There seems to be no real blueprint for literary magazines. There are good examples, and influential publications, but it's unclear how to go about making one, and it's equally unclear how to read one. They’re magazines, but they want you to read them as books. They’re shaped like books, they don’t have glossy pages, and for the most part they don’t inform you of anything – they are the things you’re being informed of. Soft Targets is as new ...

I was brought up short the other day by a gesture in Michael North’s crisp and valuable Norton Critical Edition of Eliot’s The Waste Land. After giving excerpts from the sources mentioned in Eliot’s notes, the critical prose Eliot wrote in the years before the poem, and a selection of contemporary reviews and reactions (which North, as the author of Reading 1922: A Return to the Scene of the Modern, is ideally qualified to gather), the book op...

in a recent entry on philosophy and truth my use of "bullshit" in a number of contexts gave me more than a little pleasure not at all connected to truth just sweetness

As part of my recent turn to Asian American literature (from the astonishingly different field of East-West comparative literature; I'm really stretching myself) I've been reading the blog of Roger Pao, who writes with sincerity and accuracy about Asian American poetry. I sometimes worry that Roger is too sincere (though I love sincerity, am sincere all the time), perhaps because I love irony, almost as much as I love what S L Kim says about i...