It is not always easy to tell, in the work of John Berger, where fiction meets autobiography — or, for that matter, essay and meditation.
MORE MATTER: Essays and Criticism, by John Updike.
The essay prompted considerable debate and was included in Mr. Gioia's 1992 collection of essays, "Can Poetry Matter?: Essays on Poetry and American Culture," which was selected by Publishers Weekly as one of its Best Books of 1992 and became a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle award.
In terms of writing it doesn't matter — fiction, essays, narrative nonfiction, screenplays (he's written an amazing one for "CivilWarLand," which Ben Stiller optioned more than 15 years ago and is till trying to get made).
"Why Translation Matters" (an extended essay, really) is one of the first texts in Yale's energetic new series, Why X Matters, each volume of which is to present a "concise argument for the continuing relevance of an important person or idea".
But, Locke himself refers to the subjects they discussed that fateful evening as 'very remote' from the matters of the Essay.
Take a step out of that dream world where getting 71 in an essay matters to anyone and you can get a bucket of beers for £10.
No matter – Chandler's essay is still superb, and I don't want to argue with him about Hammett basing his fiction on reality.
In a way that's hard to imagine in our fragmented media age, his essay mattered: it played an outsized role in catalyzing the nuclear-freeze movement, which in turn played an outsized role in making nuclear war unthinkable.
