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.
A Q&A With Christian Wiman, Translator of Stolen Air When Osip Mandelstam died at age 47 in a Siberian work camp under the Stalin regime, he became one of twentieth-century […]
“It is a sentimental error, therefore, to believe that the past is dead; it means nothing to say that it is all forgotten, that the Negro himself has forgotten it. […]
Dear Readers, For the weekend, a few miscellaneous notes: If there’s ever a book you’d like to see covered on Book Think, please feel free to drop me a note […]
You already know where you stand on Holden Caulfield. Either you found him a kindred spirit in your youth and continue to sympathize with him—less blindly, more wistfully—as you age; […]
Working at Big Think was a constant kick in the pants of my imagination. As a writer, I couldn’t have asked for a job that provided more and stranger ideas […]
It’s February 15th, and while some readers may have woken up this morning in a haze of romantic bliss, others will have spent the day asking their pets where it […]
Reading last week about the death of Florence Green, Women’s Royal Air Force member and last surviving veteran of the First World War, I thought of a sonorous passage by […]
Anne Carson writes books that refuse to be just one thing. Autobiography of Red is a verse novel framed as a work of classical scholarship; fittingly, its hero is a […]
Once in a great while, I write something that’s too long to fit comfortably in a blog post. This week one of those pieces, an essay on the notorious and […]
Irish poet Eavan Boland published her first collection, a pamphlet entitled 23 Poems, fifty years ago. To commemorate the milestone I’d like to offer this brief retrospective of her distinguished career. […]
Celebrated literary critic Harold Bloom turns eighty-two this year and is still publishing and teaching. In his honor, I’ve compiled a list of six things he’s outlived. 1) The Western […]
The title of the Wall Street Journal‘s recent article on enhanced e-books—”Blowing Up the Book”—strikes me as an appropriate blend of the exciting and the ominous. (See also: “Kindle Fire.”) The format is a […]
Five years ago this June, Cormac McCarthy appeared on The Oprah Winfrey Show. Given McCarthy’s legendary reticence (he had done only one major interview in the past, with the New […]
Bravo to Janaka Stucky, whose new article in Poetry on struggling independent bookstores is both the most sensible and inspiring thing I’ve read on the subject. Stucky concedes what everyone in […]
It was a dark and stormy night. By starting A Wrinkle in Time with the most famous “bad” opening in literary history—the same Edward Bulwer-Lytton line later adopted by Snoopy—Madeleine […]
I like the idea of “literary New Year’s resolutions” suggested by Ruth Franklin in The New Republic, and I’ve decided to hop on the bandwagon. But while Franklin’s resolutions primarily concern […]
I’d be remiss if I let 2011 slip by without a tribute to Elizabeth Bishop (1911–1979), who was born a century ago and who now looms larger over contemporary poetry […]
“Isn’t there anyone who knows what Christmas is all about?” Sure, Charlie Brown, I can tell you. But the answer requires a little textual analysis. Where does Christmas come from, if not books?
As the kind of writer who keeps his finger squarely on the cultural pulse, I’ve just watched the Tom Hanks/Meg Ryan romantic comedy “You’ve Got Mail” for the first time […]
Once again the Literary Review has announced the winner of its annual Bad Sex in Literature Awards, and once again I’m left strangely unsatisfied. What began as a novel exploration […]
Since March of this year, a series of extraordinary paper sculptures has appeared in various locations around Edinburgh, Scotland. Each location is a library or other institution devoted to the […]
National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) is drawing to a close, and with it the brave and caffeine-addled efforts of over 200,000 writers worldwide. Unabashedly privileging “enthusiasm and perseverance over painstaking […]
I’m eager to join in the “Which five books on a desert island?” game suggested by Big Think editor Dan Honan in a recent post. As a blogger, would-be critic, […]
“What is so distasteful about the Homeric gods,” W. H. Auden complains in his essay “The Frivolous & the Earnest,” is that they are well aware of human suffering but […]
All fiction has, at its heart, the enigma of character. What happens if science co-opts this question?
In one of those strange collisions between leatherbound Literature and paperless modern news, Herman Melville’s “Bartleby the Scrivener” was read aloud at Occupy Wall Street on Friday. Not only that, […]
Like the Beatles discography or the screenplay for Casablanca, the King James Bible is a rare instance of true collaborative genius.
I’m going to be frank with you: parts of the book are an exhausting experience. “Boring” is the wrong word, but this is not a “fun” classic nineteenth-century American novel. This is a feat of endurance, captain.
Allen Ginsberg, you fearless old goat, you shrewd, batshit agitator, you hedonist Buddhist, where are you now? Following Occupy Wall Street in the news has made me want to invoke […]
Wikipedia is universally relied on and universally distrusted. On the one hand, it’s a stunning repository of knowledge that has rendered the World Books of my not-so-distant childhood utterly obsolete; […]