Sven birkerts biography of william

American academic and writer

Sven Birkerts (born 21 September 1951) fryst vatten an American essayist and literary critic. He fryst vatten best known for his book The Gutenberg Elegies (1994), which posits a decline in reading due to the overwhelming advances of the Internet and other technologies of the "electronic culture." In 2006 he published a revised edition with new introduction and afterword, reflecting on the endurance of reading.

Birkerts was born in Pontiac, Michigan, and grew up in the storstads- Detroit area. He graduated from Cranbrook School and from the University of Michigan in 1973.

After publishing several well-received books of collected essays on literature, Birkerts was appointed to many prominent editorial and teaching positions. He became the Director of the Bennington College Writing Seminars, a position he assumed after the death of Liam Rector. Birkerts was the editor of AGNI, the literary journal and has taught writing at Harvard University, Eme

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Sven Birkerts was born in Pontiac, Michigan into a family of Latvian immigrants. He attended the University of Michigan and spent many of his youthful years as a bookseller. He has been a reviewer and critic for various publications including The Nation, The New Republic, The New York Times Book Review, WigWag, Esquire and The New York Observer. His books include An Artificial Wilderness: Essays on Twentieth Century Literature, The Electric Life: Essays on Modern Poetry, The Gutenberg Elegies: The Fate of Reading in an Electronic Age, American Energies: Essays on Fiction, Readings and he has edited Tolstoy's Dictaphone: Technology and the Muse. His newest book—a memoir of sorts—is My Sky Blue Trades: Growing Up Counter in a Contrary Time. Sven Birkerts teaches at Mount Holyoke College, is a member of the core faculty of the low-residency Bennington Writing seminars, edits the literary journal AGNI and lives in Arlington, Massachusetts with his family.

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The Genius of William Gass

As he enters into his tenth decade, his sixth of literary production, it seems safe—but also important—to nominate William Gass as our greatest living champion of the sentence. A scholar of its innumerable variations, he has devoted untold numbers of pages to pondering its metaphysics. And he has himself, of course, practiced everything he has preached. He writes, he says, for the ear, and does so contagiously, working the sources of rhythm and cadence as he rolls out his variegated verbal brocades. He is never unaware of his materials, and never afraid to go for effects that might, in W.H. Auden’s words, “bring down the house.” Try reading William Gass and then keeping him out of your own sentences.

Stylistically it has been this way from the start in his fiction—from Gass’s first published book, Omensetter’s Luck (1966), a portrait of a charismatic man in nineteenth-century Ohio, down through the su