Everyone, even the most tell-all writer, withholds something in the interests of protecting herself or others, but my interest in my own stories has always been to use them to illustrate larger stories about the culture . . .
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Is it not in the warm chambers of the past, after all, that we are immortal, invincible, and alive?
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Poet Kimiko Hahn discusses her new collection, FOREIGN BODIES.
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“Everything in my life is basically a scribble.”
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“I wanted every reader to see her or his own story.”
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Melanie Abrams discusses her debut novel, PLAYING, and a forthcoming novel, MEADOWLARK.
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The brain in the jar wants out, you know. It just can’t do anything about it.
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Can one love one’s country into a better version of itself? And can that love better the self?
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Donald believes the earth is round, he does, and that it spins on its axis and revolves around the sun. No doubt. He just prefers the old rectangular tales with their sharp borders and precipitous ends.
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Today I write on the longest day of the year, the summer solstice. As someone who has been influenced by not a few pagan practitioners and Wiccan wonder workers, along with more conventional priests and monks of various religious varieties, I am attuned to the turning of our planet in the cosmos. Striving to be […]
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“It” does not even “come” in the traditional sense. These primal, atavistic qualities are with us all the time, lying dormant until the right situation coaxes them forth.
...morePsychoanalyst and writer Adam Phillips talks with his editor, Ileene Smith, about unforbidden pleasures and his new book of the same title at FSG’s Works in Progress. Phillips respectfully declines Freud’s narrow of view of the origins of desire, pleasure, and inhibition, and hopes for new illumination. He ends by saying, “So I think that […]
...moreCampbell McGrath talks about his new collection, XX: Poems For The Twentieth Century, capitalism, history, and what it might mean to write a wordless poem.
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Our insane system: does it feel too risky to bring this up in the mainstream press?
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I am good at making people feel safe.
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Author and agent Bill Clegg talks about his new novel, Did You Ever Have A Family, grief in fiction and in life, and why there is no finish line except the final finish line.
...moreI’ve always been writing about the same thing: that truth and stories are inextricably linked, that stories are truer than fact because they are fact organized into meaning. If we don’t tell our stories, if we don’t remember, and if we don’t leave stories, then our world becomes sick and we become sick. Only the […]
...moreCritical theorist Mari Ruti writes about how humans may not be built for happiness: “If all of that isn’t enough to make you suspicious of the cultural injunction to be happy, consider this basic psychoanalytic insight: Human beings may not be designed for happy, balanced lives. The irony of happiness is that it’s precisely when […]
...moreEllen Ullman’s throbbing new novel, By Blood, tells the story of an eavesdropping neighbor with a compulsive attention to sound.
...more(Writing wretched verse so you don’t have to since 1995) In Hiroshima In Hiroshima, after the bomb the sick lay close as lovers, the strong put tags on those who stood no chance later to be flayed by fire
...moreA review of Vienna Triangle, by Brenda Webster Vienna Triangle is much more than the construction of a fiction around historical facts and figures.
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