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What’s an Autodidact?

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The journalist and biographer Jason McBride and I have some confusion about how we first met—definitely before we were in Germany together for a symposium. The marathon reading of Kathy Acker’s Blood and Guts in High School we both took part in? The Poetry Project at St. Mark’s Church in-the-Bowery? KGB Bar in New York’s […]

Oh, Mom

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JEANETTE PAUL WORE a point-hemmed black smock top and black stretch pants. She clickety-clicked auburn-painted nails on the fake stick shift. She recognized her beast of an emotion through the behavior of other drivers. After getting on the New Jersey Turnpike, she was thrown into a nervous rage by the flashy lane-changing of drug dealers […]

“I don’t know what thinking is except imagining stories.”

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The following interview, recorded for the One Grand Books podcast, Shelf Life, has been edited for concision and clarity. You can listen to the podcast here. Is there a more primal terror than a mother’s fear of losing a child? Helen Phillips, one of our greatest speculative writers, explored that terrain brilliantly in her last […]

The Real Fiction is Life: An Interview with James Purdy

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I was just coming off a long and feverish James Purdy binge in 1986 when his latest book, In the Hollow of His Hand, was published. It seemed the ideal opportunity to catch up with one of America’s most eccentric and compulsive writers–the subject of a cult that kept his name alive through more than […]

Sonnet Some Months Later

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Hurrying through the summer sun on an empty stomachHaving returned to the chilly vigor noThe dizzying thrill of health I’m looking for begonias to clipPropagate in water by my bedroom windowThe perversion of dangling roots tangled naked under glassPale appendages, gummy with adolescenceAn article I’m reading online refers to the begonia’s blooms as blousyAnd top […]

Everyone’s Vegan Brother

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Everyone’s vegan brother is out on a run. Since giving up animal products, the boys aren’t interested in our touch anymore. They changed their diets in a statement on the abhorrence of violence, but besides that, they long to slough off their weighted, temporal layers and get back to the etheric realm. Carnal things bind […]

The pleasures of identity

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Blake Smith is one of the premier public intellectuals in America. Even if that title had the same meaning or prestige today as it did in the twentieth century, his work on Substack as well as at Tablet magazine, where he is a contributing writer, would still be right up there: from Susan Sontag’s fiction […]

The Wall Against Death

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The late Victor Heringer authored the following crônica, a literary hybrid form of personal essay and cultural criticism popular in Brazil, four years before his death in 2018. Here it is available in English for the first time, translated by James Young. 1. The poet Fabiano Calixto recently launched his new collection here in São […]

The Great Escape

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In Woody Allen’s 1985 movie, The Purple Rose of Cairo, a character steps out of the silver screen-era movie in which he’s appearing, and enters the real world. The line between art and real life is blurred. Fantasy has invaded real life. Something similar is afoot in Thomas Allen’s series, Pulp Fiction, currently on show […]

When Lucy Sante left her “pathetic ex-husband.”

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The critic and writer Lucy Sante likes to describe her pre-transition self as her “pathetic ex-husband.” The jibe is cute, but also sincere. “Luc was miserable,” Ms. Sante said, impishly “deadnaming” herself. “Before my transition I was cripplingly shy. Now I’m ready to talk to anyone.” She gestured around her well-worn home in Kingston, N.Y., […]