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Sven Birkerts
Portrait of Sven Birkerts

Sven Birkerts is coeditor of AGNI. He is the author of ten 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), Then, Again: The Art of Time in the Memoir (Graywolf, 2008), The Other Walk (Graywolf, 2011), and Changing the Subject: Art and Attention in the Internet Age (Graywolf, 2015). 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).

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, Mt. Holyoke College, and the graduate Bennington Writing Seminars, which he directed for ten years. He lives in Arlington, Massachusetts. (updated 10/2022)

AGNI has published the following work:

Editor’s Note
Surely Some Revelation
AGNI 97 Reading Publishing Writing Process
Essays
Reflections at 50
AGNI 96 Print Only
Editor’s Note
Interiors
AGNI 95 Print Only
Editor’s Note
The Fitful Tracing of a Portal
AGNI 93 Print Only
Editor’s Note
From the Interregnum
AGNI 92 Print Only
Editor’s Note
I Write This as the Amazon Burns
AGNI 90 Home Loss Nature
Blog
The Writer’s Image
Online 2019 Arts Mysteries Reading
Editor’s Note
Losing, Finding, Improvising
AGNI 89 Print Only
Editor’s Note
“Caress the Detail”: Thoughts on Repair
AGNI 88 Print Only
Editor’s Note
Booze Snow Cone with Crème de Menthe
AGNI 72 Print Only
Editor’s Note
Derek Walcott at BU: A Sorting
AGNI 86 Print Only
Editor’s Note
Drowning
AGNI 84 Print Only
Editor’s Note
“What Next?”
AGNI 85 Print Only
Editor’s Note
It Wants to Find You
AGNI 76 Print Only
Editor’s Note
Birkerts and I
AGNI 83 Print Only
Editor’s Note
“This Just In—”: Notes from the Couch and the Writing Desk
AGNI 87 Print Only
Conversations
A Conversation with James Carroll
AGNI 40 Print Only
Essays
Biography and the Dissolving Self: A Note
AGNI 40 Print Only
Essays
Joseph Brodsky
AGNI 43 Print Only
Editor’s Note
Reading at the Limit
AGNI 60 Print Only
Editor’s Note
The Ideal Reader
AGNI 61 Print Only
Editor’s Note
The Thinker in the Garden
AGNI 65 Print Only
Editor’s Note
The Walk
AGNI 66 Print Only
Editor’s Note
In the Commissaries of Hell
AGNI 67 Print Only
Editor’s Note
The Advertent Eye
AGNI 68 Print Only
Editor’s Note
And What Is Writing
AGNI 70 Print Only
Editor’s Note
Mind’s Matter
Editor’s Note
I’ll take Hell in a Handbasket for five hundred, Alex.
AGNI 73 Print Only
Editor’s Note
The Golden Book
AGNI 74 Print Only
Editor’s Note
Notebook: Style
AGNI 77 Print Only
Editor’s Note
Semblance: Something Else Again
AGNI 78 Print Only
Editor’s Note
Ten Broad Swipes at the Problem of Structure in the Essay (and Perhaps Other Genres as Well)
AGNI 79 Print Only
Editor’s Note
The Nightcrawler, Joan Miró
AGNI 80 Print Only
Editor’s Note
The Problem of Other Minds
AGNI 81 Print Only
Editor’s Note
Double Take
AGNI 82 Print Only
Editor’s Note
Vertigo
AGNI 75 Reading Writing Process On Fiction
Editor’s Note
What Remains
Editor’s Note
The Hive Life
Editor’s Note
Finding Traction
Editor’s Note
As Above: Saul Bellow
Editor’s Note
Submission Guidelines
Editor’s Note
Noble Rot
Editor’s Note
On Becoming an Editor
Reviews
Found in the Dreamhouse
AGNI 52 Print Only
Essays
The Woman in the Garden
AGNI 35 Print Only
Essays
Reflections of a Non-Political Man
AGNI 29 and 30 Print Only
Essays
Starting
AGNI 26 Print Only
Essays
Introduction to a Special Feature: On the Experience of Reading
AGNI 22 Print Only
Essays
Notes from a Confession
AGNI 22 Print Only
Essays
James Wright’s “Hammock”: A Sounding
AGNI 21 Print Only
Essays
Last Things First: Czeslaw Milosz’s Witness of Poetry
AGNI 19 Print Only
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