A Poet's Notebook
Picture this: Sinclair Lewis, the hard-hitting word slinger of the American novel and playwriting scene, so intertwined with his portable typewriter that he hauled the damn thing with him on his honeymoon in 1928. It’s like the guy couldn’t leave home without it. You’d think his fresh spouse, the razor-sharp journalist Dorothy Thompson, would’ve called…
Stephen Graham Jones, a Blackfeet Native American, has written a terrifying story about a spirit that seeks revenge. The Only Good Indians won both the Bram Stoker and Shirley Jackson awards for best horror novel at last year’s Horror Fiction Awards. Earlier this year, British-American author Catriona Ward released her third literary horror novel, The…
Sometimes a silhouette is more significant than an ordinary drawing. A few traces of the pen, a few vibrant adjectives, are often sufficient to bring a character to life. Take Owl Eyes, a partygoer at Gatsby’s mansion, a quickly drawn and excellent character who wanders into the library with intoxicated admiration. I’ve always seen this…
Hailed as a masterpiece on its original publication in 1921, Three Soldiers is a gripping exploration of fear and ambition, conformity and rebellion, desertion and violence.
One of Herman Hesse’s earliest novels, In the Old Sun (In der alten Sonne) was completed in 1904. The story is of novella length and comes long before the novels that were to make Hesse famous in the decades after World War II. In his early years as a writer, Hesse turned memories of his…
Coyote Canyon Press just published the first of two novels by Hermann Hesse, an endeavor we’re calling our Hermann Hesse Project. Just published is Gertrude. The text for this edition is taken from Adele Lewisohn’s translation of 1915, Gertrude and I, published in New York by The International Monthly. Gertrude was the first novel by Hermann…
Nathaniel Hawthorne’s “Rappaccini’s Daughter” is a rich and darkly morbid story that showcases Hawthorne’s art at its most sensuous and florid. It is the story of a beautiful young woman in a poisonous garden, and its gorgeous and lethal beauty are wonderfully done. The story is a sinister one in that the growing signs of…
The defining moment in the life of John Dos Passos came between August 16 and 20, 1917, when he experienced combat firsthand as an ambulance driver in France at the Battle of Verdun. Three days later he wrote to his friend Rumsey Marvin: The war is utter damn nonsense—a vast cancer fed by lies and…