Against Nature
“Still, the earth is your place. A tidy grave site measured to your size. Or, from another angle of vision, one vast democratic grave.”
In Rough Country I: Cormac McCarthy
Blood Meridian and the Border Trilogy are counterpoised: the one a furious debunking of the legendary West, the other a subdued, humane, and subtle exploration of the tangled roots of such legends of the West as they abide in the human heart. Whereas Blood Meridian scorns any idealism except the jeremiad—“War is god”—the interlinked novels of the Border Trilogy testify to the quixotic idealism that celebrates friendship, brotherhood, loyalty, the integrity of the cowboy-worker as one whose life is bound up with animals in a harsh, exhausting, and dangerous environment.
Female Noir
By Joyce Carol Oates Originally published as the introduction to Cutting Edge: New Stories of Mystery and Crime by Women Writers, Edited by Joyce Carol Oates. In the old days, […]
Man Under Sentence of Death: The Novels of James M. Cain
There is perhaps no writer more faithful to the mythologies of America than Cain, for he writes of its ideals and hatreds without obscuring them in the difficulties of art.
If Beale Street Could Talk
It is so vividly human and so obviously based upon reality, that it strikes us as timeless.
Mr. Rooster
By Joyce Carol Oates A shortened version of “Mr. Rooster” was published in The New York Times Magazine; the full version is published in Bearing Witness: Joyce Carol Oates Studies. […]
“Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?” and Smooth Talk: Short Story Into Film
Laura Dern is so dazzlingly right as “my” Connie that I may come to think I modeled the fictitious girl on her, in the way that writers frequently delude themselves about motions of causality.
Muhammad Ali: “The Greatest”
Who would have thought that Muhammad Ali’s defiant repudiation of American foreign policy, in the mid-1960s considered virtually traitorous by some observers, would come to be, in the decade to follow, a widespread and altogether respectable political position?
The Dream Boxes of Gloria Vanderbilt
These are striking creations inside plexiglass boxes that merit close, sympathetic scrutiny in the way that the most subtle of poems and dreams merit our scrupulous attention.
Writing for the Stage
Well-intentioned, print-oriented people are forever asking, “Doesn’t it upset you to see your characters taken over by other people, out of your control?” My reply is generally a mild one: “But isn’t that the point of writing for the theater?”
Pseudonymous Selves
In 1984 the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters awarded one of its distinguished fiction prizes to a new and presumably young Chicano writer named Danny Santiago, for his first novel, Famous All Over Town. Subsequent to the award it was revealed, with some embarrassment, that the newly discovered Chicano writer was not Chicano at all …
A Letter to My Mother, Carolina Oates, on Her 78th Birthday
The old farmhouse was razed years ago, the very site of its foundation filled with earth, all trace of its existence obliterated. Yet I see it clearly, and the lilac tree that grew close beside the back door, a child-size tree into which I climbed, a dreamy child given to solitude in places near the house, near you.
My Father, My Fiction
Though frequently denounced and often misunderstood by a somewhat genteel literary community, my writing is, at least in part, an attempt to memorialize my parents’ vanished world; my parents’ lives. Sometimes directly, sometimes in metaphor.
Mike Tyson, July 1997
The scandal of Holyfield-Tyson II forces admirers of boxing to consider: Why is biting any more demonic than fighting itself? Its demonism isn’t conventional, that’s all.
Rape and the Boxing Ring
Mike Tyson’s conviction on rape charges in Indianapolis is a minor tragedy for the beleaguered sport of boxing, but a considerable triumph for women’s rights. For once, though bookmakers were giving 5-1 odds that Tyson would be acquitted, and the mood of the country seems distinctly conservative, a jury resisted the outrageous defense that a rape victim is to be blamed for her own predicament.
Tyson/Biggs: Postscript
There is an unsettling air about Tyson, with his impassive death’s-head face, his unwavering stare, and his refusal to glamorize himself in the ring—no robe, no socks, only the signature black trunks and shoes—that the violence he unleashes against his opponents is somehow just.
Celestial Timepiece 