The critic writing a book of poetry faces peculiar challenges. Can she silence her internal censor enough to produce breakthrough work? Can she both savor and sever her allegiances as the need dictates?

In other words, the professional critic is simultaneously anchored and thrusting against the anchor....

Yes, of course, creative writing can be taught, and it is very successfully taught. It might be the most successful humanities enterprise in the American university, if success is to be measured by stated goals. As for "improvement," yes to that too, if by "improvement" we mean internalizing the principles...

The ice-age of no dialogue between minds, hearts and spirits has begun. The only escape route leads downwards, into dreams, for some into the graveyard. -- Playwright Heiner Müller, accepting the Kleist Prize in 1990, quoted in Berlin And Its Culture: A Historical Portrait, by Ronald Taylor (Yale University Press,...

Raymond Hammond is editor of the poetry journal New York Quarterly and the related book imprint New York Quarterly Books, as well as being an esteemed poet in his own right and the author of a lively polemic, Poetic Amusement. I recently had a...

How did Google get to be one of the dominant Internet companies of our time? What did it do right that Yahoo, Microsoft, and other competitors failed to do over the last decade?

Based on two and a half years of research, and extensive interviews with Larry Page, Sergey...

Steve Inskeep, co-host of NPR's Morning Edition, has written a most readable, informative, entertaining, and provocative narrative of contemporary Karachi (Instant City: Life and Death in Karachi, Penguin Press, October 13, 2011)--one of the best in existence, connecting Karachi's misty origins and murky midlife to its present befuddling...

Richard Burgin has long been a mainstay in American literary circles, as five-time winner of the Pushcart Prize, editor for more than a quarter century of the award-winning journal Boulevard, and author of numerous critically acclaimed short story collections. I recently talked to him over email about his career and...

As usual, fall is when the big guns come out. Exciting novels by major writers like Ha Jin, Haruki Murakami, Umberto Eco, Jeffrey Eugenides and Russell Banks. An important life of George Kennan, and of writers Kurt Vonnegut, Lorine Niedecker and William Carlos Williams. Short stories by a master writer,...

I don't expect for a moment for this to happen, but I believe no other writer on the face of the earth comes as close to deserving the next Nobel award for literature as Salman Rushdie.

There is only one other writer on the planet who writes with more...

Over the last few years, it's been an honor for me to get to know Franz Wright, winner of the 2004 Pulitzer Prize for "Walking to Martha's Vineyard" (his father, James Wright--whom I consider one of the greatest late twentieth-century American poets--also won the Pulitzer Prize in poetry...

Yale, Harvard, Oxford, Princeton--these are the names that instinctively come to mind when university presses are mentioned. But hold on--there's something brewing in Huntsville, Texas, too.

Huntsville, you say? The execution capital of the world? That may be true, but they also have Sam Houston State University, which hosts...

We live in a different country now. It is difficult to radically alter a nation's political discourse at every level, yet this is exactly what 9/11 accomplished.

We live in a country that remains unrecognizable from the (brief and somewhat superficial) flourishing of multicultural diversity, tolerance of newness and...

This is the first in our series of projected interviews with directors at leading university presses. Peter Dougherty has been at the helm of Princeton University Press--one of the country's most outstanding publishers--since 2005; I recently had the opportunity to talk to him in some detail over email...

I've been intrigued by Richard Eoin Nash since the time he ran the indie press Soft Skull Press in the 2000s. His new enterprise is Red Lemonade/Cursor, a reader/participant-oriented publishing venture hoping to take full advantage of the social potential of new media. I recently had the opportunity...

The truth about American poetry is that it is in very bad shape. The professional poetry establishment has taken care to mark serious criticism coming its way as sour grapes, but the quality of poetry being produced by American poets regularly awarded the highest prizes in the land and recognized...

This is the latest in our series on the short story--its unique aesthetic, how it's different from the writing of a novel, who are some of the form's major practitioners, and what it takes to craft a successful short story.

Aamer Hussein is one of the most prominent South Asian...

Exciting new novels by Mohammed Hanif and Aravind Adiga (two of the hottest stars of South Asian literature), new novels by underrated writers Dana Spiotta and Tom Perrotta, meditations on race and politics by Caryl Phillips and Randall Kennedy, thoughts on the transformation of Beijing and the centrality of Deng...

Last year on Independence Day we launched an intense focus on indie presses, and continued that attention throughout the year (see for example here, here, and here). This year again we bring you some of the most exciting established and emerging voices,...

You won't find any of these books in the New York Times Book Review, though they've all been released in the first half of this year by prominent presses. As far as I can tell, not a single one of them has been reviewed in the Times--and I suspect this...

In the May/June 2011 Poets & Writers, there's a feature on writing contests. Editor Kevin Larimer (all credit to him for asking the right questions) interviews four poetry first book contest administrators, Stephanie G'Schwind (director of the Center for Literary Publishing and editor of Colorado Review), Michael Collier...