Remembering John Ashbery: “But night, reserved, reticent, gives more than it takes.”
The world lost one of its most accomplished writers this weekend, and one of its most beloved, when the American poet John Ashbery died at his home in Hudson, NY, just a… Read more »
Nobel Prize archive reveals list of losers, including Borges, Nabokov, Neruda and more
In 1965, the Swedish Academy selected the Soviet/Russian novelist Mikhail Sholokhov as the winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature—“for the artistic power and integrity with which, in his epic of… Read more »
From Kafka to DeLillo: A small list of writers who rejected their own work
It’s not so surprising that admirers of a famous person’s work can become interested in that person’s personal life. Maybe they want to further explore what makes their favorite playwright… Read more »
I never liked the World Trade Center. / When it went up I talked it down
So begins David Lehman’s “World Trade Center,” written in 1996, about the way his feelings toward the Towers changed over time. This poem is the frontispiece in Poetry After 9/11,… Read more »
W.H. Auden’s “lost” journal recovered, 75 years later
One of three known journals written by W.H. Auden has been recovered nearly 75 years after it was written. This journal dates between August and November 1939. Auden died in… Read more »
SHIRTLESS SIGHTING: Mark Twain
Faithful readers of MobyLives may recall last year’s sultry slideshow of writers in their underpants, including figures like Allen Ginsberg, Ernest Hemingway, Ray Bradbury, William Carlos Williams, and William Faulkner.… Read more »
On editing and being edited
The role, duties, responsibilities, sins, virtues, and other attendant qualities… Read more »
SLIDESHOW: Writers in underpants
On a recent afternoon, in the middle of some research for an upcoming book, I fell down a Google rabbit hole and landed on a Polish blog post with the… 1 / Read more »