Category Archives: Reading Notes

Grief as a home

Posted on July 22, 2015 by Ellen Akins

    I haven’t read the book, Kathleen Alcott’s novel Infinite Home, and this excerpt in Electric Literature‘s Recommended Reading is good, but what struck me was the opening of Catherine Lacey’s introduction:   Grief as a home, or better … Continue reading →

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Bellow, Bellow, Bellow

Posted on May 13, 2015 by Ellen Akins

Zachary Leader‘s The Life of Saul Bellow: To Fame and Fortune has just been published (by Cape in England, Knopf in the U.S.), giving a bevy of wonderful writers, critics, and pundits a chance to reflect on the colorful old … Continue reading →

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Jonathan Miller

Posted on May 6, 2015 by Ellen Akins

From a review of Kate Bassett’s biography of Jonathan Miller, who apparently sprang from the mind of Monty Python: As a Cambridge undergraduate he liked to turn heads by walking barefoot through the streets carrying a large marrow.

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On Mentors, John Casey, Kurt Vonnegut, Peter Taylor

Posted on April 30, 2015 by Ellen Akins

Something now lost in the mists of memory made me think of Kurt Vonnegut, perhaps, oddly enough, a story just published in Narrative, “The Big Trip Up Yonder“–oddly, because when I tried to find a record of the incident that came to … Continue reading →

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Translating “Raymond Carver”

Posted on March 26, 2015 by Ellen Akins

So peculiar: Upon reading Rachel Cusk’s piece about parenting in the New York Times Magazine (no, the piece, not the parenting, was in the magazine) and encountering this: Raymond Carver’s disturbing poem, “On an Old Photograph of My Son,” an outpouring … Continue reading →

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