Counter-Tradition of the American Imagination
Geographies of Flight: Phillis Wheatley to Octavia Butler by William Merrill Decker. Northwestern University Press, 2020. Paper, 294 pages, $43. Reviewed by J. L. Wall Aboard the Arbella—or maybe in Southampton before the colonists departed for the New World—John...
Marriage Can Change Everything
Jack: A Novel by Marilynne Robinson. Farrar, Straus and Giroux 2020. Hardcover, 320 pages, $27. Reviewed by J. L. Wall Why, I ask students who are reading Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead, does John Ames never directly give us his wife’s name? It’s only learned late in the...
Stuck with Pound
Cathay: A Critical Edition by Ezra Pound, Edited by Timothy Billings. Fordham University Press, 2019. Hardcover, 364 pages, $35. The Bughouse: The Poetry, Politics, and Madness of Ezra Pound by Daniel Swift. Farrar Straus and Giroux, 2017, Hardcover, 320 pages, $27....
A Paean to Craftsmanship
Works and Days by Hesiod, translated by A. E. Stallings. Penguin Classics, 2018. Paperback, 112 pages, $8.45. Reviewed by J. L. Wall The new Penguin edition of Hesiod’s Works and Days includes a map. This is a curious decision. There are no journeys in the poem,...
More than Regime Change, We Need a New Cosmological Vision