Prison Writing & Political Will
In the midst of the California prison system’s crackdown on dissent, inmates across the country lack the crucial tool: freedom of expression.
Desperate Leisure: Ten Questions with Geoffrey G. O’Brien
The poem and the book want to think about what kind of people we are on Sunday and what we’d have to do to build an article in front of that term—to be a people rather than people…
The Goldilocks VariationsFrom the Print
G enters the unoccupied cottage. Porridge, chairs, beds. Too hot, too cold, too high, too wide, too hard, too soft. Just right. G eats, breaks, crawls in. The owners return. An intruder!
Anna Craycroft: A Weekly Correspondence (8/12/13)
Consciousness itself arises, writes Mearleau-Ponty, in the realization that “I am able” meaning the realization that one can reach beyond the immediate…
Staff Picks: Max Fish, "After the Beginning"
One fine morning, I awoke to discover that, during the night, I had learned to understand the language of birds. I have listened to them ever since. They say: ‘Look at me!’ or: ‘Get out of here!’ or: ‘Let’s Fuck!’ or: ‘Help!’ or: ‘Hurrah!’ or: ‘I found a worm!’ and that’s all they say…
Anna Craycroft: A Weekly Correspondence (8/5/13)
The primary word is not a straightforward symbol for a concept but rather an image, a picture, a mental sketch of a concept, a short tale about it—indeed, a small work of art…
The Language of Displacement
Rick’s sadness belongs to Hollywood, where war is an occasion for great love and the heroism of self-sacrifice. The narrator of Seghers’ novel, by contrast, is overcome with a kind of misery that the French call a ‘cafard,’ a Godless emptiness…
Anna Craycroft: A Weekly Correspondence (7/29/2013)
In accordance with a simple, necessary, and self-conditioned law of life, the development of the child proceeds from a definite, invisible, unchangeable, implicit unity, which is in harmony with a corresponding unity in the cosmos…
Review: On Tao Lin’s "Taipei"From the Print
As an edifice built to stupefy and alienate the reader, Taipei is something to behold. It is like a hall of mirrors where the visitor’s reflection eliminates any trace of her original affect, where a smile is thrown back as an anesthetized mouth…
CastellaFrom the Print
This fridge has a powerful right to speak. That’s right. A hooligan in his past life, this refrigerator was born with an unusually powerful voice…