October/November 2001 
An Interview with Carl Phillips
Christopher Hennessy
Carl Phillips has been a finalist for both the National Book Award for From the Devotions and the National Book Critics Circle Award for Cortege. His prizes and fellowships include those from the Guggenheim Foundation and the Library of Congress, the Massachusetts Artists Foundation, and the Academy of American Poets. His first volume, In the Blood, won the 1992 Morse Poetry Prize.
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Two Roads Diverged in a Wood: Character, Metaphor, and Destiny in the Work of William Matthews and Larry Levis
Tony Hoagland
These first two functions of Chandler's image could be called functions of Equivalency-they provide the reader with real-world information relevant to the horizontal narrative. But a third dimension of Chandler's metaphor is that of the Fantastic, which is to say, the pure, dream-like fantasy of the image, uncalled-for and inexplicable, otherworldly in a way which has little or nothing to do with the situation or the plot of The Big Sleep.
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Some Epiphanies About Epiphanies
David Jauss
In Christian doctrine, the Epiphany-capital E-refers to the manifestation of God to the Magi in the form of the Christ child. In Stephen Hero, James Joyce adapted this term to secular and literary purposes.An epiphany is, his protagonist Stephen Dedalus informs us, "a sudden spiritual manifestation" of the essential nature of a person, situation, or object.
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Campus Equity Week?
Jennifer Berkshire
In Connecticut, part-time faculty members at one community college are planning to erect a tent on the campus lawn, dispensing advice to students at 25 cents a head. In Chicago, adjuncts from all over the city will rally downtown, demanding changes in a state law that makes it difficult for part-timers to organize unions. And on the West Coast, part-time teachers from throughout the giant California system plan to educate, agitate, and do whatever else it takes to make their voices heard.
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Who is a Writer?
Ronald Goldfarb
The case of Vanessa Leggett raises an intriguing question: who is a writer? Leggett is a 33- year-old woman in Texas who has been jailed for refusing to turn over her tapes and research notes to a federal grand jury investigating a murder in Houston. She was writing a true crime book about the case in question.
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Interview of T. Coraghessan Boyle
Liam Callanan
T. Coraghessan Boyle is the author of 14 books. His most recent novel, A Friend of the Earth, was published by Viking in fall 2000, and his most recent collection of stories, After the Plague, will appear in fall 2001, also from Viking. He has been honored with numerous prizes, including France's Prix Medicis Étranger for best foreign novel, and the PEN/Faulkner Foundation's award for best novel, as well as its Bernard Malamud Prize in Short Fiction.
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Writing About Family: Is It Worth It?
Mimi Schwartz
"Write what you know!" is the advice given freely to writers not engaged in academic research and journalism-and what we know best involves family. If that becomes a problem, fiction writers and poets have some wiggle room. They can always say, "Hey, that's not you! That's my imagination at work!" and hope for grace. Memoirists and personal essayists have no such cover.
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