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“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., […]

As Soldiers March, Alfonso Covers the Boy’s Face with a Newspaper

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Fourteen people, most of us strangers,watch Sonya kneel by Petya shot in the middle of the street.She picks up his spectacles shining like two coins, balances them on his nose. Observe this moment—how it convulses— Snow falls and the dogs run into the streets like medics. Fourteen of us watch:Sonya kisses his forehead—her shout a […]