Tennessee Williams vs. St. Louis
Can you ever escape your past? Tennessee Williams spent a lifetime trying. His years in New York, New Orleans and Key West are the stuff of literary legend. But it was St. Louis where Williams lived longest, and St. Louis that shaped him as an artist and a person. So argues Henry I. Schvey in “Blue Song: St. Louis in the Life and Work of Tennessee Williams.”
Author Williams to give in-person reading
Acclaimed author Joy Williams returns to Washington University on Thursday, Oct. 14, for a special in-person reading from her new novel, “Harrow.”. Afterward, David Schuman in Arts & Sciences and a former student of Williams, will interview the author about her long career.
Dorothy, a publishing project, partners with New York Review of Books
Dorothy, a publishing project — the independent book publisher co-founded by Danielle Dutton and Martin Riker — has entered into a sales and distribution agreement with the New York Review of Books that will amplify its book promotion and marketing efforts. Dutton, associate professor of English, and Riker, senior lecturer in English, both in Arts & Sciences at Washington University […]
Well Waiting Room
A collection of poems that contemplate the bureaucracy of the mind through interior political cabinets Taking its name from the banal, purgatorial space outside (but inside) a doctor’s office, “Well Waiting Room” imagines the conversations we have with ourselves at this liminal site as an exchange between interior bureaucrats, each of whom governs a particular aspect of the […]
Forget Prayers, Bring Cake
A Single Woman's Guide to Grieving
When Merissa Nathan Gerson moved to New Orleans, she was greeted by the sudden death of her father. In this heartrending and relatable story, she shows how to grieve, how to ask for help, and how to rely on your community.
Her Cold War
Women in the U.S. Military 1945-1980
Tanya L. Roth follows the experiences of women in the military from the 1948 passage of Women’s Armed Services Integration Act to 1980.
Inheritance of Aging Self
In this collection of poems, Lucinda Marshall, AB ’79, “beautifully reminds us to cleave to our memories: scent memories, rearranged and fractured memories, body memories that get absorbed back into the universe. These poems are infused with wisdom to help guide us through the legacy of our own non-being,” writes Nancy Naomi Carlson, a fellow […]
Infinite Variety
Literary Invention, Theology, and the Disorder of Kinds, 1688-1730
Unnerved by the upheavals of the seventeenth century, English writers including Thomas Hobbes, Richard Blackmore, John Locke, Jonathan Swift, and Daniel Defoe came to accept that disorder, rather than order, was the natural state of things. They were drawn to voluntarism, a theology that emphasized a willful creator and denied that nature embodied truth and […]
Best Men
David Schuman directs the MFA program and coordinates the creative writing concentration for undergraduate English majors. Schuman’s fiction, nonfiction and reviews have appeared in Catapult, Joyland, Missouri Review, Carolina Quarterly, Conjunctions, Black Warrior Review, The Rumpus and many other publications. He has been awarded a Pushcart Prize and his story, “Stay,” was listed as a distinguished story in Best American […]
An unfinished ending
After a sudden move to the Midwest, author Sayed Kashua brings his series of novels that explored Arab-Israeli identity to an end.
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