This travelogue through small presses shows that the art of printing remains alive even in a digital world. Andrew Steeves’ recounting of a three-week whirlwind tour of small print shops in Canada and the United States highlights the... Read More

Essays argue for good Canadian poetry, rather than poetry written for ideological or nationalist purposes. “The virtues of good critical reading,” writes James Pollock, are “openness, attentiveness, patience, critical... Read More

In 1962, a young Texas playwright named Horton Foote adapted one of the South’s greatest novels, Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird, and won an Academy Award for Best Screenplay. Already a prolific playwright in his own right, Foote... Read More

Celebrated American poet W.S. Merwin is notable not only for his accomplishments and prodigious output (publishing twenty-some poetry collections, twenty-some translations, and several books of prose since 1952), but for the shifts in... Read More

Who could have guessed when academic Robert B. Parker introduced Boston private eye Spenser in The Godwulf Manuscript in 1974 that the entire landscape of American detective fiction would shift? Although Spenser (last name only, please)... Read More

The novelist David Foster Wallace took his own life on September 12, 2008. This single fact colors virtually everything written about his work since then, a fact acknowledged in this collection of critical essays focusing on Wallace’s... Read More

“Was there any?” was the response of a film historian when Tom Stempel, a professor of cinema, mentioned that he was researching writing in American television. Film and television screenplays usually do not appear on lists of great... Read More

“The critic,” writes Eric Ormsby, “must stimulate curiosity but he or she must also appeal to our innate sense of justice. Like it or not, the critic is a judge…We may flinch from the ‘judgmental’ but at the same time, I... Read More