"Literary criticism, as I attempt to practice it", writes Harold Bloom in "The Anatomy of Influence", "is in the first place literary, that is to say, personal and passionate". For more than half a century, Bloom has shared his profound knowledge of...

Steve Tomasula is a novelist like no other; his experiments in narrative and design have won him a loyal following. Exemplifying Tomasula's style, "IN & OZ" is a heady, avant-garde book, rooted in convincing characters even as it simultaneously subve...

Romulo Gallegos is best known for being Venezuela's first democratically elected president. But in his native land he is equally famous as a writer responsible for one of Venezuela's literary treasures, the novel "Dona Barbara". Published in 1929 and...

What is the place of individual genius in a global world of hyper-information – a world in which, as Walter Benjamin predicted more than seventy years ago, everyone is potentially an author? For poets in such a climate, "originality" begins to take a...

Donald E. Westlake is one of the greats of crime fiction. Under the pseudonym Richard Stark, he wrote twenty-four fast-paced, hardboiled novels featuring Parker, a shrewd career criminal with a talent for heists. Using the same nom de plume, Westlake...

By turns funny and abstruse, "The Shimmering Beast" is the newest book by accomplished video artist Steve Reinke, which brings together his best pieces of prose. Hybrids of criticism, fiction, and personal essays, each chapter takes on another's work...

In Deaf life, the personal narrative holds sway because most Deaf individuals recall their formative years as solitary struggles to understand and to be understood. Few deaf people in the past related their stories in written form, relying instead on...

Epistemology is the study of how "knowledge" is formed. Standard epistemology isolates the "known" from the "knowers", thereby defining "knowledge" as objectively constant. Multiple epistemologies suggest that individuals learn in different ways shap...

As a young, deaf Jewish woman living in a small town in Michigan in 1942, Sandra Horowitz felt deeply frustrated by her limited prospects. Even though she had just graduated from junior college, she knew that she had two strikes against her in fulfil...

The work of Joseph Brodsky (1940-1996), one of Russia's great modern poets, has been the subject of much study and debate. His life, too, is the stuff of legend, from his survival of the siege of Leningrad in early childhood to his expulsion from the...