Limericks for Oktoberfest Oktoberfest beckons anewWith festivities, hullabaloo.I’ll parse Märzens for youSo you’ll know what to doAt your bottle shop picking out brew. If you can’t fly to Munich, don’t worry—American brewers have scurriedTo release in due seasonThe beer lover’s reasonFor drinking outdoors before flurries. When it’s Autumn and weather behaves,Tis the . . .
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A Review of Gianfranco Calligarich’s Last Summer in the City, Transl. Howard Curtis; Foreword by André Aciman (Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 2021) Is there a more fertile experience for literary aspirants than to be poor in a great city? Every generation of young would-be novelists searches for their own version of the Lost . . .
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Aristotle imagined that red occured when “luminous transparency is covered by a thin burning smoke.” In California, in the Amazon, wherever forest fires spread, visions of a red future multiply. “With all the dust and smoke in the air, the world will begin to look different,” writes one reporter.—from “Fugitive Reds,” Volume . . .
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(Photo: A bus stop in San Juan, PR; CC BY-SA 4.0) On NPR the other day there was a story about sunny, hot, and sticky Los Angeles and the utter lack of shade trees in Watts and other Black and Latino neighborhoods in contrast to their profusion in nearby Beverly Hills and . . .
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Meanness is not the only way to access it. I grew adjacent to Christ: knew him purely by name and sight (limbs on the patibulum) The crossbar—the patibulum—is an incorrect representation.—from “A Humility Essay,” Volume 62, Issue 3 (Fall 2021) Tell us about one of the first pieces you wrote.My second-grade teacher . . .
Read MoreWatch a reading and panel discussion with Nicolette Wong, Xu Xi, Sharon Yam, Yeung Chak Yan, and Q.M. Zhang! Amidst the reshaping of Hong Kong’s social, cultural, political and ideological landscapes, how do we re-envisage a city that exists in our memories? For those who have left their hometown—or the place they . . .
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(Jules Chametzky. Photo by Ned Gray) Just a couple of days after I arrived to Amherst, Jules Chametzky called to invite me for lunch. My wife and oldest son (the youngest was born three years later) were still in New York. The following day, we met at a local restaurant. Right away, . . .
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(Jules Chametzky. Photo by Jerome Liebling, courtesy of Rachel Liebling) in honor of garlic clovesbaked wholein rosemary olive oil that eating together could bean artwhich Americans have perfected that auld lang syne could come in versions unexpected that canons are what you make of them that living in generations brings gracefulness to . . .
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(Jules Chametzky. Photo by Jerome Liebling, courtesy of Rachel Liebling) By the second half of the twentieth century, apartheid was so deeply embedded in the national culture that the divide between black and white, codified in law, was fully embraced by institutions from pulpit to prison—and nowhere more so than in colleges . . .
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(A Chametzky family photograph, Brooklyn, NY, 1942. Jules Chametzky, fourteen years old, is standing in the back row, second from the right, next to his father and behind his mother.) From “Broadening the Canon, or Talmudic Faulknerism: Reading Chametzky, Knowing Jules” (MR 44 1/2, 2003). When we met in Berlin he adopted . . .
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