Urinals: it’s not only how you use them; it’s also where you put them— Duchamp knew this. Context is everything in terms of letting you know when you should unzip your fly and let loose and when you should declare … 
You never hit a story that’s only one genre, do you? Westerns tend to have some element of romance, horror uses comedy as pressure-release valve, fantasy’s nearly always got a few solid action sequences, science fiction and spy thrillers trade …
At the end of his New York Times review of Blake Butler’s There is No Year, Joseph Salvatore asks, “What is the meaning of this family’s haunted house? Are we to interpret it all metaphorically?. . .Butler makes us work …
There is no one attribute common to what we call ‘noir,’ and this absence of essence is not always true when we think of other genres. For example, westerns have one thing in common, which is their setting, the West. …
As a recent graduate of an MFA program, I feel confident in asserting that all writing students are aware of the insanity of their pursuits. This awareness manifests itself in different forms: as angry refutations of the accusation that all …
“I teach American Literature.” This is my stock response whenever I am asked what I do for a living. Usually, having provided this rather generic job description, I am met with a set of, by now, predictable questions. “Well, what …
The contemporary romance genre, with its stereotypical quaintness and occasional misogyny, has long been implicated for its utter lack of relevance to the literary reader. Love as a theme, at least, according to Vivian Gornick, an American critic and essayist, …
Author of fifteen books of fiction, most recently the story collection Fugue State, and the novella Baby Leg, winner of the O. Henry Award for his short story “Two Brothers,” the International Horror Guild Award for his story collection The …
