Wednesday, August 22, 2007

Adam Kirsch Links

The latest new yorker has a nice essay on Shelley by Adam Kirsch. As I was reading it I just wanted to bookmark links to other essays by Kirsch here on the blog. I think he is one of the finest young literary reviewers and essayists around, at least among the people writing for the mainstream magazines and newspapers. His essays for the new yorker here and his columns on diverse literary and non-so-literary subjects for the new york sun, where he is also the literary editor, here. His essay on Martin Heidegger -Hannah Arendt letters is also worth reading. I am quite clueless about the subject but it seems he is not a big fan of modern, experimental poetry. An article in the nation takes him to task on this account.

4 comments:

Unknown said...

Oh yes, Adam Kirsch is a superb reviewer. I came across his NY Sun column in a strange way. Chandrahas Choudhury of The Middle Stage had written a post against Kirsch's contention that blog commentary on literature had little value and after reading that article, I also wrote a longish comment (arguing against it). But then, I went back and read many of his other reviews and have been reading them since. I went so far as to compile many of his reviews and then printed and bound them to make the thing seem like a book. And when I feel like reading on literature and I don't have access to the net, I go back to that book.

Alok said...

His essays in new yorker and other places are also very good.

ak said...

Yes, so I have heard. But I haven't read any of them because, if I remember correctly, most of them are on poetry. Also, when I started reading Kirsch, I was going through a phase where I couldn't read pieces longer than two or three pages; I just didn't feel like it. And all his essays in the New Yorker were three or four times that.

Alok said...

yes his new yorker essays are about poetry and are longer. but they are still quite introductory and generally non-technical.