Author: Jess Row
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Hello, Best American visitors…
Welcome to anyone who stumbled across “The Call of Blood” in The Best American Short Stories 2o11 and then found your way here. You may be interested to know that the version of the story in Best American is somewhat shorter (about a thousand words shorter) than the original, which is included in Nobody Ever Gets…
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Joyce, meet Joyce
From Donald Barthelme’s “After Joyce”: Satisfied with neither the existing world nor the existing literature, Joyce and Stein modify the world by adding to its store of objects the literary object—which is then encountered in the same way as other objects in the world…Interrogating older works, the question is: what do they say about the…
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Ownership and The Real
There’s an interesting (and unplanned) dovetail between my piece on the novel that came out in Boston Review this month (which I wrote, for the most part, last summer) and my review of Marcus Boon’s In Praise of Copying, which I wrote in January but just appeared in The New Republic online yesterday. One is…
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The Novel is [not] Dead
Here’s my recent Boston Review piece on Virginia Woolf, Mikhail Bakhtin, David Shields, James Wood, Benjamin Kunkel, Yvonne Vera, and other luminaries. My original title was, “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” But then I had a feeling that Edward Albee would ring my doorbell in the middle of the night.
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Some thoughts on where I went to college
“I think that the fetishization of elite schools in American culture, the way in which they cultivate an image as brands, as imprimaturs of some scarce resource called “excellence,” is sad and pathological, and profoundly anti-democratic. The truth (a truth I didn’t know, or at least didn’t want to admit, in college) is that an…
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More matter
Happy “spring”! In case you’re looking for things to read, you can find two new stories of mine online this week: “Dear Yale,” at Guernica, and “Men and Dogs,” at FiveChapters. At the New York Times Book Review, I review E.L. Doctorow’s All The Time In The World: New And Selected Stories. My piece on…
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Another piece from the playlist
Here’s the Keith Jarrett track from my Nobody Ever Gets Lost playlist, now online at Drunken Boat. The audio isn’t stellar; if you like it, I can’t recommend highly enough the album it comes from The Melody At Night, With You, surely the best in Jarrett’s vast catalog. And here’s a beautiful, understated (relatively) version…
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To Whom It May Concern
This is a response to Claudia Rankine’s request for “thoughts on writing about race” following her public critique of Tony Hoagland’s poem “The Change” at the 2011 AWP conference. To Whom It May Concern Years ago, when I was in graduate school, I ran into one of faculty members in my program, an African American…
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Press for Nobody
There are a few new pieces posted on the Press page, including a lovely review/conversation on Mark Oppenheimer’s new radio show, Paper Trails, which was broadcast on Sunday, February 13th, and is now archived online.
Jess Row 