The Antioch Review back issues from January 2007:
Nolan Miller (1907-2006).(Obituary)
Jan 01, 2007; ... When I joined the Antioch College faculty in 1968, one of its most interesting characteristics was that several of the original founders of The Antioch Review were active figures on campus. Seven members of the Antioch community had founded the Review in 1941, and when I became editor in ...
Reflections, observations, memories.
Jan 01, 2007; ... I Familiar foolishness: 1) Do you promise to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth? (Every court case, every witness, would go on forever.) 2) The TV anchor's "I'll see you again tomorrow night." The anchor doesn't see us; we see ...
Odessa.(Short story)
Jan 01, 2007; ... Odessa Petty is in the back yard beheading her enemies. That's what she calls chopping wood. It's still summer but she likes to get things done well ahead of time. "What is there for me to do, Mrs. Wickrow?" She asks this every morning, usually when Llewellyn and I are having our second ...
Samuel demands the muse: Johnson's stamp on imaginative literature.(Samuel Johnson )
Jan 01, 2007; ... The impact of Samuel Johnson on later writers derives from the extraordinary way in which his works are inextricably connected to his personality. He himself is one of the great characters in literature; his opinions and conversation were recorded in intimate detail in letters, journals, ...
A quarterly reader (and writer).
Jan 01, 2007; ... The first thing I look for when venturing into one of my quarterly subscriptions--I rotate a dozen or more journals annually and decide to retain or eliminate based on numerous factors, which I need not get into just yet--is the editor's note. Most of the time I don't find one. This is a ...
The inn at Loch Bragar.(Fictional work)
Jan 01, 2007; ... Headed notepaper. Nicely done, and the typeface, Baskerville in blue. He liked that, the little touches of good taste. He removed the top of his fountain pen, and paused with the nib held over the paper. This was going to be the most difficult letter he'd ...
Notes on pacifism.
Jan 01, 2007; ... A colleague of mine likes to call me a fundamentalist pacifist, and he's not wrong. Or if he's wrong, it's only in implying that there's some other sort of pacifist. Pacifism is always a fundamentalist position; pacifists say, "We reject war in general." Everyone else says, "Depends on the ...
Exoskeleton.(Poem)
Jan 01, 2007; ... <Pre> Is this armor, or your architecture? You can't but stiffen to the touch. We wear each other thin, and in autumn's honor, wear orange. Drizzle has sheathed the apple trees with silver, and the crumbling feed cart ...
Yeshiva Boys.(Poem)
Jan 01, 2007; ... <Pre> 1. The Ten Plagues Came the plagues and we named them in order: blood, frogs, lice, wild animals, pestilence, boils, hail, locusts, darkness, and the slaying of the first born. The scholars agree that hail was, except for the slaying of the first born, the most devastating ...
Essay on Criticism.(Poem)
Jan 01, 2007; ... <Pre> Life is a criticism of poetry, Not a turning loose of poetry, but an escape from poetry. A great beauty overcomes or rather obliterates all poetry. The shattering of a mirror marks the poem As the shattering of a glass marks a wedding. Beauty is terrible, like an angel. ...
D. W. Griffith in a Nutshell.(Poem)
Jan 01, 2007; ... <Pre> "The Mountaineer's Honor, 1909 When a harum-scarum mountain girl is seduced by a traveler from the valley her brother tracks the seducer down and kills him. In ...
Second Marriage.(Poem)
Jan 01, 2007; ... <Pre> Leah marries Ken on a stormy October afternoon. We pass gifts then huddle around with strangers near the bar. Leah is my oldest friend, 20 years running. Ken is a new thing. A new husband. Leah has on an avocado dress, short, bare legs. My wife says she looks great for 40 ....
Snow in Umbria.(Poem)
Jan 01, 2007; ... <Pre> Call it fate. Call it nature. Call it luck. Call it unrepeatable euphoria. Once in a hundred years, there's a freak snowfall in the olive groves of Umbria and I, by dint of miracle, was there. (The windfall that had paid my charter fare: an actual publication.) Even the moon ...
Lovers of hurricanes.(Short story)
Jan 01, 2007; ... All summer Constantine watched the corn grow. Viewed from the deck of the cabin, which lay between the river and the field, it looked much like a green sea, especially when the wind moved across the stalks, making a sound like his favorite trout stream. Because it was being irrigated with ...
Provenance.(Short story)
Jan 01, 2007; ... Rail Fence, Rambling Road, Kansas Troubles, Honeycomb, Spice Pink, Bow Knot, Doe and Darts, Dove-in-the-Window, Princess Feather, Triple X, Oak Leaves and Acorns, Crosses and Losses, Festoon, Fly Foot, Wood Lily, Variable Star, Triple Irish Chain, Lady of the Lake, Necktie, Seven Sisters, ...
The twilight of Russian literature: Vladislav Khodasevich and Gavriil Derzhavin.
Jan 01, 2007; ... The short twentieth century for the Russians (1917-1991) ended much the way it began, at least culturally. As the Soviet Union collapsed, Russian writers, artists, and others mined the Russian past searching for models to help understand and shape a brave new future, just as they had done ...
