Find our Quarterly features, along with other releases, here.
Quarterly II–Winter 2023
- On Births and Prophecies
- Descartes, Thoreau, and The Brass Tacks, Louis Gallo
- Some Notes on Modernism and Creative Writing, Michael Nath
- An Ordinary Mind on an Ordinary Day, D. W. White
Quarterly I–Fall 2022
- On Ghosts and Memories
- Haunted by the Book, Jessica Denzer
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On Births and Prophecies
Next month is the one-year anniversary of L’Esprit, conceived (of) in a Parisian bar hard up against the Seine (I think it was Pub Saint-Michel) in November and born online, as so much is these days, in February. It’s been an incredible year, and when we overuse excited here and on social media, it’s for good reason. To go from…
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Descartes, Thoreau, and The Brass Tacks
As I entertained these two aforementioned thoughts this morning, which have stuck with me since my undergraduate days and which I had always found unrelatable, it occurred to me that Thoreau and Descartes had after all pursued the same, identical target—getting down to the brass tacks. That cliché does not quite encapsulate the urge to…
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Some Notes on Modernism and Creative Writing
So as a teacher of both modernism and creative writing, I would like to consider the following: 1) the practical training that the creative-writing student may acquire from experience of the modernist novel; 2) the modification, or refutation, of what may have become creative-writing doctrine by examples drawn from modernism; 3) some ways in which…
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An Ordinary Mind on an Ordinary Day
As one would expect for a book regularly placed atop the “greatest of all time” lists, there are nearly as many avenues to traipse down in discussing Ulysses’ importance, accomplishments, and legacy as there are people who’ve (actually) read it. In fact, the number of versions of the very opening sentence of this very essay,…
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On Ghosts and Memories
Today marks Armistice Day, 104 years since the cessation of fighting on the Western Front. The First World War, among the most cataclysmic and shocking events in human history, left profound scars on the society it left behind.
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Haunted by the Book: On the Grief of Writer’s Block
In her preface to Grief Lessons, Anne Carson’s translation of four plays by Euripides, Carson asks, “Why does tragedy exist?” She answers (of course; if Carson knows anything, she knows that if you ask a question, you must answer it. Akin, I suppose, to Chekov’s gun). “Because you are full of rage,” she writes, “Why are…
L'Esprit Literary Review 