“Caught between Sister Eustace’s fingers, my ear is close to ripping off as she drags me through the schoolhouse and toward the steps that lead to the Mother Superior’s room. This is the only part of the morning that hasn’t gone to plan. I focus on the comforting weight of the silver . . .
Read More
A Review of House Parties by Lynn Levin (Spuyten Duyvil, 2023) Lynn Levin’s debut collection of short fiction, House Parties, offers the wisdom and humor of a keen eye and a kind heart. An accomplished poet, Levin, author of five collections of her own poetry and one volume of translation, also writes beautiful prose so . . .
Read More
There is thought behind those eyes, said my headwhen it saw itself in the Polaroid held in my hand. My face was being eaten by the glow that dissolvedmy forehead into a luminous window because I was overexposed. This is no metaphor.—From “Exposure,” Volume 64, Issue 2 (Summer 2023) What writer(s) or . . .
Read More
Red and Green Tomato Plants on Train Rail, photo by Markus Spiske (Earth Primer #4) For some time now, tomatoes and cucumbers and peppers and strawberries and raspberries and other plants have been grown in tiny containers, often small plastic jars filled with peat, usually in plastic greenhouses that manage partially or fully . . .
Read More
September 26, 2023 Dear President M. Elizabeth Magill: My wife Anna Botta and I have many wonderful memories from our days as graduate students in Comparative Literature at Penn in the late eighties and early nineties. One in particular will serve to frame and reflect our complex experience this past weekend, when . . .
Read More
Author Vauhini Vara Chaya Bhuvaneswar: Tell us the journey of how you came to write the stories in this wonderful, unsettling collection. Were there some that came quickly and others that took more time? Vauhini Vara: For me, everything I write feels like a living document, up until the time it’s published in a . . .
Read More
(Photo: from the BRC photo gallery, “30 Years of Reclaiming & Correcting the Rock Aesthetic”) The Black Rock Coalition emphatically and wholeheartedly condemns Jann Wenner’s thoughtless misogynistic and racist statements in the New York Times regarding women and Black artists. While his comments were beyond reprehensible, they are no major revelation to Black artists who’ve . . .
Read More
RoutesIn Minima Moralia, Adorno reviles U.S. highways. They represent the irruption of capitalism in nature: “the more impressively smooth and broad they are, the more unrelated and violent their gleaming track appears against its wild, overgrown surroundings.” They are artificially devoid of marks—neither foot nor wheel can leave a trace on them, . . .
Read More
When Buddha said silence is an emptyspace & space is the home of the awakened mind, he hadn’t yet crossed his legs& held his spine both firm & calm in the smoke-filled avocado kitchenof my small girlhood.—from “Cuffing Season” by Lisa Fay Coutley, Volume 64, Issue 2 (Summer 2023) Tell us about one of . . .
Read More
Countryside in Algeria, photo by Giacomo Sartori (Earth Primer #3) Cultivated soil is very fragile—just a bit of water running over the surface is capable of stripping away its thin upper layers, which are the most rich and fertile. The soil is then deposited at the base of the slopes, where the . . .
Read More