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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 […]

Youth, Interrupted

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Richard Haines was five when he began drawing. Gardens, mostly, and wedding dresses. “The gay gene activated,” he says. “All the other kids were drawing World War II bombers on their notebooks. On mine were roses and gowns.” All gay boys have some version of this story, but the droll portrait of the young kid […]