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Interview with Aleksandar Brezar and Enis Čišić, Part Two

October 19, 2016 - By Jim Hicks

Between Realism and Fantasy

(Read Part One here.)

JH: The next obvious subject is to talk about process, and how this comic came about. From an idea to an object that exists in the world, there’s a hell of a lot of work. So tell us about that. One of the things people who don’t know much about it don’t know is just how much work it is to make comics.

EČ: It took us what, six months?

AB: No, more than six months. Between nine months and a year.

EČ: A long, long process...

Interview with Aleksandar Brezar and Enis Čišić, Part Three

October 19, 2016 - By Jim Hicks

Alternative Realities

(Read Part One and Two here.)

JH: One of the things we’ve done in the Massachusetts Review blog—because we thought we needed to—is book reviews of other work that pretends to come out this period and this history. In particular, two novels were very successful in the US: Téa Obreht’s The Tiger’s Wife and Sara Nović’s Girl at War. About the reviews we did, well, I’ll give you just the title of the one for The Tiger’s...

10 Questions for Amy Gordon

October 18, 2016 - By Amal Zaman and Danielle Brown

A story my father likes to tell
on late fall evenings. His brown,
Jewish, thumbtack eyes pin you
with the details. The german countryside. A simple inn.
- from "What He Saw" which appears in our Spring 2016 Issue (Volume 57 Issue 1).

Tell us about one of the first pieces you’ve written.

One of the first pieces I wrote was when I was a senior in high school and I often stayed up at night and wandered around (I was a terrible insomniac) and I experienced a sort of mystical vision. I tried to write a sonnet about it. I have never written anything like it since then.

What writer(s) or works have...

Think Twice, It's Alright

October 14, 2016 - By Michael Thurston

Look, I was surprised by it, too. Indeed, my reaction on seeing the Guardian’s live update at 7:00 on Thursday morning was to post on Facebook: “Dylan?! WTF?!” Soon my friends, as they woke up and logged on, were posting their own responses, ranging from “The times they are a-changin’” to “There must be some kind of way out of here.” Me? “No direction home, like a rollin’ stone.” Dylan was never the person I thought would, or should, win the Nobel Prize for Literature. All this month, I was hoping, like I hope every October, that the prize would go to a non-white writer from the global south. All this month, I was thinking, like I think every October, that most of the best writing I know of these days is in...

10 Questions for Akil Kumarasamy

October 11, 2016 - By Amal Zaman and Danielle Brown

Laalini, the woman I married, recited for me three lines of poetry about this world of dew and confessed her love for Issa, and before I learned he was a poet, I thought he was an old lover, and the jealousy and the relief I felt then left me walking the city in a trance as if I had almost lost what was irretrievable, dear as an arm. - from " Meditations" which appears in our Spring 2016 Issue (Volume 57, Issue 1).

Tell us about one of the first pieces you’ve written

When I first started writing fiction, I wrote a story about an elephant killing a tourist in India and later as retribution, the elephant...