A Review of After World by Debbie Urbanski (Simon & Schuster, 2023) Artificial Intelligence is the narrator is Debbie Urbanski’s novel After World—a relevant theme since the debut of Chat GPT in late 2022 and the broadening discourse about AI in writing. Urbanski’s consideration of AI predates the controversies over students using . . .
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Much of what was happening around the world remained unknown to most people. The vast majority didn’t know anything about it or couldn’t decode the signs of this revolution. In the big cites, the fuses had been lit, and we could smell the sparks coming from Vietnam, the Prague Spring, Bolivia, Chicago, . . .
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Forough Hantooshzadeh Rakhshan believed no sins existed, unless a woman had committed one. That may be why her life had always progressed like a chain of dominos, invariably promising complete destruction with the fall of the first piece, after which she would have to build everything anew. Ever since childhood and into . . .
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Editor’s note: On November 15, 2023, Norman Solomon delivered the Second Annual Ellsberg Lecture at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, a lecture series hosted by University’s Ellsberg Initiative for Peace and Democracy. The text below is based on a transcript of his remarks, excerpted and edited for publication. In 2019, Ellsberg made UMass . . .
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Stephen O’Connor’s short story collection, Northwest of Boston, was published in January 2023 from Loom Press. Penguin Random House published Salar Abdoh’s novel, A Nearby Country Called Love, in November 2023. Abdoh was featured in our Winter 2021 issue. Debbie Urbanski’s After World is out now with Simon and Schuster. Francesca Bell’s translation of Max Sessner’s poetry collection, Whoever Drowned . . .
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After we make love, I think of the word obliterate how it means the destruction of something. I think hostile hands are everywhere. We should probably nail it all shut. I don’t have time to think back to the fourteenth century because too much is tangling roots this day and the day after.—from . . .
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Translated from Italian by Jenny McPhee The day after the events in Munich, the Catholic Press Association called me to say it was conducting an inquiry regarding the massacre and asked if I would express my opinion. I refused to respond. I told them that I never respond to inquiries.[*] Pronouncing a . . .
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Photo by Giacomo Sartori: North Algeria, a typical Mediterranean sequence. Light-colored bumps caused by erosion, red soil on the hillsides, dark soil in the hollows. (Earth Primer #8) The hues we have in our heads for landscapes often spring forth from the colors of their soils. Left uncultivated, vegetation would cover such . . .
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Dung: Photo from Pixabay.com (Earth Primer #7) From its earliest days, one of the agriculture’s main problems has been giving back to the earth the organic matter that it steals from it. Harvesting seeds, tubers, and fruit (e.g., wheat grain, potatoes, and apples), we take organic matter away from the fields. And in . . .
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Dear friend, Thank you for inviting me to speak on the panel you are hosting. I am writing to you because it enables me to find words better than speaking into a Zoom group. I write from Bremen, Germany, as a retired white professor who is no longer in any political or . . .
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