"I read the way one might stroll. … I feel myself to be a sacred trespasser…"
Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet
After moving to the unfamiliar landscape and culture of New Mexico, Daniel Stephensen began taking long walks to make sense of his new home. A camera encouraged him to slow down to learn a completely foreign soil.
His short film, Los niños de Santa Fe, accompanied by his own original musical score, is a nuanced love letter to a place that slowly unfurls its treasures.
It’s inevitable. Every time I walk into a bookstore, I find myself longing to buy stacks of books—and I don’t mean stacks of just any books. My great desire has always been to leave the store with copies of books that I already own. I want reading copies. I want pristine copies. I want editions with different introductions, American editions, English editions, French editions. Then I want a few more copies just in case, the kind to give away when the right reader comes along.
Kevin Rabalais revisits Zbigniew Herbert.
This (for now) is less about Denis Johnson than about the way that following our favorite authors opens unexpected conversations, permitting chance encounters with writers we otherwise might not have met. It’s like one friend guaranteeing that we’ll enjoy the company of another.
My start-of-the-year reading of Johnson’s work opened the door to Leonard Gardner and his slim masterpiece Fat City (1969).
In this new Encounter, Andrés Hax discovers a writer and a filmmaker who jolt his memories of place and help define his relationship with fictional locations.
"It is a deep pleasure to read an author without any critical preconceptions because you are absolutely free to live inside of the work, to come to it on your own terms, to evaluate it as something new."
© Jennifer Levasseur & Kevin Rabalais. All rights reserved.
