I’D LIKE TO START by first ridiculing the idea of literature, especially American literature. Literature is a word professors use to anesthetize books that might still be alive otherwise. James Joyce preferred the word ‘poetry’ to refer to any written work that spoke to what is closest to the human heart; “the rest,” he said dismissively, “is literature.”
People Get Ready
DURING THE WAR on Afghanistan, there was a paranoid theory among the opposition that after the U.S. defeated the Taliban (themselves never quite tied to 9/11), the Bush administration would find a way to include Iraq in its War on Terror, and that this unfounded and opportune move would prove, once and for all, how transparent the present aggression was.
Notes from Underground
JOHN GARDNER taught me how to write, though I never met him. By the time I started writing he’d been dead several years, his star already receding, but a friend who’d been an English major had had to read him for a course and highly recommended Grendel.
My Way or the Highway
WHEN I THINK of what people abroad think of America, I picture their general ridicule of our idea of foreign policy and the statesmen sent to carry it out. I picture diplomatic blunders such as Reagan at Bitburg or George Bush throwing up at a Japanese state dinner. I hear George W. Bush struggling to answer simple questions until Tony Blair steps in to save him. I picture Gerhard Schroeder standing in the background and trying to keep a straight face as George W. twists his own words into a parody of doublespeak.
My Mysteries of Pittsburgh: An Alphabet
I GREW UP IN PITTSBURGH, in Point Breeze, between John Edgar Wideman’s Homewood and Michael Chabon’s Squirrel Hill. It was the ’60s, just late enough to miss Annie Dillard’s “American childhood,” though later (I think) I delivered their Post-Gazette. I also claim to have delivered David McCullough’s morning paper, but that, like many of my memories, may be untrue.
The Works of Stewart O'Nan 