In June of this year, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles fired its chief curator of 22 years, Paul Schimmel. Its new director, the famous New York gallery owner Jeffrey Deitch, said he would take over that role. A month later and a few thousand miles east, in Oxford, Mississippi, the founding editor-in-chief [...]
While many universities are beefing up their online course offerings, those of us who had memorable college experiences may console ourselves with one thought: the college will still be there, for anyone who wants to take classes in real time with real professors and fellow students in the same room. It may be a small [...]
When you think of slackers, Malcolm Gladwell is probably not the first person to come to mind. He’s an enormously successful author who became a staff writer at the New Yorker when he was just 33. He’s at the apex of New York’s professional class, which has about as many slackers as Minnesota has surfers. [...]
The summer issue of Contrary Magazine features poet Anne Barngrover, who holds an MFA from Florida State and will be a PhD candidate in Poetry at the University of Missouri this fall. “Anne Barngrover’s poems inhabit the rural south with a devout specificity to detail. It is our pleasure to share them with you…” ~ Poetry Editor [...]
Philip Roth once described his nightly routine as one involving dinner, a walk, and then reading. He said that he’d been re-reading authors he loved when he was young, and I admired him for it. But I also thought: Why would anyone want to re-read something? There’s so much one hasn’t read. Re-reading seemed not [...]
Suddenly, a Knock on the Door Etgar Keret (translated Miriam Shlesinger, Sondra Silverston and Nathan Englander) Chatto & Windus 2012 In Poetry for Supper, R.S. Thomas implied that poetry is ‘a thing that needs a window before it enters a dark room.’ Perhaps short stories – and flash fiction in particular – need readers who [...]
This story, which I wrote this morning and for which I do not expect to win any literary awards, contains 14 words that no one (except maybe Vladimir Nabokov) has used in the past 100 years. I found them in a list of “old-timey” words that should be brought back into fashion, and they really [...]
The Snow Leopard by Peter Matthiessen The Viking Press 1978 I read The Snow Leopard as my life was going a bit pear-shaped—my first full-time job in three years, which I loved, was unexpectedly ending after only a few months, though nobody could say exactly when or how; my younger sister was ill and [...]
A Vacation on the Island of Ex-Boyfriends Stacy Bierlein Elephant Rock Books 2012 Imagine you alight on the shores of your vacation destination. As you wave good-bye to the ferry, your only connection to the normal world, you unexpectedly find yourself face-to-face with all of your past lovers. Their sole purpose for being there is [...]
The Guardians: An Elegy Sarah Manguso 2012 FSG Many who read Sarah Manguso’s first memoir, The Two Kinds of Decay (2008), were in awe of the tale and its teller. At twenty-one, Manguso contracted an autoimmune blood disease that grew into nine years’ of transfusions, paralysis, and depression. It seemed the only way she could [...]
Close Quarters Amy Monticello Sweet Publications 2012 In her first book, Amy Monticello begins with a joke, the kind that families tell and retell at picnics and holidays, the kind of joke that not only entertains but becomes legend, that points to larger themes and insight. Monticello sustains this focus on story and insight throughout [...]
In 1995, when I was 19, I drove from my hometown in Illinois to Washington State, where I had a job cooking for the summer in the Cascade Mountains. I gave myself a week to get there so that I would rarely have to take an Interstate. With a battered road atlas on the passenger [...]
Ryan Smith has a degree in journalism and more than a dozen years’ experience writing for bona fide newspapers. That didn’t spare him his job, though, and like many of us with resumes replete with publications, advanced degrees, and the willingness to work for very little money, he recently found himself scrounging for editorial work. [...]
We were just 18 years old and Mimi was the first of our friends to slip to the other side – into adulthood. Mimi was getting married and she had asked me to be a bridesmaid. My lone task would be a simple one, and to which I was well suited, the bachelorette party. Eight [...]