Recent Entries:

The poet’s dread – or one of the dreads – is that life may escape words. It’s a useful anxiety, a spur to productivity. But we may be better off abandoning the worry when the writing begins. Here are some reasons why. First, life does elude words; it is a fugitive from the frontier justice of our phrasing.

“The need to explain a personal and collective biography of the Palestinian poet and his/her poetry, while a necessity not particular to a Palestinian, is itself a quandary,” writes Fady Joudah in the introduction to his translations of selected poems by Ghassan Zaqtan.

The Death of Erik Satie

The arches aspire to points
in the church of childhood,
a single note here and here and here.
Drafty gothic undertones, the grandiose
obscurity of the modern mind.

Cirrhosis, then pleurisy.
Hours waiting in stillness,
as in an empty cabaret.

A bell tinkles in the corridor, the viaticum
drifts toward the dying man next door.

Born in 1925 in Paris, Claude Lanzmann is mainly known in America for his production of the nine-and-a-half hour film Shoah (1985). It took him eleven years to make – six years to shoot or record interviews with witnesses of the Jewish Holocaust, and five more years to cut 350 hours of footage and sound into the final version.

In his only essay, Guy de Maupassant stated that the role of the realistic novelist “is not to tell a story, to amuse us or to appeal to our feelings, but to compel us to reflect, and to understand the darker and deeper meaning of events.” The arrival of history written as entertaining literature was spun out of German Romanticism – in coincidence with the emergence of the novel and its fi

I asked a dozen prose fiction writers to comment briefly on new and recent titles. The Seawall has been hosting similar multi-poet features in the spring and fall since 2008, but this is the first such post focused on fiction (and also, this time, on a memoir).