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The Climate Change in Me (4)

December 17, 2021 - By Giacomo Sartori

(Part Three)

In me also exists—as within any other citizen of a country where capitalism is unchallenged—a consumer self. This self for years now buys almost exclusively organic food, not only because he is careful not to poison himself any more that he has to, but also because he believes this is one way to stand up for the environment. He thinks that organic farming doesn’t plague and decimate farmlands and countrysides the way conventional farming does, and that, if it has now become a major force in both the countries where he lives, it’s also thanks to him, or at least to people like him, who for years have bought organic produce, even if it costs more. And if there is a way to combat...

The Beers Before New Year's

December 16, 2021 - By By Marsha Bryant

‘Twas the midst of December: there came forth a cry
From us beer drinkers wond’ring which brews we shall buy
For festivities, feasting, for sitting by fires.
It’s the holidays! Taste all the good that transpires.
‘Tis the time to be stocking your holiday shelf
With the richly full-flavored beers. (Move over, elf!)

First Diwali and Hanukkah offered their light,
And soon Christmas and Kwanzaa make winter nights bright.
O what to my wandering tastebuds appears--
A bodacious selection of holiday beers!
Before dinner, or after, or for a night cap,
Here are beers that will warm you from all o’er the map.

From England, from Iceland in courses they came,
And I savored the labels and called...

10 Questions for Virginia Konchan

December 14, 2021 - By Edward Clifford

My first real job: barmaid.
I stood: I stared. I poured
cabernet: I dried expensive
wine glasses with a chamois cloth
—from "Psalm," Volume 61, Issue 3 (Fall 2021)

Tell us about one of the first pieces you wrote.
I made my first chapbook when I was five, with colored construction paper and yarn: a short allegorical story called “A Magical Christmas” about a young girl who goes Christmas shopping with her grandmother and who manages to keep the gift she chooses for her a secret until Christmas Day. Then I gave the chapbook to my grandmother for Christmas, a nested narrative. There were many plot points that didn’t cohere, but she loved it. That experience enabled me to internalize a reader.

The Challenge of Book History

December 11, 2021 - By Tabish Khair

A Review of Simon Frost’s Reading, Wanting, and Broken Economics: A Twenty-First-Century Study of Readers and Bookshops in Southampton around 1900 (State University of New York Press, 2021).

Studies in the field of book history hold a perverse fascination for me. I can never approach them solely as an academic, for the novelist in me begins to chirp in too. This is inevitable. As M. M. Bakhtin stressed, the novel is essentially chirographic, and, despite the side alleys of serialisation, one can argue that the novel owes its current dominance inevitably to the coming of the mass-produced and mass-marketed book. On the other hand, as a...

10 Questions for Carolyn Kuebler

December 9, 2021 - By Edward Clifford

Look, I'm alive. And this park, Wright Park it's called—a scrappy woodland just a half mile down the road from my home—is alive too, living and dying at once, whether I'm there to see it or not.
—from "Wildflower Season," Volume 62, Issue 3 (Fall 2021)

Tell us about one of the first pieces you wrote.
I have boxes full of notebooks of various kinds—diaries with a tiny lock and key, black-and-white speckled Mead notebooks, plaid clothbound books with too-tight bindings, and sleek Moleskines. These are full of barely legible writing that has always felt like a lifeline to me, the only way to make any sense of the overwhelming chaos of just living and being and the relentless passage of time. They are...