Contemporaries Essays

“Now to sum up,” said Bernard. “Now to explain to you the meaning of my life.” — Woolf, The Waves I was reading, desultorily, the stories of Muriel Spark during a…

We call a poet a “poet’s poet” when they’re read mostly by other poets. By implication, a poet’s poet is difficult or obscure or both. When I call certain novelists…

It is an incontrovertible fact that works of art age. The distance between the time when a novel is written and the time when it is read only grows wider….

Hi, the visitor called Charlotte says. Hi, he says. Visitor. Visitation. There seems to be a force which bodies, by their very presence, exert on each other                                                                                                 — Ali Smith, Summer (76)…

In How to be Both, one of Ali Smith’s signature smart and snarky teenage girls, George, and her mother, an online activist-artist, have an argument about the lyrics to the Pet…

If you have read anything by Ali Smith, you’ll be familiar with the grip that all things lexical have on her authorial imagination. In the final novel of the Quartet, Summer,…

Hello? tap-tap-tap Hello? Cara L. Lewis: Hello! Here we both are, in a virtual commons.  Debra Rae Cohen: This is a virtual conclave, isn’t it — bruited on Twitter, assembled by email,…

Here again it was all so natural to me and more and more complicatedly a continuous present. A continuous present is a continuous present. I made almost a thousand pages…

Emulating Daniel Gluck in Ali Smith’s Autumn, we spent the latter half of the autumn and start of the winter gleaning and gathering loose leaves, scraps, and remnants and stitching our…