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Shakespeare’s Sweet Uses of Adversity
Sweet are the uses of adversity Which, like the toad, ugly and venomous, Wears yet a precious jewel in his head; And this our life, exempt from public haunt, Finds …
Prefaces, Introductions and Notices: The art of C.S. Lewis, David Quammen and Mark Twain.
Yes, quite a trio on both ends of that curious title. I have a fondness of introductions of all stripes because they are, in practice, written long after the work …
Robert Frost: The Trickster on the Road.
“If we would understand poetry, let us be informed about a poet’s experience and crises out of which he speaks honestly if painfully. For at the heart of the poem …
Silence Dogood. A short story by Martin Baker
In 1959, Truman Capote appeared on David Susskind’s program, Open End to talk about writing. When the “Beat Generation” was mentioned, Capote famously replied, “None of these people have anything interesting to …
Reciprocity and Reunion with Richard Ford
I renew my faith in great writing by turning back to my usual suspects: Richard Ford, Don DeLillo, Tim O’Brien, Joyce Carol Oates, and David Long. Like most superlatives, “great” …
6655321: The Clockwork Orange Dilemma
“The ideal reader of my novels is a lapsed Catholic and failed musician, short-sighted, color-blind, auditorily biased, who has read the books that I have read. He should also be …
The writer and the tightrope. The fiction of Dennis Lehane.
When I read Dennis Lehane, I think of The Flying Wallendas. He deftly walks the curiously thin line between fiction and literature. The first draft of his novel, A Drink …
Pat Conroy, Transcendence, and My Reading Life
Early in his novel, The Prince of Tides, Pat Conroy brings the character of Lila Wingo to life with this brief paragraph. “She saw the world through a dazzling prism of …
The decline of eloquence
One of my favorite lines from Shakespeare’s Hamlet is understandably overlooked. Like a tiny ship, those five words are swamped by such iconic leviathans as: “To be, or not to …
Some scattered thoughts on EndPoint and Other Poems by John Updike.
John Updike’s prose was so rich and intimate, I never felt compelled to pry into his life beyond the printed page. But his final book, Endpoint and Other Poems is an invitation …
BakerMuse Essays 