Sven Birkerts

Sven Birkerts (author page at Amazon) has been editor of AGNI since July 2002. He is the author of eight books: An Artificial Wilderness: Essays on 20th Century Literature (William Morrow), The Electric Life: Essays on Modern Poetry (William Morrow), American Energies: Essays on Fiction (William Morrow), The Gutenberg Elegies: The Fate of Reading in an Electronic Age (Faber & Faber), Readings (Graywolf), My Sky Blue Trades: Growing Up Counter in a Contrary Time (Viking, 2002), Reading Life (Graywolf, 2007), and Then, Again: The Art of Time in the Memoir (Graywolf, 2008). He has edited Tolstoy’s Dictaphone: Writers and the Muse (Graywolf) as well as Writing Well (with Donald Hall) and The Evolving Canon (Allyn & Bacon). His new book, The Other Walk, will be published in 2011.

He has received grants from the Lila Wallace-Reader’s Digest Foundation and the Guggenheim Foundation. He was winner of the Citation for Excellence in Reviewing from the National Book Critics Circle in 1985 and the Spielvogel-Diamonstein Award from PEN for the best book of essays in 1990. Birkerts has reviewed regularly for The New York Times Book Review, The New Republic, Esquire, The Washington Post, The Atlantic, Mirabella, Parnassus, The Yale Review, and other publications. He has taught writing at Harvard University, Emerson College, Amherst College, and Mt. Holyoke College, and is director of the graduate Bennington Writing Seminars. He lives in Arlington, Massachusetts, with his wife and two children. (updated 11/2010)

AGNI has published the following work by Sven Birkerts:

•The Advertent Eye
•And What Is Writing
•An Appreciation of Charles Bardes, M.D.
•As Above: Saul Bellow
•Biography and the Dissolving Self: A Note
•Bits
•Booze Snow Cone with Crème de Menthe
•Chekhov’s Fancy
•Chekhov’s Fancy
•In the Commissaries of Hell
•A Conversation with James Carroll
•A Conversation with Saul Bellow
•The Decline of the West & Other Animadversions
•Finding Traction
•Found in the Dreamhouse
•The Golden Book
•The Hive Life
•The Ideal Reader
•I’ll take Hell in a Handbasket for five hundred, Alex.
•Introduction to a Special Feature: On the Experience of Reading
•James Wright’s “Hammock”: A Sounding
•Joseph Brodsky
•Last Things First: Czeslaw Milosz’s Witness of Poetry
•Mind’s Matter
•Noble Rot
•Notes from a Confession
•On Becoming an Editor
•Reading at the Limit
•Reflections of a Non-Political Man
•Scratch
•Stage 2
•Starting
•Submission Guidelines
•The Thinker in the Garden
•Vertigo
•The Walk
•What Remains
•The Woman in the Garden