Had Balzac been a less masterful novelist, the disreputably profligate fraud in him might have overwhelmed his artistry. Still, the other Balzac, the artist, is tainted by his well-earned reputation for what has been called artistic license or dishonesty...
The French novelist Honoré de Balzac (1799-1850) was the first writer to use fiction to convey the total social scene prevailing within one country at a particular period in its history. Commonly regarded as the founder of social realism, he also...
Two poets, two views of 9-11 By ROBERT PINSKY Sunday, September 15, 2002 I have read many poems responding to the Sept. 11 attacks. Most of them seem rooted not in a response to the event itself but in the poet's...
1. Shortly after midday, swerving to avoid three children, a recklessly overloaded truck rolled on its side, spewing a shipment of Malaysian refrigerators and steel sinks across the recently finished Presidential Highway. The sight of new refrigerators, irresistible in that sultry, fetid city,...
"God bless them, they were so young, with their hair down to their shoulders and carrying all those books.” This wistful observation comes from an aging, drunken, failed poet in The Savage Detectives, the grand novel that made Roberto Bolaño famous in Latin America when...
The Best Day the Worst Day: Life with Jane Kenyon, by Donald Hall. Houghton Mifflin, 258 pages, $23.Jane Kenyon died in the morning 10 years ago, at three minutes before the 8 o'clock news, with her husband, Donald Hall, beside her, in the long, two-story,...
