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Why Have Writers Neglected Elderly Lovers?
I am sick and he is old, but a fierce affection binds us to each other and to this country house, which we will have to leave. When 21 years ago we first made our way down its sloping driveway...
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Why Look at Art When You Could Watch TV?
People talk about being “right brained” or “left brained” as if you can’t be both. Such categories, of course, are not only cognitive but cultural, the constitutive divisions of Western philosophy—mind...
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The Showgirl Who Discovered Lolita
Sixty years ago today, on November 26, 1958, Vladimir and Vera Nabokov went out to dinner at Cafe Chambord on Third Avenue at 49th Street. The other dinner guests included Walter Minton, publisher of...
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Does Art Originate From the Same Necessity That Gives Rise to Beehives?
Nature has its necessity, its direction, its force. A flower can’t suddenly stop and decide not to bloom. A child can’t have second thoughts about being born and stay inside its warm mother. And the...
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Windows to the World: At WS Merwin’s Old French Farmhouse
“There is nothing for you to say. You must First learn to listen. Because it is dead It will not come to you of itself, nor would you Of yourself master it. You must therefore Learn to be still when it...
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The Avid Reader: Helen Schulman on As I Lay Dying
The year was 1981. I was living in idyllic Ithaca, a crazy-beautiful upstate New York university town, rocky and hilly, furrowed by waterfalls and gorges, and anchored to the magnificent blue stage of...
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How to Be an African Travel Writer in Africa?
It is a question of time’s long reach. In many African countries the main period of colonization occurred between the late and mid 19th centuries, a short, far-reaching breach. The foundational...
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A Close-Reading of The Talented Mr. Ripley as Coming of Age Story
Patricia Highsmith’s The Talented Mr. Ripley was published on November 30, 1955, 63 years ago today. It is, in my opinion, the perfect winter holiday book. It’s acrobatic and addictive reading, the...
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On the Infinite Fault Lines of Contemporary Life
“A fault plane is the plane that represents the fracture surface of a fault. A fault trace or fault line is a place where the fault can be seen or mapped on the surface. A fault trace is also the line...
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Abstract Art Didn’t Begin with Picasso
Artists are storytellers. They have something to say. People often think of artists as illustrators of stories or ideas, and many of them are, but because artists are poets, their artworks are not...
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What Was Virginia Woolf Looking for in the Night Sky?
“Behind the cotton wool of daily life is hidden a pattern,” wrote Virginia Woolf. In life and literature, this was her destination: raw, unfiltered reality. It’s no wonder, then, that astronomy...
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Looking for God in the Writing of Denis Johnson
In an article titled “Bikers for Jesus,” Denis Johnson described himself flippantly as “a Christian convert, but one of the airy, sophisticated kind.” It was the sort of claim he made often, and it...
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Meet the Man Who Introduced Jacques Derrida to America
Dr. Richard Macksey’s dining room is textured with the lingering scents of dust and old leather and yesterday’s pipe smoke. It’s the first Thursday in September, and one by one, his students—a diverse...
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Poet of the Disappeared: On the Writing of Raúl Zurita
Sea of Pain is an invitation from Raúl Zurita. In 2016 at the Kochi-Muziris Biennale in Kerala, India, in a dilapidated colonial warehouse, Zurita created an installation of seawater and poetry, and...
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Of Willa Cather’s Lasting Love For the Frontier
This year marks the 100th anniversary of the publication of My Ántonia. Today, the Willa Cather Foundation is celebrating the author’s 145th birthday with a community open house and cake at the...
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On James Baldwin’s Dispatches from the Heart of the Civil Rights Movement
In part one of “Beyond Simplicity,” (which originally appeared in Brick 101), Ed Pavlić explored the complex motivations that brought James Baldwin back from France to the US and sent him on a tour of...
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Imagining a Black, Queer Aboriginal Melbourne
This essay originally appears in issue 40 of The Lifted Brow, a special edition “created entirely and independently by a First Nations collective of editors, curators, academics, designers, and...
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In Praise of the Long and Complicated Sentence
The style guides say: keep your sentences short. Write cleanly, cut as many words as you can, and don’t overburden your reader’s short-term memory by delaying the arrival of the full stop. But...
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Rewriting Trauma: The Business of Storytelling in the Age of the Algorithm
The following is adapted from a lecture originally given at the World Conference of Screenwriters in Berlin, in October of this year. * I was recently invited to give the keynote address to the World...
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Oliverio Girondo’s Absurd Cosmopolitan World
Things are never only what they seem in Oliverio Girondo’s early poems, and in fact they often merely imitate reality. In “Rio de Janeiro,” the city “is a cardboard imitation of a porphyry city,” and...
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