With this collection, [Jordan Kisner] takes her place among the next generation of American Transcendentalists, and those true essayists for whom nothing human is too strange to write about . . . She’s one of the few contemporary writers who knows how to bridge spiritual and temporal worlds, but who’s also able to alter and expand our understanding of the metaphors we live by through immers
Pixabay / Pexels
In honor of National Poetry Month this April, Sounds Good will present special programming Mondays beginning April 5th at 11 am. These programs from PRX will honor significant poetry contributions of the last 200 years from Plath to Whitman, Dickenson to Kerouac.
See WKMS National Poetry Month programming below:
Monday, April 5th at
The Poetry of Emily Dickinson: A Big Read Documentary
Emily Dickinson is not only one of the supreme lyric poets of American literature. She has also come to symbolize the purest kind of artistic vocation. Not merely unrecognized but virtually unpublished in her own lifetime, she developed her genius in the utmost privacy, invisible to all except a small circle of family and friends. Driven only by her own imagination, she created a body of work unsurpassed in its expressive originality, penetrating insight, and dark beauty.