The writer Jeanette Winterson once described books as “agents of freedom,” and that image of a book’s power has come to provide some moments of reprieve in the last few weeks as Putin has sent his troops into Ukraine. If Putin’s tactics have resembled those of Hitler, using a Russian-speaking enclave of Ukraine as a […]
The Vital Touch
One hundred years ago, with a bleak and bitter wind blowing as his ship entered the bay, an itinerant writer from the coal mining heartland of England landed on the island of Sardinia. Impoverished, maladied, and depleted by war and pandemic, the island was still decades from becoming a jet set destination. Food and fuel […]
Pushkin in the Boiler
“What he’d carried in his bag was more dangerous than a bomb, more hazardous than a moneyed landowner, and he’d had no idea how to deal with it.”
Waiting
We all find ourselves waiting in a myriad of ways almost every day, sometimes several times a day. I am the most impatient person I know. Shooting people while they waited, became a decades long project, fascinated in watching others spend their time doing nothing or something, seeing how gestures, body language, led to images […]
Where I Wrote… Moon Witch, Spider King
For the last three years and change, Marlon James has been writing steadily and regularly at Camp Cedar Pines, a writer’s retreat created by novelist John Wray in his Brooklyn brownstone. “At any given point there are five authors working here, including at one time two finalists for the National Book award in rooms facing […]
Akira Hirata
On a playscape outside the Oyster Ridge Public Library, a woman in a dinosaur t-shirt approached Akira Hirata about recording his three-year-old daughter’s voice. Although the woman was slight and boyish, Akira noticed a respectable snugness where the dinosaur’s face stretched over her breasts. Akira’s fingers moved unconsciously to fix his hair. The woman handed […]
What a tiny pea tells us about African American history
In the American South, along a 200-mile stretch of the coast of South Carolina and Georgia, there is a scar on the Earth’s surface so big it can be seen from outer space. Starting in the seventeenth century, more than 40,000 acres of land were cleared here and 780 miles of canals dug, all to […]
When Vivian met Lore met Nora
“People will go on writing good books as long as human beings occupy the planet and are conscious, but it’s not an event any more. When we were young it was an event.”
Tidal Patterns
The Non-Place The non-place is unlovely. Atop the mattress factory, I found a door on a smokestack. It opened into a warm closet and I slipped inside. Molly with her face all red held the baby. Our brother Ivan took notes. Along the sea wall stood a coil of rope as high as my head. […]
A Bite of Rockfish
“You’re eating rockfish right now, but what you’re tasting isn’t rockfish. The taste on the tip of your tongue is the taste of the universe.”
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