Dumitru Tsepeneag began his literary career in the dissident milieu of mid 1960s Bucharest, before being forced into exile in Paris in the mid 1970s. After the 1989 Romanian Revolution, Tsepeneag returned to his native country—and he remains today one of the most important and accomplished living Romanian authors.
I recently saw an invitation to Anna Karenina’s baby shower. It was not at the library or the Hermitage. It was online at the site of Paperless Post…
The American Reader is a brand new literary journal, and runs on enthusiasm, passion, and most of all, your support. So thank you! And welcome to our home.
Pussy Riot. Feminists. Prisoners of Conscience. Russian riot grrrls. These are the signifiers, plucked from their Russian socio-political context, that have come to represent this women’s art collective in the Western media. Robbed of any historical or cultural continuity, Pussy … Continued
Publishing is the Ottoman Empire of industries—no one who’s studied it has any idea how it’s lasted as long as it has. The truth is, from a distribution point of view, the buyer side of publishing is already well within the control of a single monopoly: Amazon.
I grew up in a country where writers were like rock stars. It was the 90s: Norman Mailer-era America was over, had moved on to other things—but in France, you could still see a barely-handsome author on the banner of … Continued
For the past twenty years, Dijkstra has used her camera to investigate the construction of identity. The result is a rich collection of photographs and videos studying both the fragility and resilience of identity.
Sasha Frere-Jones, the New Yorker’s pop music critic, often sounds like a guide taking the reader on a tour of some foreign, distant land. “You could argue that Dr. Dre and Snoop were the most important pop musicians since Bob … Continued
I sat down with Vanessa Veselka in a small, yet airy, café in New York’s West Village. The dining room was buzzing with chatter and classical music, and every once in a while we had to pause in our conversation … Continued
Gutenachtgeschichte means a bedtime story and feinschmecker means gourmet
With her own Yorkshire Terrier lying beside her, my mother recounted an urban legend of an elegant North Carolinian who had her beloved terrier stuffed when it passed away, so that its stiff little body could sit forever on her Chesterfield sofa.
This rhetoric of violence (“knocked on their heels,” “crushed,” “wiped out,” “eviscerated”) muddled the distinction between mental and physical torment, while failing to do justice to actual suffering. As the careless hyperbole accumulated, it lost its force: eventually, we came to believe that the pain caused by the “Great Recession” was only metaphorical.
If the seriousness of a job is measured by the hours worked, why are some of the creative professions still not considered work fit for “an adult”?
Illustrator Daniel Horowitz has become a favorite among publishers and journals. His work has been featured everywhere from The New York Times and Random House, to GQ, The Wall Street Journal, Knopf, and now, The American Reader.
The UNYPL project hinges on the intimate connection between anonymous reader and unnoticed observer.
