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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 hone in performance the songs that…
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 Bloomsbury Cookbook: Recipes for Life, Love,…
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 up in an email interview. Xin…
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 predecessors that we’ve forgotten, even if…
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 group of sorority sisters with psychedelic…
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 Sarah Lawrence College and New York…
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 started! The Library of Congress announced…
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 Vietnam and Korea brought escorted children…
Resolved to read more this year? These books are the best the new year has to offer. Your Heart is a Muscle the Size of a Fist Sunil Yapa Lee Boudreaux Books January 12 $26.00 In his novel about the heated 1999 WTO riots in Seattle, Sunil Yapa writes: “What a violence of spirit to…
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