http://bigthink.com/blogs/book-think <p>Book Think is a guide to "dead trees," live Web fiction, and everything in between.&nbsp;<span>It features book news, reviews, literary essays, and commentary on changes in the publishing industry.&nbsp;</span></p> <p><span><span class="il">Austin</span>&nbsp;Allen is a poet and adjunct professor of creative writing at Johns Hopkins University, as well as a former editor at Big Think. He lives in Baltimore.</span></p> <p>&nbsp;</p> Mon, 20 May 2013 22:34:58 -0000 Copyright Big Think. This work is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 United States License. http://bigthink.com/ideas/pride-and-prejudice-at-200 http://bigthink.com/ideas/pride-and-prejudice-at-200 Sat, 20 Apr 2013 15:56:24 -0400
Read More]]> Austin Allen http://bigthink.com/ideas/joshua-mehigan-has-written-the-best-poem-youll-read-this-year http://bigthink.com/ideas/joshua-mehigan-has-written-the-best-poem-youll-read-this-year Fri, 01 Mar 2013 00:01:38 -0500 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 "The Orange Bottle," published recently in Poetry magazine, is such a tour de force I doubt we'll see it surpassed in 2013 ...

Read More]]> Austin Allen http://bigthink.com/ideas/no-single-book-is-true http://bigthink.com/ideas/no-single-book-is-true Tue, 29 Jan 2013 14:06:21 -0500
Read More]]> Austin Allen http://bigthink.com/ideas/three-poets-one-epitaph-hardy-yeats-frost-pt-3 http://bigthink.com/ideas/three-poets-one-epitaph-hardy-yeats-frost-pt-3 Fri, 28 Dec 2012 15:40:23 -0500 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... W. B. Yeats Cast a cold eye On life, on death. Horseman, pass by! Robert Frost I would have written of me on my ...

Read More]]> Austin Allen http://bigthink.com/ideas/three-poets-one-epitaph-hardy-yeats-frost-pt-2 http://bigthink.com/ideas/three-poets-one-epitaph-hardy-yeats-frost-pt-2 Thu, 27 Dec 2012 12:35:39 -0500 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 comparison between “Channel Firing” and any of Yeats’s best political poems—“Easter, 1916,” for example—will show the difference clearly ...

Read More]]> Austin Allen http://bigthink.com/ideas/three-poets-one-epitaph-hardy-yeats-frost-pt-1 http://bigthink.com/ideas/three-poets-one-epitaph-hardy-yeats-frost-pt-1 Wed, 26 Dec 2012 14:06:25 -0500   Hardy I never cared for Life ...

Read More]]> Austin Allen http://bigthink.com/ideas/is-this-man-the-emperor-of-ice-cream http://bigthink.com/ideas/is-this-man-the-emperor-of-ice-cream Tue, 04 Dec 2012 00:10:25 -0500 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 to look up what his old employer, The Hartford (formerly the Hartford Accident and Indemnity ...

Read More]]> Austin Allen http://bigthink.com/ideas/helen-vendler-great-artists-arent-always-model-students http://bigthink.com/ideas/helen-vendler-great-artists-arent-always-model-students Fri, 30 Nov 2012 17:18:25 -0500 article in Harvard magazine, in which she encourages the school to welcome mediocre students who also happen to be great writers. It's about time someone of her stature exploded the ideal of the "well-rounded" student ...

Read More]]> Austin Allen http://bigthink.com/ideas/lincoln-shakespeare-and-tony-kushner http://bigthink.com/ideas/lincoln-shakespeare-and-tony-kushner Sun, 25 Nov 2012 14:59:53 -0500 Lincoln this week, and on balance I liked it very much. At the beginning and end (and occasionally in between) it's a sentimental pageant, with swelling chords and overbearing long takes, and for that we have Steven Spielberg to thank. The rest of the time, it's the most literate major motion ...

Read More]]> Austin Allen http://bigthink.com/ideas/genetics-and-creative-writing http://bigthink.com/ideas/genetics-and-creative-writing Sun, 11 Nov 2012 11:24:03 -0500 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 of writing exercises assigned to 511 children and one or both of their ...

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