Sven Birkerts co-edits the journal AGNI at Boston University and directs the Bennington Writing Seminars. His most recent book is Changing the Subject: Art and Attention in the Internet Age (Graywolf).
CONTRIBUTOR ARTICLES
Getting to the “Click”: Teaching the MFA at Bennington
For writers of creative nonfiction, the “click” comes when you look at the what and realize the how....
Serendipity: A Conversation Between Sven Birkerts and Christopher Benfey
Sven Birkerts and Christopher Benfey discuss art, awareness, and the operations of chance....
The Truest Music
“An essay is a venture, an attempt. It proposes not the Q.E.D. of arrival but ongoingness, forward motion.” Sven Birkerts on “The Art of the Wasted Day."...
Where Will You Take Me?
“'Time Pieces' comes across as a vexingly undecided little book.” Sven Birkerts on John Banville's Dublin memoir....
The McPhee Method
Sven Birkerts considers John McPhee's "Draft No. 4: On the Writing Process."...
And Yet
Looking back on what I wrote in my ambitious youth, I catch myself mentally revising every other sentence. But I was far less likely to get stuck back then....
A Way of Taking in the World
Sven Birkerts on Teju Cole's new essay collection, "Known and Strange Things."...
Cocks and Flowers
What do we see when we look at Robert Mapplethorpe's flowers?...
Chance and Sausage
In Simic, it’s safe to say, the sausage, that shapely staple of many cultures’ cuisines, has found its Homer....
Sven Birkerts Interviews Sven Birkerts
Do Saul Bellow’s smart, thoughtful essays stand up to his enthusiastic, unruly novels?...
Where Danger Is
Rebecca Solnit "keeps her faith in the human project, its possibilities. But these will not be easily offered."...
An Essayist of the Old School
Joseph Epstein imbibes, perhaps a little too much, the literary education....
The Lint of the Material
Sven Birkerts doesn’t have a cell phone. Never did and never will. He doesn’t want to be that alienated....
Why Genre Matters
The old question of genre just won't go away: Sven Birkerts, Judith Kitchen, Scott Nadelson, David Biespiel, and Dinah Lenney mix it up some more....
Envy, or, The Last Infirmity
"To become the person who wrote that prose, that poetry, would mean that I had, at long last, truly become myself."...
The Ghost of Books: Past, Present, and Future
"The Ghost of Books: Past, Present, and Future" is an experiment not in terror and not necessarily Dickensian....
The Pump You Pump the Water From
Writing can't be planned for or predicted, and when it happens, when the surge begins, it brings a satisfaction like nothing else....
The Room and the Elephant
On internet criticism, Wikipedia, and the waning of expertise....
