Guernica
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Who Cares Who Wrote Shakespeare?
At Guernica, Tana Wojczuk shares her personal story of seeing Shakespeare performed as a child and her eventual realization and understanding of Shakespeare’s humor, and defends the importance of seeing Shakespeare’s works on stage: This is one of the reasons it…
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The Universal Truth of the Body
At Guernica, Jennifer Sears talks to Mary Gaitskill about her recent novel, The Mare, emotional accessibility, love that crosses social norms, and the challenges—technical and empathic—of developing a characters very different from herself. Gaitksill credits the body, her own, for…
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Coming of Age in New York City
Over at Guernica, Kyle Lucia Wu talks with Stephanie Danler about her new novel, Sweetbitter, and how Danler’s personal experiences as a young woman living in New York City and working in a restaurant overlap with those of her protagonist:…
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Tennis as Art Form
Understanding tennis as aesthetic phenomenon involves returning to that word Wallace insists on using in his discussion of Federer: beauty. At Guernica, Greg Chase discusses the new collection of David Foster Wallace’s essays on tennis, String Theory, in which tennis…
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This Week in Short Fiction
This was the trouble with bringing a gun to work: you couldn’t stop thinking about it. This understatement comes from “Rutting Season,” a story by Mandeliene Smith in this week’s new issue of Guernica that flirts with every office worker’s…
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This Week in Short Fiction
The grief story: it’s sympathetic, moving, and even cathartic when done well. It’s also a trap for clichés, overwrought metaphors, sticky sentimentality, and hyperbole. Add that to the ubiquity of the grief story, and you get a subject that can…
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The Body Does Not Lie
For Guernica, Jen Karetnick interviews dancer Natica Angilly about dance poetry, its meaning, and how she became involved in it: Natural, developed, and studied efforts to share our singular and group experience are worth pursuing in all expressive languages, especially dance…
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Burned In The Melting Pot
At Guernica, Sara Nović condemns the linguistic dismissal of American Sign Language and questions the overwhelming primacy of spoken English. She attributes this erasure of Deaf culture not only to widespread misconceptions about disability, but also to the insatiable American desire…
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How to Write Emoji
For Guernica, Elisa Gabbert explores the incorporation of emoji into language and fiction. Gabbert also addresses the idea of diachronic translations, i.e. translating fiction from one historical era to another, and what place hyper-specific contemporary technology like emoji have in…
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A Narrative to Relate To
At Guernica, Elizabeth Karp-Evans interviews John Freeman, the founder of the literary journal Freeman’s, on freelancing, his goals for Freeman’s, and cultivating narratives: Narratives are individual; after that they become myths because you need to abstract a narrative to make it…
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Children in Numbers
At Guernica, poet Susan Briante shares a personal, lyric essay on motherhood in a system—our own—undergirded by the valuation of children. “Dusk traffics light, the light scans her” becomes “The market scans my child, calculates pecuniary value.”
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The New Women’s Revolution
Last December, a group of feminist activists from all over the world met and discussed a new women’s solidarity movement. The full discussion, with an introduction by Eve Ensler, is up now at Guernica. Now is the time for women to…