“LISTEN: MUSIC IS BORN from the human mind, but it also appears naturally, like the smell of malt, like the taste of celery. Humans desperately try to precent it from slipping through their fingers. They fasten it to the score, to instruments, to commentaries, to theory books, to records…”–from Perfect Pitch which appears in . . .
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My response to the 2016 US Presidential election was by no means unusual—shock, sadness, rage. I suspect that I was not the only woman to feel attacked, as if someone had run up behind me and slammed a baseball bat into my head. The election of President Trump felt like a sharp . . .
Read MoreOur Music Issue contributors and editors put together a Spotify Playlist:
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“Fingertips ready at the page tipwith the vigilance of a physician.An executor of Chopin herself,she knows the crests and tidesof the Revolutionary:“—from “The Page Turner” which appears in the Winter 2016 issue (Volume 57, Issue 4). Tell us about one of the first pieces you’ve written One of the first poems I ever wrote was . . .
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My dad immigrated to the U.S. from Pakistan in 1973, at the age of 17. He’d long dreamed of this country, and as a teenager in Karachi he used to ride the bus to the U.S. Embassy after school and read American books in the library there, everything from John F. Kennedy’s Profiles . . .
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The Massachusetts Review presents the latest Working Titles e-book: “TIME SERVED by Malcolm Garcia–available this week! From Time Served: I heard about Jose Chavez-Alvarez by chance, just after my journalism career crashed with the recession in 2008. I survived five rounds of layoffs at a daily newspaper before the sixth round tagged me. Out of . . .
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The Massachusetts Review presents the eight Working Titles e-book: “Chaotic Freedom” in Civil War Louisiana by Bruce Laurie–available this week! From “Chaotic Freedom” in Civil War Louisiana: This essay offers additional insight into the motivations of comparatively ordinary soldiers–two men whose Civil War stories have never been told in full. Henry S. Gere and . . .
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The Massachusetts Review presents the seventh Working Titles e-book: Ambrosia by Lee Upton–available this week! From Ambrosia: IN MY EARLY CHILDHOOD, the people I loved most in the world made sure that I saw a silver tree. I remember taking a giant breath and then swallowing the sight of that tree so that it would never . . .
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The Massachusetts Review presents the sixth Working Titles e-book:Just Another Jihadi Jane: A Novel Excerpt by Tabish Khair—available now! From Just Another Jihadi Jane: DON’T ASK ME for too many details. The devil is in the details, they say. Well, the police are there too, and the antiterror squad. There is death in the . . .
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From STRANGE MERCIES It’s terrible the way that prayer is answered. —Graham Greene, The Heart of the Matter THE MORE MAYHEW pretended to pray, the more he began to doubt the project of documentation, and yet the spectacle of what he’d already videotaped seemed fully real only now, the images wavering with unstable pixilation . . .
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