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His voice a thin radio rasp, Neil Armstrong coaches Buzz Aldrin down the ladder of the Lunar Module. “It’s about a three footer,” he says of that last step to the chalky surface below. The second man on the moon leaps from the final rung and lands buoyantly.
Despite the foothold grief retains in our lives at large, its portrayals in our art are often one-size-fits-all. It isn’t simply a question of what is appropriate to grieve—the world provides no shortage of reasons for that—but whether on the television, over Facebook, or, most perplexingly, within literary fiction, we put parameters on not only…
Though Ikonomou’s characters are faced with Greece’s economic crisis, and the collection is beholden to particular circumstance, place, and time, Something Will Happen is not so particular as to be prohibitive. It’s spare. It’s intricate, full of heart and heft, and about the crisis only insofar as it enters the lives of these men and women, their dreams and thoughts, their relationships and homes.
Sometimes the things we remember most from childhood are the things that scared us. There is something everlasting about the visceral fears of childhood. However, it took a lot to scare me as a child. Even from a young age, I had a keen love of ghost stories and horror. I collected ghost story anthologies…
I’ve always had a wretched time titling my writing. It’s the last thing I do with any piece, and not without a lot of deep sighing. In panic mode I have a rattling tendency to latch on to songs; just in the short history of my posts here, I’ve borrowed titles from Tina Turner and…
The purpose of art is not to depict reality—it is to transform reality into something more interesting and meaningful. And the only way to do this is to distort, exaggerate, or in some way embellish what is there. Supernormal stimuli excites us more than reality does. Birds, mammals, fish, all human beings and at least…
You just don’t see enough literary fiction about bears. If, like me, you prefer your nutritious reading with a side of mauling, you should pick up Matthew Neil Null’s Allegheny Front. Erudite, unsentimental, and alert to the natural world, Null turns the history of West Virginia into stories that feel both authentic and mythological. I…
Tomás Q. Morín’s first book of poems, A Larger Country, won the APR/Honickman Prize and was runner-up for the PEN/Joyce Osterweil Award. It’s a collection that brings together a series of different times, places and characters (both historical and imagined) into a new world all its own, one that is both recognizable and decidedly strange….
From the closing of the Poetry Book Society to the 2016 YA Book Prize, here’s this week’s biggest literary news: The Poetry Book Society announced that it will be shutting its doors after over fifty years of service to the literary community. The PBS is widely known for supporting the sale of poetry: acting as a book club by…
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