The Reading Experience came into existence as a blog about literature and literary criticism in January 2004. The first version of the blog was retired in September 2010. The Reading Experience 2.0 lives on but with a narrowed focus, featuring primarily reviews of new fiction and posts on the practice of literary criticism.
I was an academic scholar and critic before I began writing for this blog. I still write the occasional "academic" essay, and my approach to criticism is still no doubt informed by my experience as an academic critic, but I now for the most part write general interest reviews and longer essays intended for a nonspecialist audience.
LIST OF PUBLICATIONS APART FROM TRE:
"All That Remains: On the Fiction of John Hawkes" --The Critical Flame, Vol. 2, Issue 13, May-June 2011 (link)
"Top of the Bill: Stanley Elkin and Jewish Humor"--Open Road Media, May 11, 2011 (link)
"Strange Silence"----Review of Shouting Down the Silence: A Biography of Stanley Elkin in Open Letters Monthly, April 2011 link
"Correspondence Theory" --Review of Gilbert Sorrentino's The Abyss of Human Illusion inThe Quarterly Conversation, Issue 19, Summer 2010 link
“Life on the Page: How the Fiction James Wood Really Likes Works” Open Letters Monthly, August 2008. Included in Open Letters Monthly: An Anthology, 2010 link
“Disassembling Donald Barthelme” The Quarterly Conversation, Issue 11, Summer 2008 link
“No Funny Business” (On Comedy in Fiction) The Quarterly Conversation, Issue 7, Spring 2007 link
“Breaking the Code” The Quarterly Conversation, Issue 3, Spring 2006 link
“Reckonings”--Review of Gilbert Sorrentino’s A Strange Commonplace in Jacket Magazine, April 2006 link
“Legislating: Christopher Hitchens as Literary Critic" Agni Online, November 2005 link
“Off the Beaten Track” --Review of Ronald Sukenick’s Last Fall and Rikki Ducornet’s The Word “Desire” Playback St. Louis, December 2005 link
Review of Steve Stern’s The Angel of Forgetfulness Playback St. Louis, August 2005 link
“A Young Woman’s Fancy” --Review of Elizabeth Crane’s All This Heavenly Glory Playback St. Louis, May 2005 link
“Two Talkers Talking”--Review of Stephen Dixon’s Old Friends in Bookforum, Feb/March 2005 link
“Orchidaceous Extras”--On Richard Rorty and Vladimir Nabokov Prose Toad, Vol. 2, No. 1 (Winter 2004) link
“Not Merely Academic: Creative Writing and Literary Study” RE: Arts and Letters, Vol. 28, No. 2 (2004)
“Lesson Plans”--An essay review of Elaine Showalter’s Teaching Literature in Butterflies and Wheels (2004) link
“Postmodern American Fiction” The Antioch Review, Vol. 61, No. 4 (Fall 2003) link
“Empty Rhetoric: Innovative Fiction and the American Literary Magazine” Context No. 14 (2003) link
“Liberalism and Literature” (2003) Newtopia, Issue 12 link
“More Tedium Than Tingles: On the Fiction of Saul Bellow” Northwest Review Vol. 41, No.1 (2003)
“Literature Itself: The New Criticism and Aesthetic Experience” Philosophy and Literature Vol. 27, No.1 (2003) link
“Critical Conditions” Context No. 12 (2002) link
“Forsaking Illusions: On Richard Powers’ Plowing the Dark” in Hogtown Creek Review (Fall 2002)
“Text Patterns” --An essay-review of Mark Danielewski’s House of Leaves in Marlboro Review No. 11 (Winter/Spring 2001)
“Abandoning the Ruins”--Memoir/Critique of academic literary study College English Vol. 63, No. 3 (January 2001) link
“Inventing Literature" American Book Review (November/December 2000) link
“‘Terribly Bookish’: Mulligan Stew and the Comedy of Self-Reflexivity” Critique Vol. 41, No. 3 (Spring 2000) link
“Charlie Chaplin”--Essay-length entry in Bio-Bibliographic Guide to Clowns, Fools, and Jesters in Literature and the Arts (Greenwood Press, 1998)
“Natural Born Killers and American Decline"--The Films of Oliver Stone, Donald Kunz, ed. (Scarecrow Press, 1997)
“Two Fabulists”--An essay-review of Steve Stern’s A Plague of Dreamers and Steven Millhauser’s In the Penny Arcade in The Georgia Review Vol. XLIX, No. 4 (Winter 1995)
“Literature by Default: American Fiction in the Reagan Era” The Arkansas Quarterly Fall 1995
“A World Worth Laughing At: Catch-22 and the Humor of Black Humor” Studies in the Novel Vol. 27, No. 2 (Summer 1995) Reprinted in Catch-22 (Bloom's Modern Critical Interpretations), Harold Bloom, ed. Chelsea House 2007 link
“‘We’re Getting a False Reality Here’: Albert Brooks and the Comic Idea" Film Criticism Vol. 17, No. 1 (Fall 1993)
“The Rabbi as Vaudevillian: Stanley Elkin’s Comic Rhetoric" Contemporary Literature Vol. 34, No. 1 (Spring 1993) link
“Metafiction and Romance” Studies in American Fiction Vol. 19, No. 2 (Autumn 1991) link
“The Comedian’s Dilemma: Woody Allen’s ‘Serious’ Comedy” Literature/Film Quarterly Vol. 19, No 2 (1991) link
SHORT FICTION
“Brains on the Mat, A Chinese Bat” Quarter After Eight (Volume 11/12, 2007)
“The Parasite Text” Bewildering Stories (February 2005)
“The Medium and the Message”Word Riot (December 2003)
“Simplicity"The Bitter Oleander, Vol. 9, No. 2 (2003)
“The Other Samuel Dean” Sycamore Review, Vol. 15, Winter/Spring 2003
“The History of Philosophy" AugustCutter
“Getting a Life” Unlikely Stories, September 2002
“The Primal Scene" Unlikely Stories, September 2002
“Signifying Nothing” Fiction Funhouse, June 2002
“The Higher Learning” AugustCutter, April 2002
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