Nonfiction on Art and Literature

Michael Hofmann is an acclaimed poet, translator, and critic. He has published six books of poetry and has translated more than sixty books from the German, including Gottfried Benn's Impromptus: Selected Poems and Some Prose, as well as works by Ernst Jünger, Franz Kafka, and Joseph Roth. His criticism appears regularly in the London Review of Books, the New York Review of Books, and Poetry. He currently teaches poetry and translation at the University of Florida. In the thirty essays collected in Where Have You Been?: Selected Essays (Farrar, Straus and Giroux), Hofmann brings his wit and critical mastery to a poetic, penetrating, and candid discussion of the writers and artists of the last hundred years.

Sven Birkerts is the author of nine previous books, including The Other Walk, The Art of Time in Memoir, and My Sky Blue Trades. Director of the Bennington Writing Seminars, he also edits the journal AGNI based at Boston University. In 1994, Sven Birkerts published The Gutenberg Elegies, his celebrated rallying cry to resist the oncoming digital advances, especially those that might affect the way we read literature and experience art—the very cultural activities that make us human. In Changing the Subject: Art and Attention in the Internet Age (Graywolf Press) he examines the changes that he observes in himself and others—the distraction when reading on the screen; the loss of personal agency through reliance on GPS and one-stop information resources. Birkerts examines what is lost by our wholesale acceptance of digital innovation and what is regained when we immerse ourselves in a good book. Of Birkerts, the Chicago Tribune writes, “He doesn’t care about seeming cool or sounding smart; he writes what he thinks.”