The Big Cats, Part V
On crime and punishment and missing out on parties
The virus is born and already dead, a script / for another life’s dis-ease. ...
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The Big Cats, Part IV
On Joe Exotic and Bill Gates
Tiger catches / Joe Exotic by the toe. He won’t run, / let him go. My mother said Bill Gates / is going to pick the very last one....
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The Goths & Other Stories
I
In the winter of 476 A.D. the Ostrogoths, hungry and exhausted from wandering for months through barren hills along the confines of the Byzantine Empire, wrote to Emperor Zeno in Constantinople requesting permission to enter the walled city of Epidaurum, and just kinda crash and charge their phones.
“My ...
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The Big Cats, Part III
On fever dreams and wounds to lick
A wounded animal conceals itself
to hide from death and to seek it....
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The Big Cats, Part II
On sleeping dangers, grocery runs, and hiding out in the wilderness
Last night I dreamed there was a tiger sleeping / in the bosom of the family, the same light canary / color as the dog. ...
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The Big Cats, Part I
On tigers, Richard Brautigan, and six feet of distance
In the Bronx the tigers have come down / with a dry cough and febrile dreams...
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Troilus and Cressida and a Diseased Body Politic
Reading Shakespeare in a time of plague
We are perennially curious about what Shakespeare can teach us about our own world, hoping to find instruction and solace in his plays, poems, and exemplary turns of phrase.
Recently, this curiosity has produced a score of tweets and articles speculating about Shakespeare’s productivity during periods when the plague ravaged London, ...
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Hope, Revolution, and Survival
An interview with Morgan Parker
Masha Shollar [MS]: You’ve said that you trick yourself into writing by making yourself laugh. This collection is so intense and not one I would automatically think of as humorous, even though poems like “Matt” and “Brooklyn” for instance are, in ways, very funny. But they still had these dark ...
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The World Is Absolutely Full of Wonder
An interview with Mary Ruefle
In
Dunce, Mary Ruefle
examines death, endings, and our relationship to the everyday objects and
rituals that remind us, even while they provide comfort and solace, of the
fundamental frailty and uncertainty of life. We spoke recently by phone (the
“Contact” section of Ruefle’s website states, wonderfully, that she does not
own a computer and that ...
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Donald Trump’s Former Book Agent Comes Clean
UTA’s Byrd Leavell calls Caroline Calloway “unwell” and regrets his association with the President
Leavell
is a literary agent, currently at United Talent Agency (UTA), one of
Hollywood’s most powerful agencies, representing artists and other
professionals in the entertainment industry. Based in Beverly Hills, it has
divisions focused on film, television, digital, video games, and music, in
addition to books. As the agency’s mission statement puts it, “We help ...
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Elegies for Lost Children
An Interview With Valeria Luiselli
Eventually, the narrator’s own children go missing, culminating in a 20-page single sentence climax that breaks every convention, and that the reader is unable to look away from. On top of this wide range of themes, Luiselli also creates a novel-within-a-novel – a book called “Elegies for Lost Children” that ...
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Pay Attention to the Language Itself
An interview with Lydia Davis
-- “The
Fly,” Lydia Davis
A classic short story -- yes, short story -- from the writer whom the Los Angeles Times Book Review has called “one of the quiet giants in the world of American fiction.” In Essays One, the reader is treated to a compilation of Davis’s commentaries, explorations, and ...
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