Over the last three years, many of the news items I’ve recorded in paint have seemed funny, surreal, or even unbelievable—but some were disturbingly sad: for example, Kids-in-Cages. Because of resolute news people and a few inquiring members of Congress, it was exposed that our government was imprisoning hundreds, even thousands, of families at . . .
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I love my nonno very much. That’s Italian for “grandpa.” I love Italian too. One of my two languages that, for reasons beyond my control, is my only language: the one, the survivor. Anyway, I love Italian. And I’m getting to know it, and to know it I write it: I carefully . . .
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These uncertain, unprecedented times have given us all pause, so to speak. Even those of us who have the immense privilege of secure jobs, the relative safety of seclusion, and work that is, as we have recently learned to call it, non-essential, still have reason to wonder whether anything will ever again . . .
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(Photo by Anne Ehrhart) Never saw the like of it before:four sets of railroad tracks on one side,four lanes of traffic on another,parking lots on either side, barelyspace for bushes and a patch of grass,an early April day, sun shining—and there, beside the fir tree, a fox.There, another. Smaller. And another!Three, four, . . .
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Natasha — my name, which is not from my only language, the one, the survivor, is also not from the other, the aborted, the rejected— becomes N-A-T-A-S-H-A. Hell to write, especially because of that “SH” that to me sounds like it should be “SCI.” But I’ve accepted things as they are: for . . .
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For years I earned my living as an illustrator, my work appeared in print with a story attached, words; so when I stopped illustrating and returned to fine art, it was natural for me to include words in that as well. But nothing political. Until Trump got elected. At that point I . . .
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A review of We Were Promised Spotlights by Lindsay Sproul (Penguin Random House) Lindsay Sproul’s debut novel, We Were Promised Spotlights, will no doubt resonate with readers who are especially interested in LGBT coming-of-age stories, but what makes this book stand out is the quality of the prose, the well-drawn, complex characters, and the compelling . . .
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(Photo: “Caged,” by Achraf Baznani, used by courtesy of the artist) Diary with Broken Lines to Wile Away Viral Time Monday 6 April Is Sharif Elmusa afraid of Covid-19?Yes, Sharif Elmusa is afraid of Covid-19(apologies to Charles Simic for the paraphrase,hope he’s in good form). Life and death are not the glasshalf full . . .
Read MorePoet Desirée Alvarez (Volume 61, Issue 1) reads from her latest book, Raft of Flame (OmniDawn).
Read MoreEditor’s note: What follows is a three-day selection from an ongoing project, one which has—in near simultaneity—been translated into several languages and published around the world. As Gonçalo M. Tavares’s English translator Daniel Hahn has remarked, the result looks “far outward as much as inward, so the diary ends up being global . . .
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