The Best Short Story I Read in a Lit Mag This Week: “The Matchmaker” by Karen Palmer
In “The Matchmaker” (James Franco Review), Karen Palmer stays tight to her characters’ moment-by-moment experiences, which helps the potentially polarizing events of the story elude simple definitions. What’s revealed is the tragedy of a mental institution unable to adequately serve the population it’s responsible for. In the opening few
A Recommendation
Just west of Houston, before you reach Texas’ most remarkable stretch of nothing, there’s a crumbling Latin diner I take my kid brother on Fridays. It is refreshingly un-Yelpable. The family’s owned it forever. They’re almost native in their darkness, and when I order two beers, they’ve pitched us
Review: ROOMS FOR RENT IN THE BURNING CITY by Brandon Courtney
Rooms for Rent in the Burning City Brandon Courtney Spark Wheel Press, 2015 74 pp, $12 Buy paperback In the days before Spotify and iTunes, rock bands faced a challenge known as the “sophomore album slump.” A new band typically had had a few years to compose and then
Woolf at the Table: Good Dinner, Good Talk
I have always been enchanted by Virginia Woolf and—being an avid cook and food writer myself—by gastronomic references in literature, both fiction and nonfiction. So when I learned about a book about the eating habits of the Bloomsbury set, of which Woolf was a member, I took notice. The
It Never Rains on National Day: an interview with writer Jeremy Tiang
Jeremy Tiang is a fiction writer, playwright, and translator from Singapore. His short story collection It Never Rains on National Day was published by Epigram Books in 2015, and is available at Epigram Books’ website. He lives in Brooklyn and was recently featured in the Singapore Writers Festival. We caught
Mirrored Crisis: What Jeffrey Eugenides’s MIDDLESEX can show us about today’s refugee crisis
We’ve been here before. The scenes we’ve seen and read about in the refugee crisis that has overwhelmed Eastern and Western Europe—Alan Kurdi cradled by the Turkish officer, people bearing their possessions on their backs held back by border police, and the drowned misery of the camps in Lesvos—have
INFINITE JEST as Performance Art
I was at Punta della Dogana in Venice when I first saw Ryan Trecartin’s Center Jenny. The movie was projected on the wall and brooded over Lizzie Fitch’s sculptures: lawn chairs and picnic benches chained to golf course-quality grass like a scary garden party. The film itself follows a
“Unexpected Brightness”: An Interview with Elaine Sexton
Elaine Sexton’s poems are active, nimble, curious—they often seem to be trying to solve a problem or puzzle out the right words to describe our too-often wordless emotions. No wonder her first book is called Sleuth. Elaine’s other books include Causeway and, most recently, Prospect/Refuge. She teaches poetry at
Round-Up: The New Round-Down
News moves fast, and so much can happen in seven days. That’s why we’re switching up the format of our weekly Round-Down series. Instead of concentrating on one topic at length, we’ll be giving you small synopses of the biggest literary headlines from the previous week. Let’s get things
Armchair Traveling through History: The Orphan Trains in Literature
Between 1854 and 1929, around 200,000 homeless, abandoned, and orphaned American children were sent by train, mostly from New York City, to new homes, mostly in the Midwestern U.S. Later in the twentieth century and early in the twenty-first, in our contemporary versions of the Orphan Trains, planes from