Category: News

A big thank you to Sara Lippmann and Danielle Harms for making Eckleburg's 15th Anniversary celebration at AWP 2025 in Los Angeles a very special success. Also a big shout out to 7.13 Books, Rare Bird Books, Leland Cheuk and Tyson Cornell for their talented readers. Truly enjoyed. Last but ... Read More

DJ Mylia at Attack of the Book People III AWP 2025, LA Eckleburg 7.13 Books Rare Bird Books Hotel Per La Mezzanine West 649 S. Olive Street Los Angeles, CA 90014 Featuring Marilee Albert Rae Cline Rosa Kwon Easton Danielle Harms Chip Jacobs Sara Lippmann Sameer Pandya Jim Ruland Hugh ... Read More

Join 7.13 Books, Rare Bird Books and Eckleburg for Attack of the Book People III at AWP 2025 in LA on Friday, March 28th, 6 to 10 pm. Food, drinks, DJ and a fantastic lineup of readers including Marilee Albert, Rae Cline, Rosa Kwon Easton, Danielle Harms, Sara Lippman, Chip Jacobs, Sameer Pandya, Jim Ruland and Hugh Sheehy. Find copies of Eckleburg No. 22 at the ... Read More

Join 7.13 Books, Rare Bird Books and Eckleburg for Attack of the Book People III at AWP 2025 in LA on Friday, March 28th, 6 to 10 pm. Food, drinks, DJ and a fantastic lineup of readers including Marilee Albert, Rae Cline, Rosa Kwon Easton, Danielle Harms, Sara Lippman, Chip Jacobs, Sameer ... Read More

You’d think ‘bur’ would have two r’s, the hooks on the letter resembling those on the prickles. Our dogs do not love the cocklebur’s almond-sized fruit, especially Fern, whose fur is the consistency of bad wig hair. The burs cling to Fern like Velcro, using her beard, her tail, her ... Read More

If, one day while watching TV on the couch, your wife offhandedly mentions she went to college with the tall, dark-haired guy in the Bud Light commercial, under nocircumstances should you… A) Suspect that “went to college with” is code for “once had amazing sex with” (Good luck with that…); ... Read More

Since its inception, vampire fiction has incurred a great deal of criticism. Like any category of genre fiction, vampire fiction has been derided as not “real” literature and nothing more than sensational pulp. The genre has been characterized as immoral and rife with sexual eroticism, containing nothing of literary merit ... Read More

A simple element that serves as a basis for expanded narrative; or, less strictly, a conventional situation, device, interest, or incident. In music and art, the term is used in various other senses, as for a recurring melodic phrase, a prevailing idea or design, or a subject for detailed sculptural ... Read More

The most insistent and vigorous historicism through most of the twentieth century has been Marxism, based on the world of Karl Marx (1818-1883). Marxist criticism, like other historical critical methods in the nineteenth century, treated literature as a passive product of the culture, specifically of the economic aspect, and, therefore, ... Read More

The mind-body problem is the "problem of describing the relation between our mental lives and the physical aspects of our brains, bodies, and environments." (The Norton Introduction to Philosophy) ... Read More

In Book X of his Republic, Plato may have given us the first volley of detailed and lengthy literary criticism. The dialog between Socrates and two of his associates shows the participants of this discussion concluding that art must play a limited and very strict role in the perfect Greek ... Read More

Metaphysics is the "part of philosophy concerned with the nature and structure of reality. Contrasted with, e.g., epistemology, the part of philosophy concerned with our knowledge of reality." (The Norton Introduction to Philosophy) ... Read More

An analogy identifying one object with another and ascribing to the first object one or more of the qualities of the second.... The tenor is the idea being expressed or the subject of the comparison; the vehicle is the image by which this idea is conveyed or the subject communicated ... Read More

Marty realized that he had never once purchased a box of Corn Flakes, not ever in his life. The thought was very frightening. He wondered how he could've stepped on a Corn Flake in his own apartment without ever having purchased a box of Corn Flakes before.... Michael J. Coene's ... Read More

