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Accentuate the Positive

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I’m preparing for a trip, trying to hold onto the why of going. Staring at our dogs like I’ll never see them again. Creating a watering schedule for friends I’ve tricked into keeping our tomato plants alive. Stress full. So, I momentarily withdraw, to appreciate the privilege of being able to go where I want, […]

Dacha Dreaming

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If you’ve read or seen Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard, you will be familiar with the quintessentially Russian concept of the dacha. But it’s not just a cottage, or even a weekend retreat–it’s a space for summer living that has played a critical role in the development of Moscow and St. Petersburg, offering an escape to […]

The Waiting Room

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In a waiting room a man pays close attention to a pot-bellied man and his waistcoat in this excerpt from Yesterday, the first novel by the great avant-garde Chilean writer Juan Emar (who died in 1964), now finally published in English.  And we headed off to the waiting room in Chasuble Square.  The following dialogue, […]

Russell Banks: Where I Write

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A 200-year old desk made for opium smoking serves as the author’s amuensis I spend six months a year in an old house in the Adirondack wilderness of northern New York, where my writing space is a renovated sugar shack, built in 1914 for boiling maple sap into syrup. The other six months, November to […]

Wind in the Woods

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The wind blows in, bringing signs of rain.The woods darken,rustle, then settle back into silence. Woods shrouded and dim, as if a place to be,as if the center of all the things of the world.In its shadowed hush, memory flares. Here are the changes of the ages, its continuation,and the impermanence of all that live […]

Under the Skin

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In fairy tales, people are turned into inanimate objects against their will, magicked into statues, or put to sleep for a hundred years, until set free by a prince’s kiss. The performance artist and sculptor Miles Greenberg wills himself into states of suspended time, feats of endurance that test his body, pushing against his physical […]

I Wanted to Make a Difference

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I didn’t want to be raisedby a sad mother.I didn’t want her brotherto have died in World War II.It’s hard to change history.Even God can’t change history.But with one trick, I will.Watch me. It’s 1912. I’ve gone back in time. Adolf Hitler has just been rejectedfrom the Viennese Academy of Fine Arts.I speak perfect German.I […]

August

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In August, all of the pharmacies in New York ran out of Adderall. No one could say why exactly. A supply-chain breakdown. A fraught relationship with Russia. A shipping container filled with Estonian girls. In the absence of Adderall, all of the girls in my class gained weight. The libraries went empty. We all cried […]