The Latest:
"Isabella Rossellini is a dark-haired porcelain beauty with a stare that's as desperate as it is ravenous. She is the ultimate seductress, victim and martyr to Dennis Hopper's brilliant, masochistic sicko. I could watch the two of them for hours, whatever that says about my psychological health." By Jessica Machado
"There's a hint of trepidation in his voice that reveals his youth when says, 'In your opinion, did your husband have any cause to damage the vehicle? That is, do you think the accident was premeditated?'" By Alissa Nielsen
"The importance of Boetti's work--with its emphasis on playfulness, connections, chance, and the rest--assumes the greatest thrust when considering his complete ouvre. His influence surfaces repeatedly in the work of his contemporaries, and is now evident in a number of current Italian painters and sculptors." By Elizabeth Lopeman
In the latest Late Night Review, Emily K. Bright reviews Zubair Ahmed's debut poetry collection, City of Rivers (McSweeney's Poetry Series). "This is a collection rooted in family and ghosts," Bright writes.
"Winterson does not appear to be suggesting that Bible stories equal fairytales. Instead, she's moving in the margins, figuring out if she can create a new text for her life while still holding on to the old one." By Emily Burns Morgan
"He was convinced that a decadent skintight sci-fi future was within his grasp, if he could maintain the fantasy long enough to reach Boston and get it all down on paper. He'd write a demented diary disguised as a flock of comic books that would warp culture while his PSA-launched acting career paid for a beach house and a satellite headquarters. Basically, young Jason Squamata had taken just enough drugs to go nuts." By Jason Squamata
"What if the social details and contexts that lead us to believe we 'know' a character are misleading, and are therefore the first things that should be stripped from a narrative?" On Renata Adler's Speedboat and Pitch Dark. By Dan DeWeese
"If I hear about a lineman or a welder, say, who loves opera, I'm immediately interested in exploring that person--which is quite different from explaining that person." Mary Rechner chats with Nancy Zafris, author of the new story collection, The Home Jar.
Late Night Library has posted their latest podcast: Lucas Bernhardt and Sarah Seybold discuss Shara Lessley's debut poetry collection, Two-Headed Nightingale (New Issues Poetry & Prose).
Reviews of Viegener's 2500 Random Things About Me Too, Gass's Middle C, and Wayne's The Love Song of Jonny Valentine.
"Multiple storylines and plots, concerns on the personal, cultural, municipal, and global level: we weigh and handle these things with ease now, even more so when guided by a writer of Kushner's caliber." Patrick McGinty on Rachel Kushner's The Flamethrowers and whether James Wood has acclimated.
Was it a good game? Did both teams play hard? Take our simple quiz and discover the truth.
"The story of the Merry Pranksters, at least in Wolfe's telling of it, is less about drugs than you think, and more about the nature of leadership." By Emily Burns Morgan
"I cannot tell you how many times I danced to 'Cuts You Up' between the years of 1997 and 2000. To say that it was my jam would be an understatement; it was my solo performance in the spooky pageant that was my pseudo-goth-dance-club life." By Jessica Machado
Reviews, reflections, conversations.
How did the media get to be like this? Why do we objectify the environment? The questions of the mythic characters are familiar because they're our own. We as readers should know the answers, but like the characters, we haven't 'got outside the circle of [our] mistakes.' more
Like all pointillism, no matter how fine the points, gaps remain. This is not realism, but not wholly abstract. It is an attempt that reveals all failures of articulation. And those are, finally, the meaning of the text. more
By Emily Burns Morgan
As time goes on, the young Bechdel trusts less and less that what she observes is truth. To 'save time,' she invents a symbol to stand in for the phrase 'I think.' It's not long before entire entries are covered over with this symbol...more
By Alan Limnis
There are 99 exercises in the original collection, and ten more that Queneau suggested as substitutions or published elsewhere. The exercises read like flashes of light that illuminate for a moment the linguistic contraptions and conventions under the hood of any number of...more
By Dan DeWeese
Banville's interest is in digging into a moment--an image, a feeling, a posture, a mood, or all of those things fused in a moment of resonant perception--and capturing it so well that we simply hunger for the next moment. His...more
By Emily Burns Morgan
The word Thompson chooses to describe the Angels' underlying condition is perhaps ironic, given that it is a central term in the Marxist philosophy they abhor: alienation...more
Starved for the intellectual creativity that seemed to have ended the day I gave birth, I signed up for an art journalism class. And then one night that February, I read 'Al Roosten.' The story is not just an exercise in empathy, satire, language, or social commentary. Somehow, all these elements result in a feeling of recognition, which begets a budding kindness. more
Instead of conforming to a "publisher's readymade packaging plans," Castro continues to bravely tell her stories. She writes, "I don't fit. I don't fit, and that's okay, and that's where I write from: that jagged, smashed place of edges and fragments and grief, of feeling lost, of perilous freedom. I extract small fragile bones from the sand, dust them off with my brush, and build strange, urgent new structures." more
By Patrick McGinty
I realize that 'to segue from one scene to the next' sounds like a terribly generic description of how all narrative art functions, but few writers segue as quickly as Homes. Just as you're connecting...more
By Emily Burns Morgan
Shakespeare and Austen are, for Woolf, examples of writers who have achieved this equilibrium. Charlotte Bronte is her example of one who has not. While I understand what Woolf means, I can't help disagreeing...more
By Rachel Greben
Millet's interests here are the subterranean currents of love and attachment, and she is an expert at depicting the interplay of memory and shifting time in the real world. She conveys how learning to live with the dead is where an increasing...more
By Patrick McGinty
Great works of art bear more resemblance than disparity. We...more
At first, Building Stories seems a clunky title for such a gorgeous, complex package of booklets, books, pamphlets, posters, and even a game board by comic artist Chris Ware. The title uses building as a gerund, an action to undertake--no wonder the box sat unopened in our hallway for a month, a gift from me to my artist husband. It looked like a project, an obligation, and my husband...more
One of the pleasures unique to comics as a form is their potential to inject dramatic tension into the very act of negotiating the page. Many authors pass on this opportunity--they keep things strictly left to right, top down--but Chris Ware exploits it, and in Building Stories, his new assemblage (or whatever one calls a box that holds fourteen different books or booklets in various sizes and formats, together totaling 260 pages), he again proves himself a master of design...more
By Emily Burns Morgan
The chronicler, Iris, acknowledges her own slack characterization of the men in her drama, but seems to feel this is not much of a problem. The men are not really the point, after all. The point is what happened to Iris and Laura...more
By Chelsea Bieker
If there's one thing I love, it's a bunch of good, winding, layered, place-driven stories. I want to experience the desperation of history in short fiction, the calling of a cursed land reverberating through each character...more
By Patrick McGinty
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By Emily Burns Morgan
I met John Irving in college when he came to visit as part of my school’s reading series. About a week before the event, I received an invitation to a small...more
Crafted, designed, choreographed, performed.
Art form of the twentieth century.
Stolen licks and backstage passes.
Investigations and lived experience.
Language, pushed.
Invented worlds, invented selves.
Reports from court and field.