Donald Mengay

I wanted to visit Easter Island since 1965, when I first read Kon Tiki  in fifth grade. Thor Heyerdahl piqued my interest, though only...

One thing you discover when you decide to revisit an author's works is, well, a lot. I got the idea recently to return to the novels of...

Does anyone read Ulysses today? That's what a friend asked a short while back, a rhetorical remark insisting, Oh god, no. Why would you...

To reverse the truism There's no place like home to something like Home is no-place is useful in privileging people and connections,...

I've been traveling lately, one of my favorite things. To pack and go; interrupt the routine; experience something new and unexpected; be...

The words alone are cloyingly sweet, two categories so multiple they're almost meaningless.  Like "god," "woman," "man," and "love," each...

This isn't a post about palm trees, parrots, or torrential rains, but it could easily involve those things. It isn't about The Tropics...

Aristotle argued that tragedy, a story ending in a death, unlike a comedy which ends in a marriage, is the more impactful of the two...

Champagne, confetti, feasts, favors, noisemakers, sparklers, fireworks, kisses, and more, including more champagne, nothing of which has...

The interesting thing about humans, especially from the perspective of a post-humanist like me, is how they work against their own...

To say "I stand for nonviolence" or "I am nonviolent" are fightin' words. Immediately after the words are uttered the devil's advocate...

Of the 1800-odd poems that Emily Dickinson penned, only ten made it into print. Melville died in obscurity in 1891, forty years after the...

Literature has been obsessed with its ability to confer immortality for millenniums. There are countless examples over time, including an...

It's one thing to turn out a novel, another to land a press to publish it, and a whole other enchilada to find a readership. For the...

In 1989 Jacques Derrida and Jean-Luc Nancy sat down for a conversation on the subject of the subject, that is the entity taken for...

Sixteen years in coming! I thought it'd never arrive. By another math it's closer to forty-five. I determined to write novels in 1978 in...

To grasp the difference between a humanist and post-humanist mindset, you only need to read a recent article by Jonathan Franzen in The...

Among the many benefits that novel-writing affords a person is an awareness that a literary work is a mirror of sorts, reflecting as much...

When I first started teaching, decades ago, I followed the convention of many of my colleagues and read in class for the story. I...

When I set out to write the novel that became The Lede to Our Undoing, I wanted to revisit the experience of falling in love with another...