September 2009 
Stranger Things
Debra Spark
No little green men from the planet Urk, please. If there's a barbarian in your gathering of characters, please don't invite me to the party. When it comes to literature, I don't mind being a snob. Indeed, snob is what I do best.
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Like Water Remembering Light: An Interview with Marilyn Nelson
Leslie McGrath
I'd long held a little fantasy about being able to offer young poets contemplative time and space. Instead of staying in the "empty nest" when my children left home, I sold our home and bought a large house in the country, so I could make that dream come true.
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Egoless Versus Vainglorious Prose: The Styles of Paul Bowles and James Salter
Jay Kauffmann
What constitutes style, what creates that distinctive stamp of authorial character? Why, for instance, does Faulkner favor long sentences and Hemingway short? And why does Saul Bellow use slang words while Paul Bowles avoids them at all cost?
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The Hermit of Croisset: Flaubert's Fiercely Enduring Perfectionism
Richard Goodman
It doesn't matter to us that Flaubert wrote in French, and not English, because the pursuit of the exact word-and all other forms of artistic excellence he strove for-knows no linguistic barrier.
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How We Are Changed by the Rhythms of Poetry
Karin de Weille
The voice is arranged into specific patterns of sound and intensity, and the corresponding feeling-whether of calm or elation, rage or depression, confusion or expansion-is generated. The movement is of energy through the body, not ideas through the mind.
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The Way to Winesburg
Claude Clayton Smith
Winesburg, Ohio, Sherwood Anderson's classic short-story collection that functions as a novel, is the book by which the literary world has come to know the small-town Midwest. It ranks twenty-fourth on The Modern Library list of the 100 best novels of the 20th century.
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Far From Ordinary: An Interview with Amy Krouse Rosenthal
Amy Yelin
I really don't like to put myself into categories. As a writer, I don't have an agenda-meaning I didn't use one type of writing as a springboard to do another type of writing.
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