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Austin Allen
Austin Allen is the editor of the Poetry Genius project at Rap Genius, as well as a former editor at Big Think. He holds an MFA in poetry from Johns Hopkins University, where he has also taught as a creative writing instructor. He lives in New York City and can be reached at austin [at] bigthink [dot] com.
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People are not talking enough about The Bridge of San Luis Rey. No question, it’s a well-respected novel: it won the Pulitzer in 1928 and came in at #37 on […]
Who knew that Jorge Luis Borges, the great Argentine fiction writer and maestro of high literary culture, was a Martian Chronicles fan? Now that you know, doesn’t it seem fitting? […]
In the midst of an intense meditation on Walt Whitman in his Studies in Classic American Literature, D. H. Lawrence suddenly proclaims: The essential function of art is moral. Not […]
I’d like to add to the recent wave of eulogies in honor of Paul Fussell, poetry and culture critic, veteran of the Second World War and author of a classic […]
I’ve read nothing more heartwarming recently than the excerpts from young Obama’s love letters in the new Vanity Fair. The glow they exude has nothing to do with romance and […]
The copyright on Mein Kampf, Hitler’s infamous 700-page anti-Semitic rant, is scheduled to expire in 2015. Fearing an onslaught of neo-Nazi editions, the Bavarian state has decided to reprint the […]
With bookstores vanishing, the Pulitzer committee skimping on Pulitzers, and the Amazon dragon twining its bright yellow coils around every publisher on Earth, the book industry finds itself in dire peril. But lo! What […]
It’s a wonderful oddity—I hesitate to say “coincidence”—that the best erotic poem in literary history should appear smack dab in the middle of the Bible. The Song of Songs (known […]
Google’s “augmented reality” glasses are upon us, complete with stylish company codename (“Project Glass”) and Orwellian rhetorical judo: “People I have spoken with [i.e., Google employees] who have have seen Project […]
I can still vividly remember reading, back in 2001, the New York Times Magazinewrite-up on the release of The Corrections. It began: Some days, Jonathan Franzen wrote in the dark. […]
A Q&A With Christian Wiman, Translator of Stolen Air When Osip Mandelstam died at age 47 in a Siberian work camp under the Stalin regime, he became one of twentieth-century […]
“It is a sentimental error, therefore, to believe that the past is dead; it means nothing to say that it is all forgotten, that the Negro himself has forgotten it. […]
Dear Readers, For the weekend, a few miscellaneous notes: If there’s ever a book you’d like to see covered on Book Think, please feel free to drop me a note […]
You already know where you stand on Holden Caulfield. Either you found him a kindred spirit in your youth and continue to sympathize with him—less blindly, more wistfully—as you age; […]
Working at Big Think was a constant kick in the pants of my imagination. As a writer, I couldn’t have asked for a job that provided more and stranger ideas […]
It’s February 15th, and while some readers may have woken up this morning in a haze of romantic bliss, others will have spent the day asking their pets where it […]
Reading last week about the death of Florence Green, Women’s Royal Air Force member and last surviving veteran of the First World War, I thought of a sonorous passage by […]
Anne Carson writes books that refuse to be just one thing. Autobiography of Red is a verse novel framed as a work of classical scholarship; fittingly, its hero is a […]
Once in a great while, I write something that’s too long to fit comfortably in a blog post. This week one of those pieces, an essay on the notorious and […]
Irish poet Eavan Boland published her first collection, a pamphlet entitled 23 Poems, fifty years ago. To commemorate the milestone I’d like to offer this brief retrospective of her distinguished career. […]