Category: Richard Hoffman

  • By Richard Hoffman | Friends ask me, “How was your trip to Prague?” and I tell them that Prague is as beautiful as everyone says. I’m thinking, as I say this, that sometimes, in a world with Instagram, Pinterest, Wikimedia, it becomes harder to experience a place, to have an unmediated encounter with it. I…

  • 2016 is a year that speaks for itself. It’s been a rough and tumultuous one, culminating in a divisive presidential election that has many people afraid of what’s in store for the country once the new administration takes office on January 20. When we’re in need of wisdom and guidance during troubling and unpredictable times…

  • By Richard Hoffman When an ideology is dying, its final throes include a ferocious and defiant last stand. I believe we are witnessing that right now, the last stand of a discredited idea of masculinity that was long in the making but took its most rigid and brutal form amid the atrocities of the last…

  • At the start of Love & Fury, Richard Hoffman's father tells him that his will is pretty simple. The same could not be said about their relationship. In his memoir, Hoffman writes elegiacally of his upbringing in a working-class Pennsylvania family where he would inherit the abuse, racism, sexism, and other toxic values he would come…

  • In his new memoir ‘Love & Fury,’ acclaimed poet and writer Richard Hoffman reflects on his upbringing in a post-World War II blue-collar family, coming to terms with the racism, sexism, and other toxic values he inherited. At the book’s core are the author’s questions about boyhood, fatherhood, and grandfatherhood, and about the changing meaning…