I look to the greatest pacifists for inspiration when answers are hard to find, and that’s why I recently pondered what Martin Luther King would say to Donald Trump if he could witness the absurd spectacle of the 2016 Republican candidate for President. It doesn’t take a genius to figure … Read the rest
I recently enjoyed two new novels, The Sympathizer by Viet Thanh Nguyen and Innocents and Others by Dana Spiotta, that left me thinking about the shimmering surfaces of everyday life, and the interwoven meshes of secrecy and guilt that ripple beneath. One novel is about a clever and bookish Vietnamese … Read the rest
For a long time I thought her name was Beverly Clearly. That’s because she wrote so clearly. For real: as a kid I would look at the covers of these wonderfully readable books, and “Beverly Clearly” was the author name I saw.
It’s rare that I have a chance to … Read the rest
A few years ago I wrote a piece called “Becoming Levi Asher” to explain why I began to use a pen name in 1994. (Short version: I was about to publish my first short story, a satire about my job, and I didn’t want to get caught.)
Today, … Read the rest
A great skit on this weekend’s Saturday Night Live suggested an Adele song as a cure for obnoxious and endless Thanksgiving dinner arguments about politics.
Adele is great, but here’s a more substantial (though simple) thought experiment that can produce amazing results. It works great if you’re going to be … Read the rest
One of the exciting things about the Beat Museum’s Beatnik Shindig which is happening next weekend in San Francisco is the activity it’s stirring up. The photo above, which has never been published before, shows a gang of unknown beatniks on a now-legendary Sausalito barge that became a group home … Read the rest
“What is life? A madness. What is life? An illusion, a shadow, a story.” – Pedro Calderon de la Barca
I think it would be fun if Literary Kicks won the 3 Quarks Daily Arts and Literature Prize in 2015. My blog post “First There Is A Mountain” is … Read the rest
A few days ago I began exploring how writers from Plato to Sebastian Brant to Katherine Anne Porter have written about a “Ship of Fools”. This was inspired by my discovery that sixteen different songs with that exact title have been written and performed by major rock, punk, folk … Read the rest
I stumbled upon our society’s most fascinating enduring metaphor by chance. Clicking around on iTunes, I noticed that I owned six different songs called “Ship of Fools”.
But these weren’t six different versions of one song. “Ship of Fools” was not a classic cover song, like “Dancing in the Streets” … Read the rest