Bloomsbury nights: being, food, and love.(Short story)
Jan 01, 2007; ... We'd already spoken earlier, but the conversation gave me little sense of who she was. I'd found some people who knew of her but no one who'd met her in person. On the phone she'd been high-spirited but guarded, informative but furtive, too. Normally, when someone spends more than a couple ...
Cracking the Thucydides code.(Critical essay)
Jan 01, 2007; ... There are those who suppose that there is secret knowledge. The conspiracy theorists, the Rosicrucians, UFOlogists, Scientologists, the esoteric knowledge adherents are all examples. Who can forget Mel Gibson as the bug-eyed conspiracy theorist in Conspiracy Theory! And at a remove there ...
Poems of the Dutch Fiftiers.(Living Space: Poems of the Dutch Fiftiers, the PIP Anthology of World Poetry of the Twentieth Century, vol. 6)(Greetings: Selected Poems)(Book review)
Jan 01, 2007; ... Living Space: Poems of the Dutch Fiftiers, The PIP Anthology of World Poetry of the Twentieth Century, Volume 6, edited with an introduction by Peter Glassgold; revised and expanded, with a note, by Douglas Messerli. Green Integer, 289 pp., $18.95 (paper). Greetings: Selected ...
California: America's High-Stakes Experiment.(Brief article)(Book review)
Jan 01, 2007; ... California: America's High-Stakes Experiment by Peter Schrag. University of California Press, 328 pp., $24.95. Immigration is transforming California. One in four residents is foreign-born. Of the 20 million people added since 1962, nearly 80 percent are Latino or Asian. California's ...
The Catastrophist.(Brief article)(Book review)
Jan 01, 2007; ... The Catastrophist by Lawrence Douglas. Other Press, 276 pp., $24.95. Academic everyman Daniel Ben Wellington is on the classic ladder to success, with a successful book on art and the Holocaust in print, a presentable wife, and tenure at Franklin College in the offing. But like a picked-at ...
Empty Bed Blues.(Brief article)(Book review)
Jan 01, 2007; ... Empty Bed Blues by George Garrett. University of Missouri Press, 179 pp., $19.95 (paper). All that I hope to say in books, all that I ever hope to say, is that I love the world, declared E. B. White. George Garrett, whose lifelong output of stories, novels, poetry, plays, and nonfiction is ...
Mining California: An Ecological History.(Book review)
Jan 01, 2007; ... Mining California: An Ecological History by Andrew C. Isenberg. Hill and Wang, 242 pp., $27.00. Over 110 years later historians are still fighting with Frederick Jackson Turner. In 1893, Turner presented his epochal essay "On the Significance of the Frontier in American History." Simply ...
News of Paris: American Journalists in the City of Light between the Wars.(Book review)
Jan 01, 2007; ... News of Paris: American Journalists in the City of Light between the Wars by Ronald Weber. Ivan R. Dee, 333 pp., $27.50. What is in the background of the portrait of the Mona Lisa? Between the two world wars, who were the American journalists in Paris out of whose company Hemingway, ...
Untold Stories.(Brief article)(Book review)
Jan 01, 2007; ... Untold Stories by Alan Bennett. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 672 pp., $32.50. This book might be perfect for someone going on holiday--except it's 672 pages long and weighs 2.5 pounds. Bennett tries to prepare the reader for the length and the varied content by comparing it to a kind of book ...
The Executive Director of the Fallen World.(Book review)
Jan 01, 2007; ... The Executive Director of the Fallen World by Liam Rector. University of Chicago Press, 96 pp., $22.50. Although the title of Liam Rector's third collection might suggest his having taken on yet another impossible task (he is former executive director of AWP), his new poems reflect both ...
Only the Senses Sleep.(Book review)
Jan 01, 2007; ... Only the Senses Sleep by Wayne Miller. New Issues Poetry and Prose, 84 pp., $14.00 (paper). Emptiness haunts Wayne Miller--unfurnished rooms, human absences, each moment's retreat into the past--but from this void he fashions a quiet, Trakl-influenced voice that lends feeling to the ...
A Diary of Altered Light.(Brief article)(Book review)
Jan 01, 2007; ... A Diary of Altered Light by James Applewhite. Louisiana State University Press, 63 pp., $45.00 ($16.95 paper). Applewhite's twelfth book is in fact a diary. Daily routine, family birthdays, a European vacation--all are recorded here. Applewhite uses these occasions to meditate on time and ...
Riding Westward.(Brief article)(Book review)
Jan 01, 2007; ... Riding Westward by Carl Phillips. Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 56 pp., $22.00. Phillips's eighth collection continues his focus on eros. In this volume, sex is figured as "pillaging," desire as the longing to be "punished" and "crushed." The poems are charged with this liminal eroticism, ...
Scar Tissue.(Book review)
Jan 01, 2007; ... Scar Tissue by Charles Wright. Farrar, Strauss, and Giroux, 80 pp., $22.00. A sunset in Appalachia opens this, Wright's seventeenth volume of poetry: a familiar gesture, that of valediction, of Augustinian tribute to the luminosity of time, of landscape's fractured fullness: "the country ...