Genoa, July 1, 2016,
Address to the National Meeting of the Italian NGO Emergency
In a letter to his brother, the French painter Eugène Delacroix writes: “I’m working on a modern subject, the barricade. His reference is to the famous painting, Liberty Leading the People, a commemoration of the 1830 insurrection.
What would be the modern subject for a painter today, I wonder?
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"The Stewardess was out of control. She was told when to speak, what to say, what to wear, when to change it, how to stand, where to sit, and how to serve. But she decided whom to service. And she decided how. Four passengers: two men, two women. Always in the lavs, always inflight, always all the way. And once they’d landed in postcoital waters, the Stewardess laid down the rules." - from Emergency Exit, our April 2016 Working Title. Read an excerpt or buy on...
“She promises to call him later and takes off down the street on her rusting bicycle. Askander watches her until she fizzles into the mirage. Fifty kilometers north, the ground is green and irrigated well. On the western side of the river, the grasses are lively and soft compared to the gray and spiny stalks around the town. The fertility of the Euphrates is discontinuous, leprous in its pockets of lush and meager. Askander longs to swim in the North Sea. Any sea. To hold his breath and see how deep he can sink, if only to prove to himself he’s escaped the river.” —from “Amongst the Olive Groves of Mezra” which appears in the...
This is the first installment in a series of interviews with our contributors. "10 Questions" was created to give MR's readers a closer look into the professional lives of those who populate our pages.
"When I write, I am singing my Armenian womanhood to whoever might listen. I am dancing a dance about losses I am only just beginning to understand. I am repeating myself, filling my body and the page with all the same notes. Our mothers are our martyrs. What I really want...
A Review of Yoss’s Super Extra Grande, Translated by David Frye (Restless Books, 2016).
If humanity ever makes contact with extraterrestrials, what language will we use to communicate? Musical tones, as in Close Encounters of the Third Kind? English, Hindi, Spanish, or Chinese? If you’ve read the novel Super Extra Grande by Cuban science fiction writer Yoss (the pen name of José Miguel Sánchez Gómez), then you’ll know that it...
