Samizdat Blog

Jehnny Beth, who fronts the post-punk band Savages, is the Mona Lisa of rock.   I don't mean that she's got an eni...

The crowd, as I remember it, consisted of about 200 young women—students of St. Mary's College—along with the poet John ...

We live in a great age of literary unoriginality.  It comes in many forms, from the mildly sordid and deceptive kind we've seen in p...

The Piquerary twins remain, for the English-speaking world, among the undiscovered gems of Belgian surrealist writing, despite the prese...

What could possibly be better than midcentury Belgian surrealist prose poetry?  Belgian surrealist prose poetry re...

Good news!  The new Cultural Society is up and running , including work by Graham Foust, Norman Finkelstein, Brooklyn Copeland, Peter O...

If you believe in liberalism, Stephen Spender's journals can, at times, provide some disconcerting reading.   By liberal...

Yesterday we heard the sad news of the death of Seamus Heaney. Today we have this, an elegy for Heaney by my friend and mentor John Mat...

Hot news -- the new issue of the Battersea Review is out, and available online! It's got poetry by John Tranter, Alfred Corn, Pet...

The first thing you notice, when you start reading the canonical literature of the generation of English writers who ...

John Steinbeck was a whiz in front of a typewriter, but don't ever let him don the paper cap of a fry cook.  And kee...