COLUMBUS CAN BITE IT

In dishonor of Columbus Day, here's an essay by Paul Metcalf that we're reading in my nonfiction workshop tonight. I'm pairing it with a Sherman Alexie piece, "Captivity," that I didn't scan for here, but you can read both in The Next American Essay edited by John D'Agata (Graywolf Press.)

Or was he—for all the mysteries, the obfuscations, the clouds of black ink that, like the squid, he oozed out around the facts of his life—simply put, an outrageous, wholesale liar?

Metcalf finds him uncannily, literally Quixotic. If only Columbus had merely been jousting at windmills rather than chopping off Haitian people's hands for fun.

Read: "...and nobody objected"