The Open Road Blog

Welcome back to Open Road’s fourth Critical Symposium. Our subject in this month’s series is Walker Percy, author of the classic novel The Moviegoer. Today’s contribution comes from Patrick Samway, who wrote the definitive Percy biography. In an enlightening personal essay, Samway describes his special friendship with the writer The New York Times called “our severest moralist, and one of our most philosophical novelists.” Please feel free to share with us your thoughts about Percy and the latest Critical Symposium in the comments section below.

***

In the early spring of 1988, I spent a week in ...

Open Road’s Critical Symposium returns this week with a new series focusing on the great Southern novelist Walker Percy. The central theme of Percy’s work was the decline of religion and spirituality in modern society. We’ve therefore asked our contributors to discuss this aspect of Percy’s work and how he handled questions of faith in his own life.

We begin with an essay by Brent Short, who conducted an in-depth interview with Percy in 1990 after the publication of The Thanatos Syndrome. In his essay, Short describes how he became interested in Percy’s work and what it was ...

Open Road Media is proud to present the second installment of our Critical Symposium on Hubert Selby, Jr. Yesterday we featured an essay by American literature scholar James R. Giles. Today author Rob Couteau examines the powerful role of violence in Selby’s work. As always, we invite you to join the discussion in the comments section below.

Rob Couteau is the author of the novel Doctor Pluss, the anthology Collected Couteau, the memoir Letters from Paris, and the poetry collection The Sleeping Mermaid. In 1985 he won the North American Essay Award, a competition open to North ...

Editor's note: Last year Open Road Media introduced The Critical Symposium, an online forum featuring insightful commentary about twentieth century literary masters. The first two symposiums offered exclusive critical essays on Stanley Elkin and Andre Dubus. Today we are pleased to announce the latest installment of this original series. Open Road’s first Critical Symposium of the New Year focuses on the life and work of novelist Hubert Selby, Jr., author of the cult classics Last Exit to Brooklyn and Requiem for a Dream. Selby is known for his unflinching portrayals of urban life and highly unconventional ...

Today we bring you the final installment of our Critical Symposium on the importance of Andre Dubus. In a new essay, Edward J. Delaney, a writer and filmmaker, offers a moving portrait of the great writer in his later years. Delaney produced an award-winning film about Dubus called The Times Were Never So Bad. Click here to see a preview of the film, which is available for purchase through Amazon. Delaney's writing has appeared in The Atlantic and other magazines. He is the author of the forthcoming novel Broken Irish. Learn more about him and his work ...

Today we are pleased to introduce the second part of our Critical Symposium on Andre Dubus. For this installment we interviewed Richard Ravin, another one of Dubus's former students.  In this special interview Ravin, who works in media, provides an intimate look at Dubus as a teacher and craftsman. To see more of Ravin's work about Dubus please read his essay on Dubus that appeared in Salon in 1999.

The Working Life of Andre Dubus

An Interview with Richard Ravin

On Dubus’s working methods

Andre, as I recall, wrote in long hand, and on typewriter after that. One of ...

Earlier this year Open Road debuted a new feature on its blog called the Critical Symposium. Our first symposium introduced three essays by critics discussing Stanley Elkin's status as a Jewish American writer. Today marks the 75th year since the birth of Andre Dubus and, as a special tribute, we are initiating a new Critical Symposium about the enduring significance of his work. Our first installment in this series is an essay by the writer Thomas E. Kennedy, who met Dubus in 1983 while earning his MFA at Vermont College of Fine Arts. Kennedy is the author of numerous ...

Editor's note: Today we continue our celebration of Jewish American Heritage Month with a new essay by David C. Dougherty on Stanley Elkin's relationship to the Jewish American literary tradition. Dougherty is the author of Shouting Down the Silence: A Biography of Stanley Elkin and professor emeritus of English at Loyola University Maryland. This essay is part of our "Critical Symposium" series, an ongoing effort to include in-depth commentary about Open Road authors on the blog. Click here to read "Top of the Bill" by Daniel Green, the first essay in the series. 

“That Ounce of the Ecumenical”

(The MacGuffin, 1991)

When Stanley Elkin exploded onto the ...

This week’s archival photo shows the great comedic novelist Stanley Elkin (1930-1995), author of The Dick Gibson Show and George Mills, as a student at the University of Illinois during the early 1950s. Around this time Elkin began publishing fiction in various literary journals, but his first major work, the novel Boswell, would not appear until 1961, after he had finished his Ph.D. in English literature and begun teaching at Washington University.

All of Elkin’s novels were met with critical acclaim, and today he is remembered as one of the greatest American writers of the post-war era. His ...

Editor's note: Today Open Road continues its celebration of Jewish American Heritage Month with the first installment of our new "Critical Symposium" series, a look at our authors from the perspectives of literary critics, biographers, and journalists. This month our discussion revolves around Stanley Elkin (1930–1995), author of such comic masterpieces as The Dick Gibson Show and The Magic Kingdom. We asked three critics to discuss what it means to identify Elkin as a Jewish-American writer. Each week we will post one of their responses. This week's essay by Daniel Green, one of the web's leading literary critics, appears ...