I drink to the people on duty, on the train, in hospitals,kitchens, hotels, on the radio, at the foundry,at sea, on a plane, on the highway,and to those who get past this night where no one calls,I drink to the next moon, to the pregnant girl,to people who make a promise, to the people who kept it,to whoever paid the bill, to whoever is paying it...
Anyone who’s been spending time lately at the major book fairs knows this already – about the only thing that's sure to pack the conference rooms these days is either a book that’s got a movie contract, with celebrities attached, or a panel about e-publishing. And yet there’s no end to the interest, in writing at...
In a famous series of lectures delivered at Harvard in 1955, the philosopher James Langshaw Austin told us something everyone already knew: Language doesn’t just say things, it can also do things. In publication, the book based on these lectures took this point and ran with it.
How to Do Things With Words was not only Austin’s most...
From the first paragraph of David Rabe's new essay we know we are into something exact, profound, with echoes of all the great epic accounts of the human situation.
Perhaps that is an overblown response: As its subtitle tells us, the piece is about prize-fighting, boxing, "the sweet science." The temptation to cliche about the sport...