Look, Stranger!

by Kenneth Ligda W.H. Auden’s Look, Stranger! (1936) is an extraordinarily transitional work. The second of Auden’s three 1930s poetry collections, it lacks both the precociously distinctive voice that launched Auden to the forefront of his generation with Poems (1930) and the embarrassment of canonized riches in Another Time (1939). Yet as a major poet’s… Continue Reading Look, Stranger!

Nostromo

by Kenneth Ligda “I’d rather have written Conrad’s Nostromo than any other novel”—F. Scott Fitzgerald.[1] “The greatest novel in English of this century”—Walter Allen.[2] “[O]ne of the finest of all English historical novels”—Terry Eagleton.[3] “It is, in my view, the masterwork of that ‘puissant rêveur,’ as Gustav[e] Kahn once called Conrad….one of the few mastering… Continue Reading Nostromo