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.
Was Darcy a One Percenter? Literary Money Questions, Answered
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 […]
Announcing a Swashbuckling Adventure Poem
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 […]
“Gatsby”: Still Pretty Damn Great
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 […]
The Whole World’s Love Story: “Pride and Prejudice” at 200
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, […]
Joshua Mehigan Has Written the Best Poem You’ll Read This Year
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 […]
No Single Book Is True
“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 […]
Three Poets, One Epitaph: Hardy, Yeats, Frost (Pt. 3)
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… […]
Three Poets, One Epitaph: Hardy, Yeats, Frost (Pt. 2)
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 […]
Three Poets, One Epitaph: Hardy, Yeats, Frost (Pt. 1)
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.” […]
Is This Man “The Emperor of Ice-Cream”?
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 […]
Helen Vendler: Great Artists Aren’t Always Model Students
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. […]
The Thirst for Fake Knowledge: A Q&A With Seth Reiss, Head Writer of “The Onion”
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 […]
The Genius of “Teeny Ted”: A Brief Review of the World’s Smallest Book
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 […]
Why We Shouldn’t Look Too Hard for a “Creative Writing Gene”
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 […]
Indie Lit Cannot Be Killed: Thoughts From the Baltimore Book Festival
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 […]
The Life and Death of Djuna Barnes, Gonzo “Greta Garbo of American Letters”
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 […]
A New Photo of Emily Dickinson? Well—Maybe—
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 […]
The Portrait of a Lady, in Fifty Shades of Grey
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 […]
What If Everything Went Straight to Hell?
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 […]
Celebrating One Year of Book Think!
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 […]
Walt Whitman, Frankenstein, Dracula, and the Afterlife
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 […]
Is Thornton Wilder God?
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 […]
Bradbury, Borges, and the Future of Media
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? […]
Can Fiction Improve Us? Yes, That’s What It’s For
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 […]
In Memoriam: Paul Fussell (1924–2012)
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 […]
From “Do I Dare?” to “Yes, We Can!”: Young Obama and T. S. Eliot
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 […]
On the Return of “Mein Kampf” to Germany
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 […]
Could St. George’s Day Save the Book Industry?
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 […]
The Joys of Sex, Springtime, and the Song of Songs
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 […]
The New “Google Glasses” Ad: Some Version of Hell
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 […]