Sentences

Dear Mr. Mason, As an avid reader of literature and an aspiring writer, I would like to think that I have a decent grasp of the elements that are common…

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I should confess straightaway to an unseemly feeling of delight today, brought on by the wonders of the wonderful Web. This week’s posts on a sentence by the talented Joseph…

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In my most recent post, I shared an exchange with a novelist friend about the work of the novelist Joseph O’Neill. When we left off, my friend wondered what I…

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A novelist friend (who has asked to remain anonymous), having heard all the encouraging words here and elsewhere about Joseph O’Neill’s third novel, Netherland, started to read it a few…

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A few weeks ago on a Sunday I was driving across Vermont in a snowstorm and passed a used–pardon me, antiquarian–bookstore. That latter designation, of course, indicates danger: it means…

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John Updike gave us a great many ways to be grateful. He embraced forms (novel, story, poem, essay, play) polyamorously, and then within each of these offered variations aplenty. His…

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I wonder how many schools in America make the memorization of poetry a part of their curriculum these days. Do students still encounter the teacher who forces the class to…

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Many pundits have been parsing the policy implications of our new president’s inaugural address. Implications interest me less than articulations, and so naturally I’ve been diverted by the rhetorical rather…

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I have translated some poetry into English, and have felt fully the rather inevitable disappointment of rendering a line of limpid beauty into my own clunky music. One tries, and…

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It occured to me this morning that tomorrow’s key word, “inauguration,” might merit scrutiny. Noah Webster’s 1828 Dictionary gives a typically terrific definition (of the verb): INAUG’URATE, v.t. [supra.] To…

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“Just what I tasted, did, smelled, saw, and heard, not to mention touched, between ten thirty and the completion of the evening meal,” writes E.E. Cummings in The Enormous Room,…

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“With the reader’s permission I beg, at this point of my narrative, to indulge in one or two extrinsic observations.” I find that request irresistible–not because I’ve come to know…

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As the new year began (and following a year-ending week of memoir-bashing), I offered a short list of memoirs for which I maintain unreserved admiration. Alas, in the intervening days,…

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Yesterday’s mail brought the beautiful little book whose cover you see, with its sketch by P. Picasso of the wounded author–1,266 pages of Guillaume Apollinaire’s complete poems. The edition in…

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Imaginative literature traffics in selves. The statement can be read variously. The selves can be the creatures in the writing—narrators and characters who present or appear in a novel or…

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With all the dark talk this week about the falsity and mediocrity of memoir, it seems only fair to celebrate three bright examples of memoir at its best. Neither of…

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In my previous post, I discussed Herman Rosenblat’s memoir An Angel at the Fence, which was revealed over the weekend as a deception. The discovery and exposure of that deceit…

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“I wanted to bring happiness to people, to remind them not to hate, but to love and tolerate all people,” Herman Rosenblat is quoted as saying in yesterday’s New York…

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In 1997, I sent Guy Davenport a cassette of some cool recordings. Most of them he’d already heard. Pound, Eliot, Yeats and others, reading their poetry. One he’d not heard,…

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Harper’s readers know that Daniel Philippe Mason (no relation) has been writing excellent, strange, and beautiful stories for this magazine over the past few years. Three have appeared so far,…

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There are many ways of explaining the sudden, stratospheric popularity of Chilean writer Roberto Bolaño. At his essence he was a writer who was always thinking of new ways to…

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The hum you hear in the background is a propane generator giving me just enough juice to charge a laptop and brew some coffee–day four in life without power in…

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Wyatt Mason is iced-in in New England, without power or Internet access, and transmits this week’s Weekend Read by telephone. “I propose an essay on Roger Shattuck written by Jed…

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For those who read books as part of their habit of being, end of the year “Best Books” lists tend to offer little in the way of surprises. Odds are,…

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A friend of mine is a bartender, and I hadn’t seen him for a while, until last week. It’s fun to watch him bring over two decades of experience to…

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Unlike painting, sculpture, dance, drama and music criticism, literary criticism is produced in the same medium as the one to which it responds. This is a complicating advantage: “complicating” because…

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Most films are instantly forgotten. I don’t mean this in the gently figurative sense—that most films are not remembered. I mean that most films, in their onrush of vague and…

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“It’s beyond my skills as a writer to capture that day,” begins a sentence that stopped me this weekend and made me break into a very earnest smile. And then…

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