Austin Allen
Austin Allen is the editor of the Poetry Genius project at Rap Genius, as well as a former editor at Big Think. He holds an MFA in poetry from Johns Hopkins University, where he has also taught as a creative writing instructor. He lives in New York City and can be reached at austin [at] bigthink [dot] com.
Am I the only one fascinated by the issue of currency conversion in literature? When a posh fictional nobleman is rumored to have an income of such-and-such, or when a […]
I rarely plug anything in this space, but today I’d like to announce a project that I hope will interest some readers. For a while now I’ve been working on […]
I’m a little wary of defending The Great Gatsby. Not because I’m wary of the book, which I’ve loved with a passion since age sixteen, but because I can’t speak […]
A man spends ten years trying to sail home to his faithful wife… A naked foot slides, with mysterious ease, into the prince’s slipper… A girl stands on a balcony, […]
Well, if the New York Times Magazine can write a headline like that about fiction in January, why can’t I borrow it for poetry in February? Anyway, it’s true: Joshua Mehigan’s […]
“All that stuff I was taught about evolution and embryology and the Big Bang Theory, all that is lies straight from the pit of Hell….what I’ve come to learn is […]
Part 1 and Part 2 of this essay appeared earlier this week. Thomas Hardy I never cared for Life: Life cared for me, And hence I owed it some fidelity… […]
Part 1 of this essay appeared yesterday. Part 3 (of 3) will appear tomorrow. Where Thomas Hardy seems to me primarily a pessimist, W. B. Yeats is an ironist. A […]
In a mid-career essay about his elder contemporary Robert Frost, the poet W. H. Auden observes that “[Thomas] Hardy, [W. B.] Yeats and Frost have all written epitaphs for themselves.” […]
The great American poet Wallace Stevens, author of “The Emperor of Ice-Cream” and many other famous works, was also a longtime insurance executive. While researching him for my previous post, I decided […]
Poetry critic and Harvard professor Helen Vendler has published a refreshing article in Harvard magazine, in which she encourages the school to welcome mediocre students who also happen to be great writers. […]
Not content with publishing a fake newspaper, producing a fake news channel, and delivering the best satire on the Web to millions of genuine fans, the staff of The Onion […]
Recently two brothers named Chaplin created the smallest book in the world. Their tiny tome, Teeny Ted from Turnip Town, is etched on a microchip narrower than the width of a […]
According to The Independent, a recent Yale-Moscow State University study has found “a modest but statistically significant familiality and heritability element to creative writing.” The conclusion was based on an evaluation […]
This past Friday I headed down to the Baltimore Book Festival, an annual three-day street fair full of readings, panels, small press exhibitions, and overstuffed bookshelves on city lawns. It […]
They remember her in colloquia and symposia, they remember her in the journals. They don’t remember her in the streets, her haunts. Reading her great novel Nightwood, Jeannette Winterson has said, “is […]
Only two authenticated images of Emily Dickinson exist: one a painting of her (and her siblings) as a child, the other an iconic photograph of her as a teenager. In […]
With the Fifty Shades of Grey trilogy topping bestseller lists worldwide, it is now fair to argue that the best and worst novelists in the English language share a last […]
A Q&A With Dr. John L. Casti, author, X-Events: The Collapse of Everything Dr. John L. Casti is a complexity scientist. This is one of those job descriptions I would […]
Dear readers, Book Think debuted one year ago this month, and I’m in the mood to commemorate. Since it’s too hot for books, thinking, or even turning pages absently while […]
The smallest sprout shows there is really no death, And if ever there was it led forward life, and does not wait at the end to arrest it, And ceas’d […]
People are not talking enough about The Bridge of San Luis Rey. No question, it’s a well-respected novel: it won the Pulitzer in 1928 and came in at #37 on […]
Who knew that Jorge Luis Borges, the great Argentine fiction writer and maestro of high literary culture, was a Martian Chronicles fan? Now that you know, doesn’t it seem fitting? […]
In the midst of an intense meditation on Walt Whitman in his Studies in Classic American Literature, D. H. Lawrence suddenly proclaims: The essential function of art is moral. Not […]
I’d like to add to the recent wave of eulogies in honor of Paul Fussell, poetry and culture critic, veteran of the Second World War and author of a classic […]
I’ve read nothing more heartwarming recently than the excerpts from young Obama’s love letters in the new Vanity Fair. The glow they exude has nothing to do with romance and […]
The copyright on Mein Kampf, Hitler’s infamous 700-page anti-Semitic rant, is scheduled to expire in 2015. Fearing an onslaught of neo-Nazi editions, the Bavarian state has decided to reprint the […]
With bookstores vanishing, the Pulitzer committee skimping on Pulitzers, and the Amazon dragon twining its bright yellow coils around every publisher on Earth, the book industry finds itself in dire peril. But lo! What […]
It’s a wonderful oddity—I hesitate to say “coincidence”—that the best erotic poem in literary history should appear smack dab in the middle of the Bible. The Song of Songs (known […]
Google’s “augmented reality” glasses are upon us, complete with stylish company codename (“Project Glass”) and Orwellian rhetorical judo: “People I have spoken with [i.e., Google employees] who have have seen Project […]