A work of fiction, a major concern of which is the nature of fiction itself. (Handbook to Literature) ... Read More

Meta-ethics is the part of philosophy concerned with the metaphysics and epistemology of ethics and with the linguistic function of ethical language. Meta-ethics asks, for example, whether ethical statements aim to describe a domain of ethical facts, and if so, whether those facts obtain objectively, independently of our beliefs about ... Read More

It turns out that left brain regions are biased to talk more to each other, while right brain regions talk more evenly with both hemispheres ... Read More

The scientific study of language. It is concerned with the description, comparison, or history of languages. Linguistics studies phonology (speech sounds), morphology (the history of word forms), semantics (the meaning of words), and syntax (the relationships among elementary components of larger units). Although once considered a division of philology, linguistics ... Read More

An international tendency in the graphic and literary arts, especially painting and prose fiction. The frame or surface of the work may be conventionally realistic, but contrasting elements--such as the supernatural, myth, dream, fantasy--invade the realism and change the whole basis of the art. (A Handbook to Literature) ... Read More

A philosophical movement that primarily emphasizes empirical sensory observation as the means of evaluating claims about matters of fact. It uses rigorous methods of logical analysis to clarify the meaning of statements. Among its major advocates are Rudolf Carnap, A. J. Ayer, and Ludwig Wittgenstein. (Handbook to Literature) ... Read More

A key term in deconstruction; it argues that there is a persistent but morbid centering of Logos (meaning thought, truth, law, reason, logic, word, and the Word) in Western thought since Plato ... Read More

A broad term referring to the recognition of a reality different from appearance. (A Handbook to Literature) ... Read More

"First theorized by [Dick] Higgins, intermedia and the Fluxus works to which the term initially referred stand among the earliest major attempts at a self-consciously post-modern art practice, a concerted and yet still tentative turn away from modernism long before the 1970s, when the word “postmodernism” (that initial emphatic hyphen ... Read More

Language as expressing absence. You use a word to represent an absent object but you cannot make it present. The word, then, like the unconscious desire, is something that cannot be fulfilled. Language, reaching out with one word after the other, striving for but never reaching its object, is the ... Read More

A type or category of works sharing particular formal or textual features and conventions; especially used to refer to the largest categories for classifying literature—fiction, poetry, drama, and nonfiction. A smaller division within a genre is usually known as a subgenre, such as gothic fiction or epic poetry. (Norton) ... Read More

The term hybrid usually describes offspring of "widely different parents, e.g. different varieties or species." In literature and the arts, "hybrid" is the term applied to a blending of forms, creating a single form with attributes of two or more original forms ... Read More

A term applied to criticism that emphasized the form of the artwork, with "form" variously construed to mean generic form, type, verbal form, grammatical and syntactical form, rhetorical form, or verse form. (A Handbook to Literature) ... Read More

"Fiction is any narrative, especially in prose, about invented or imagined characters and action. Today, we tend to divide it into [four] major subgenres based on length—the [short short story], short story, novella, and novel. Older, originally oral forms of short fiction include the fable, legend, parable, and tale. Works ... Read More

A brief tale told to point a moral. The characters are frequently animals, but people and inanimate objects are sometimes central ... Read More

A character that serves as a contrast to another. (Handbook to Literature) ... Read More

Fallacies are defects that weaken arguments. By learning to look for them in your own and others’ writing, you can strengthen your ability to evaluate the arguments you make, read, and hear. It is important to realize two things about fallacies: first, fallacious arguments are very, very common and can ... Read More

Like Marxist criticism, feminist criticism derives from firm political and ideological commitments and insists that literature both reflects and influences human behavior in the larger world. Feminist criticism often, too, has practiced and political aims. Strongly conscious that most of recorded history has given grossly disproportionate attention to the interest, ... Read More

A story relating mysterious pranks and adventures of spirits who manifest themselves in the form of diminutive human beings ... Read More