Search the Site

Introduction

I’VE NEVER HAD the patience for careful, comparative analysis, so I don’t really know. Finding the word “life” sixty-one times in these 200 pages, though, strikes me as significant, and I’m relieved that “death” is mentioned only twenty. To see that “river” is used sixteen times, that “tree” or “trees” have eighty-one occurrences, and that “wind” appears twenty times might also mean something, even if one of those “winds” is a verb. Quicker than a hiccup, of course, so-called large...

Read more

Performance

By Tatiana Senkevitch

More than a century ago, in his essay “On the Anniversary Celebration of Dante,” the legendary literary critic Erich Auerbach, observed that, “Dante is far from having achieved his maximum impact even now.”[1] The Dante Project—a recent collaboration between choreographer Wayne McGregor, composer Thomas Adès, visual artist Tacita Dean, and dramaturg Uzma Hameed—demonstrates that Auerbach is still right.

poetry

Magpie

By Gavin Yuan Gao

Audio:

Donate

Help the Massachusetts Review publish ground-breaking literature and art.

Donate

Subscribe Today

for just $36/year

MR Jukebox

To celebrate the launch of our Woman:Revisited, an issue looking at womanhood and femininity 50 years after MR first published an issue on the theme, we hosted a reading with editor Shailja Patel and Zoe Tuck, and contributors Carole DeSanti and Kayhan Irani.

“We are the heirs of a legacy of creative protest [...] the teachings of Thoreau are alive today, indeed, they are more alive today than ever before.”

—REV. MARTIN LUTHER KING, JR. (MR 4.1, Autumn 1962)

From the Blog

Prize Winners

2024 Winner of the Anne Halley Poetry Prize

- By Staff

Congratulations to MICHAEL LAVERS, winner of this year's Anne Halley Poetry Prize!

Nathan McClain and Abigail Chabitnoy have selected Michael Lavers' poem "Sun, Birds, and Leaves" from MR's Summer 2023 issue (Vol. 64, Issue 2) for the prestigious prize.

MICHAEL LAVERS is the author of After Earth and The Inextinguishable, both published by the University of Tampa Press. His poems have appeared in Ploughshares, AGNI, Southwest Review, Best New Poets 2015, TriQuarterly, The Georgia Review, and elsewhere....



Reviews

Natalia Ginzburg’s Essay “The Jews” and Its Trials

- By Domenico Scarpa

Editor's note: The full version of this essay will be published in a new collection of essays: Natalia Ginzburg's Global Legacies, edited by Stiliana Milkova Rousseva and Saskia Elizabeth Ziolkowski (Palgrave Macmillan, 2024). [1]

For a long time Natalia Ginzburg avoided talking openly about her Jewish origins. She interrupted her silence, or rather, her reticence, for the first time in “The Jews” (“Gli Ebrei,” 1972), an essay published on the third page of the daily La Stampa, on September 14, 1972. Her collaboration with Turin’s newspaper had begun in December 1968.[2] Whether she...


Interviews

10 Questions for Kayhan Irani

- By Franchesca Viaud

OPENING: A pair of sheer white curtains undulate as a breeze blows. They are suspended in air, floating on their own. Behind them, pitch black. 

NARRATOR
We are here, at a criss-cross of story and memory, place and time.
We are here to witness and listen, to embrace and mend the fractures.
Why are you here?

(Four options appear in orange text. TO WITNESS; TO LISTEN; TO EMBRACE; TO MEND. Choose one to move ahead.)
—from "There Is a Portal," Volume 64, Issue 4 (Winter 2023)

Tell us about one of the first pieces you wrote.
One of the first full length plays I wrote was in the fourth grade, and it was a play about a suffragette who was organizing her friends...


Interviews

(Not Quite) 10 Questions for Francesco Pascuzzi

- By Franchesca Viaud

There was no Google where you could type in "gay liberation" or "trans" and find all there was to know. Even the term "homosexual" wasn't used, and to take back a title from a pamphlet in FUORI!, it was an "unmentionable practice." The first time I'd heard about it publicly was in November of 1975 after the murder of Pier Paolo Pasolini. News programs on TV made allusions rather than actual statements about his ascertained or presumed homosexuality. It was precisely on the occasion of the school assembly that was held after his murder that I first came out, supported by my firends in the collective.
—from "Coming Out," Volume 64, Issue 4 (Winter 2023)

Tell us about one of the first pieces you translated...


Read more on the blog

Sign up to stay in touch

Get the latest news and publications from MR delivered to your inbox.

Join the email list for our latest news