Category Archives: News

The Moyea Valley Fire, Denis Johnson

When, in the summer of 1920, Robert Grainier came back from a job in the Robinson Gorge with four hundred dollars in his pocket, riding in a passenger car as far as Coeur d’Alene, Idaho, and then in a wagon up the Panhandle, a fire was consuming the Moyea Valley. He rode through a steadily […]

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Paul Bowles, Inside the cafés and salons of Morocco

“Worlds of Tangier,” Published in Holiday, March 1958 In the summer of 1931, Gertrude Stein invited me to stay a fortnight in her house at Bilignin, in southern France, where she always spent the warm months of the year. At the beginning of the second week she asked me where I intended to go when […]

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Binyavanga Wainaina, Some scenes from a Kenyan childhood

It is a Sunday. I am nine. We are sitting on a patch of some tough nylon grass next to the veranda. Mum has brought out her Ugandan mats. I am reading a new book. I am reading a new book every day now. This book is about a flamingo woman; she is a secretary, […]

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Philip Roth in New York

A vigorous pleasure: four very strong and mutually contradictory readings of Philip Roth’s recent Nemesis at the Yivo Institute, followed by a few minutes with the author (link here). [jwplayer config=”Video Only” mediaid=”2194″ height=”400″] Roth’s coda to the events at Yivo was a time-stopping reading of the last four pages of Nemesis, in which the […]

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Zagajewski on Rilke

Out recently: the paperback edition of Edward Snow’s translations of Rilke, with Adam Zagajewski’s capacious introduction. From which: Maybe it’s more interesting to see Rilke’s work as not as virginal, not as ethereal, as it seems to many readers. After all, like the majority of literary modernists, he is an antimodern; one of the main […]

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Poets in Their Youth

Scenes from newly published memoirs by Durs Grünbein (The Vocation of Poetry) and Les Murray (Killing the Black Dog). Durs Grünbein: “For me it all started with a noise—a not at all harmless noise—more of an acoustic irritation. The strange thing about it was its suddenness and the rift it left in my overall perception. […]

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Two Poets from Adam Zagajewski: Tomasz Rozycki and Marie Lundquist

On Monday, March 28, Tomasz Różycki and Marie Lundquist will read with Adam Zagajewski in the Tenth Muse Series at the 92nd Street Y in New York.  Here is a poem from each. CINNAMON AND CLOVES by Tomasz Różycki, translated by Mira Rosenthal I’m lying here with a hole in my head through which the […]

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This Week: April Bernard on Elizabeth Bishop

April Bernard offers this beautiful reading of Elizabeth Bishop’s “The Map” in a review of new editions of Bishop’s poems, prose, and editorial correspondence. Land lies in water; it is shadowed green. Shadows, or are they shallows, at its edges showing the line of long sea-weeded ledges where weeds hang to the simple blue from […]

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“Phi,” by Melissa Green

I could not find the Golden Bowl, the Golden Bough, a golden wedding band I never saw the golden lights corona’d in my children’s hair, for they were not. I longed to love and wept out a sea’s worth as decades ticked by, ticked by and I began to slice my heart and feed upon […]

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Paul Muldoon and Wayside Shrines!

Paul Muldoon and his new band, Wayside Shrines, will be appearing at The Stone in New York City on February 16. Just in time for Valentine’s Day, we offer some of Muldoon’s song lyrics with exalted reflections on love. THE ADULT THING IT WAS OBVIOUS NEWT AND RUDY WERE HAVING AN AFFAIR JFK WAS DOING […]

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