Jake says: “first time I recall wanting to die I was eight.When I tried and nearly did I really wanted to live.”—from “South Belknap”, Spring 2019 (Vol. 60, Issue 1) Tell us about one of the first pieces you wrote.If I go “deep background,” I remember trying to write a sci-fi story . . .
Read More
“It was raining, raining, raining, and I was going into the rain to meet him, no umbrella or anything, I was always losing them in bars. I was holding just a bottle of cheap cognac tight against my chest, hard to believe it said this way, but this was how I was . . .
Read More
“The old man yells stories at Cooper. ‘My buddy was deep in before he came face to face with a beaver.’ The old man says his buddy’s hands were too far into the catfish’s mouth—maybe a forty-pound fish—to protect himself, and the beaver tore his face off. Neither his buddy nor the . . .
Read More
At the Saturday market, enormous eye-bulge of skinned rabbits. My son, nine,bulges back, looking, but not.—from “Natural Selection”, Spring 2019 (Vol. 60, Issue 1) Tell us about one of the first pieces you wrote.I’ll tell you about the first two pieces I got published, in the same issue of my high school . . .
Read More
With grapefruits & apricots. Without a cat or a dog.With my father who wanted a son. With my mother who wantednothing but closed lips, nothing but nothing. With my father’s headshaking slightly. With photographs sealed in boxes in the closet.—from “Self Portrait With & Without”, Spring 2019 (Vol. 60, Issue 1) Tell . . .
Read More
Corine Tachtiris interviews Alice Guthrie, winner of the 8th Annual Jules Chametzky Prize for Translation for her translation of Atef Abu Saif’s “The Lottery“. Corine Tachtiris: I thought we could start by talking about “The Lottery.” One of the things I noticed is that there’s a balance between this really intimate voice, where you . . .
Read More
Something in the river’s vexed beyond the torqueof tide returning to the sea, wherefromthis thing must too have come, thrashing like all’sapt to meet a fate of tatters in its teeth.—from “Great White”, Spring 2019 (Vol. 60, Issue 1) Tell us about one of the first pieces you wrote.Actually, it was recently . . .
Read More
So… I got the news yesterday, while listening to my car radio, and then almost drove off the road. I immediately pulled over and checked my email: two of my friends from Hampshire College had already written, and a third would soon after. Like them, though mostly for them, I felt as . . .
Read More
We talked to Alice Guthrie, winner of the 8th Annual Jules Chametzky Prize for Translation, about translating Atef Abu Saif’s “The Lottery.” Here’s what she told us: I think what I really enjoyed about this story, and what made me want to translate it, was the way Atef paints this vivid picture of . . .
Read More
“‘If this country ever needed a Mussolini, it needs one now,’ said Senator David A. Reed of Pennsylvania, during a 1932 address to the U.S. Congress. Yet what did Reed mean when he emphasized the need for ‘a Mussolini,’ and what, in 1932, did ‘now’ mean?” —from “Mussolini Speaks: History Reviewed,” in Volume 60, . . .
Read More