Essay |
“The Novella: Some Thoughts About the Uncanny Genre”
“When we’ve finished reading a novella, we may be left a bit bereft, even bewildered. Yet if the novella were any longer, the plot might lose the ambiguity, the stroke of irrationality, the heightened state of tension that novellas make possible.”
Text and Image |
from Uniform
“Uniform started as an idea to catalog the different school uniforms of Nevis. It soon evolved through my desire to recognize individuality.”
Commentary |
on South To America: A Journey Below the Mason-Dixon to Understand the Soul of a Nation, nonfiction by Imani Perry
“If our understanding of the region is to change, Perry argues, we will have to take two contradictory tacks. First is to recognize the diversity of the region. But alongside that, she wants us to recognize the South’s ‘changing same’ …”
Essay |
from The Murders of Moisés Ville: The Rise and Fall of the Jerusalem of South America
“In its issue from December 9, 1894, the newspaper Ha-Tzfira noted that the collection of books being brought by Reuben Sinay had increased to 120 pudi. The ‘pood’ is a Russian unit of mass, and converting this gives us an incredible figure of two metric tons.”
Poetry |
from Leaving: A Poem from the Time of the Virus
“… nobody // themselves anymore, not a single apparition, / withdrawal after defeat // but no destination.”
Commentary |
on The Anomaly, a novel by Hervé Le Tellier, translated from the French by Adriana Hunter
“Le Tellier’s playful writing, as well as his takes on existence, second chances, and personal identity, push his ambitious narrative into realms rarely encountered in popular culture.”
Commentary |
on Every Day the River Changes: A Journey Down the Magdalena by Jordan Salama
“The dead arrived by river: people who had been murdered somewhere upstream and were ‘discarded in death, dumped into the Magdalena, and carried away by the current’ past Colombia’s riverside towns and villages …”
Commentary |
on American Bastard, a memoir by Jan Beatty
“Research shows that the separation of infants from their biological mothers can cause changes in brain chemistry and a failure to thrive. Babies born in hospitals are no longer separated from their mothers as they were in the 20th century when doctors viewed infants as blank slates who had no attachments or emotional vulnerabilities.”
Commentary |
on Everything and Less: The Novel in the Age of Amazon by Mark McGurl
“Because Amazon is concerned about customer satisfaction first and foremost, the company has reframed the novel as, McGurl writes, ‘an existential scaling device, a tool for adjusting our emotional states toward the desired end of happiness, however complex or simple a state it might be.'”
Essay |
“Robert Desnos in the Desert”
“This is impossible, but Desnos is standing on the Mexican side of the Stanton Street Bridge, facing downtown El Paso. He is waiting for me to close the distance from one side of the international border to the other.”
Essay |
“Æ, the Letter Ash”
“The æsc (ash) tree was felled for spear handles, tablets, charcoal, bedframes, wagon wheels, oars — perhaps this is why the author of the Old English “Rune Poem” in the eighth century observes that the æsc is precious, although many men attack it.“
Commentary |
on Hao: Stories by Ye Chun
“The new book deepens especially into the terrain of mothers and their offspring, and into the challenges of protecting and nurturing children in circumstances imperiled by abandonment, racism, poverty and violence.”
Commentary |
on Ghosts • City • Sea, poems by Wang Yin 王寅, translated by Andrea Lingenfelter
“… a chronicle and commitment to uninterrupted labor, a reaction to the haunted world that persists through stages: a struggle to overcome, a struggle for equilibrium and healing, and the dogged pursuit of joy.”
Commentary |
on Last Summer in the City, a novel by Gianfranco Calligarich, translated by Howard Curtis
“… ultimately a melancholy novel, but one with a peculiar brightness. It makes a retreat from the world feel charming — that there’s a way out from the stress of the world, until, alas, there isn’t.”
Commentary |
on Another World: The Transcendental Painting Group, edited by Michael Duncan
“The artists were united in their desire to depict another world, one indescribable via traditional western pictorial means. They would instead utilize form, color and distilled feeling to describe the spiritual world as they perceived it.”