Blog

The Songwriter as Poet. A Conversation with Phil Elverum
(Part One)

November 5, 2024 - By Jon Hoel, with Phil Elverum

Poems are songs, songs are poems. This dictum may infuriate anyone who has ever penned an editorial on Leonard Cohen’s songs or anyone who was irate when the Nobel committee declared Bob Dylan was literature. Those familiar with the history of songwriting, however, might be inclined to agree with such an equation, knowing their shared origin points.

Anyone presented with a songwriter such as Phil Elverum—who under the moniker Mount Eerie (and The Microphones before that), has been making some of the best music of the last few decades—would be compelled to do so....

Who Are Universities For?

October 25, 2024 - By Leyla Moushabeck

Around midnight on May 7, 2024, I was arrested on the UMass campus alongside over 130 students, faculty and fellow community members. Up until the moment of my arrest, I’d been sitting on the ground, singing protest songs and sharing out granola bars with friends and colleagues, a “Ceasefire Now” banner draped across our legs.

I joined the student-led protest to pressure the UMass administration to disclose and divest from companies profiting from the sale of weapons used in the US-backed Israeli war on Palestine, an act that violates both...

The Quicksands of Toyne (Working Title 9.1)

October 20, 2024 - By Written and Illustrated by Michael Dahlie

A Death in Toyne

In the summer of 1974 I watched an elderly man drag a wooden deck chair onto the beach just north of Toyne. He was from the area, I’d seen him before, so I didn’t bother to warn him that the place where he finally chose to stop and sit was near a limestone shelf that made the tidal pools dangerous. Apparently there’d long been a problem with fluvial peat mixing in the water just east of the beach, and the sand could turn almost to mud as the tide came in.

It was not until two hours later, when I was returning to the cottage I’d been renting, that I realized that I ought to have said something to the man—someone I now know to be named Timothy Llewelyn. There were nearly fifteen men standing hand in hand, forming...

October 2024 Contributor Publications

October 17, 2024 - By Staff

Tess Lewis’s translation of Lutz Seiler’s Star 111 was released by New York Review Books. Tess Lewis’ translation work was published in our Summer 2020 issue.

Yuliia Iliukha released her novel, My Women, with the help of translator, Hanna Leliv. An excerpt of this novel is featured in our Fall 2024 issue.

Run with The Wind is Yui Kajita’s latest translation work. Kajita’s translation of several  was in our Fall 2024 issue.

Jolana Insana's poetry...

Al-Aqsa Flood: Turning the World Right Side Up

October 11, 2024 - By Willow Naomi Curry

On October 7, 2023, a group of Palestinian freedom fighters from the military wing of Hamas, the de facto government of Gaza, changed the world forever. In Operation Al-Aqsa Flood, a prison break and hostage-taking mission turned into a spectacle of carnage—after an exchange of gunfire between Hamas fighters and the Israeli Occupation Forces, the IOF...