In between dodging Barcelona’s many dogs and smokers and readers, staring up at the city’s majestic patterned facades, and inhaling its lingering scent of sugar and baking bread, we’ve been journeying through some of its recent literature.
Car Wreck Outside the Dinner Party: Poetry by Michael Martin
The Readers of Barcelona
New Work: Poetry by Reggie Scott Young
Nature rarer uses yellow: Snapshots from Antelope Canyon
A Novel to Take Me Home Again
New Work: A Poem by Eloise Stephensen
The Refugees: Summer Before the Dark
They don’t look like what we now think of as refugees—sitting at waterfront cafés over schnapps and shrimp, in suits, ties and summer frocks—but many of them have no place to go.
Volker Weidermann paints the desperate jollity in his slim, beautiful narrative of the time, Summer Before the Dark. Centering on the friendship of Zweig and Roth, this micro-history vividly captures the disbelief, the terror, the excitement and the denial within which many of Europe’s Jewish elites waited.
Reading Around the World: Nepal
Memorable Mothers in Literature
How to Read and Why
(Re)Discovery: The Power of the Dog by Thomas Savage
Every serious reader knows that she will eventually get around to Middlemarch and Moby-Dick and The Magic Mountain. We spend much of our reading lives working toward such classics. We often save them in hope that they will one day save us. Such books come with so much expectation—not to mention an array of preconceived notions—that we sometimes convince ourselves that we’ve read them before we ever turn the first page.
Coffee Break: Review on the Go, Someone
There should be a retroactive book-of-the-year award, some prize or label that acknowledges that a novel exceeds everything you read in the year of its publication, even if you missed it in its first twelve months of life. Still, I wonder, how did I miss it? Why wasn’t everyone talking about this book?
Always Astonished
The Comforting Allure of Biography
New Work: Photography
It’s by no means a matter of shame, and I can’t remember why I ever felt guilty for thinking it, but no painting or symphony has ever moved me as much as great photography.
The work of Gerda Taro, Robert Capa, Margaret Bourke-White, Walker Evans, Willy Ronis, James Nachtwey, Peter Turnley and Sebastião Salgado (to name a few) inspired me, in late November of 2015, to start carrying a camera nearly everywhere I go. The following photographs are among the images I have made in the past five months during my time in Louisiana and Australia.
In Memory of Jim Harrison
Happy Birthday, Milan Kundera
“I read a book one day, and my whole life was changed.”
That moment, as described in Orhan Pamuk's The New Life, came for me during my first year of university. In southern California while on spring break, conversation from the next room grew louder. Demands rang out to pass the bottle and shuffle and deal the cards. Yet I wanted only to plunge deeper into The Unbearable Lightness of Being.
