Reading: Dies: A Sentence
A reading of Vanessa Place's Dies: A Sentence, certainly one of the great literary events of the past decade.
Raziel Reid: from When Everything Feels Like the Movies
1. Preproduction I would’ve gone down for a pair of Louboutins (I think they call that “head over heels”), but the closest I ever got was kissing the feet of celebrities in tabloid magazines. My mother’s closet was basically a sex shop. It was full of costumes and shoes, which she wore to work. That’s...
Felix Bernstein: Breakfast at Tiffany’s; Dinner at Goldsmith’s
Breakfast at Tiffany’s; Dinner at Goldsmith’s: On Daniel's Canon and Kenneth's Memes by Felix Bernstein In his article Cheap Signaling, professor Daniel Tiffany argues that there is something new amongst a freshly grouped constellation of poets. That something new (to be brief: culture jamming) is not far from what I have written about in my...
Ben Rawluk: Superheart
SUPERHEART Ben Rawluk This is about saving the world. Steel Fury leans forward in the passenger seat of the Foxcar, stainless steel helmet knocking against the windshield, Foxboy grinding his teeth behind the wheel, suspension so terrible you really feel it when the Foxcar hits a crack in the pavement, or a pile of trash,...
QVC 2
Earlier this winter Ben Fama invited several authors to contribute to the folio that follows, titled QVC. Participants were asked to write ~150 words about something they’d recently bought, bought into, invested themselves in, or otherwise consumed, a brief and thoughtful look into their relationship to an item or subject they wished to discuss. The inaugural...
Bukem Reitmayer in Conversation with Kevin Barry
Bukem Reitmayer (BR): You started writing about Limerick, Dublin, Cork city, eventually you made your own city, Bohane, and then you began to write about County Sligo – what’s next? Where do you go from here? You mentioned before that you are getting closer and closer to home – what do you mean by that? Kevin...
Mira Mattar: Perhaps a finch, a finch perhaps
Its head is ordinary. Its head is inquisitive. Its head is ordinary and inquisitive. Its head is ordinary but inquisitive. It is a head that is ordinary and inquisitive. It is a head that is ordinary but inquisitive. Can what is ordinary not also be inquisitive? Ordinariness does not preclude inquisitiveness. It is ordinary because...
Martha Baillie: The Search for Heinrich Schlögel – A Novel Sent in Fragments
Bitten by doubt, I pick at my prose. I stop writing. Though the novel is nearly done, a crucial element is missing. To prevent myself from destroying the manuscript, why not turn it into something other? Could it “coexist” in a second form? In the novel the year is 1974 and a teenaged German, named...
Marianne Ackerman on Donna Tartt: The Goldfinch
Twenty pages into The Goldfinch (Little Brown and Company, 2013) I started having chest pains, accompanied by shortness of breath. My wrist tingled. I figured it must be something I ate, or maybe early signs of a heart attack. But the most obvious source of discomfort lay close at hand, no more than twelve, maybe...
Jonathan Ball: Misreading Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Raven”
Whenever I teach "The Raven," a number of students assume a particular misreading: that the narrator has murdered Lenore, and that the raven of the poem symbolizes his guilty conscience. I'm always shocked by how naturally this misreading comes. Students seem to realize it's not sustainable as a "reasonable" interpretation, but prefer it to more...
La Théorie, un dimanche: we want to hear from you
In celebration of Quebec's diverse writing by women, we're putting a celebratory folio together for the fall that captures the impact that La Théorie, un dimanche (remue-ménage, 1988) and its recent translation Theory, A Sunday (Belladonna*, 2013) has had since its initial publication in the eighties. We invite you to submit 300-800* words in any...
Sina Queyras: The M Word
WHAT WE WON'T TALK ABOUT WHEN WE TALK ABOUT MOTHERING When I first saw a Tweet announcing the impending publication of The M Word I Tweeted in response that if the book makes me laugh more than sigh, I would love it. The Tweet was half provocation, half earnest, but as I waded into the...
