I brush aside a spider from my arm, but he returns to scale the mountain of my knee, scuttle across my book, over page 64, and off the edge. Disoriented, thwarted, he pauses in the grass, then drops down, swaying from the tip of a green blade. Swooping from one to the next, the afternoon…
Charles Simic, Jackstraws, poems: In his thirteenth collection, Simic sometimes experiments with form, but is characteristically lyrical, sly, irascible, undeniably funny. His poems continue to startle, the “big topics” mixing with everyday annoyances. (Harcourt)
Marcia’s parents, who still lived in New Jersey, were truly happy when she came to live in the East again. Her father said, “Hey! That’s more like it,” when she first told them she was moving to New York. “About time!” her mother said. Nobody mentioned the years when they had been so bitterly against…
One of those early summer days, driving west on Carson Street, heading for parts unknown, singing aloud in my head, saying Lord, Lord, what am I to do? Not a heaviness in my heart, not a lightness in my heart, but the usual hum and rush of living in this city of bungalows and smokestacks…
Contributor Spotlight With her long story in this issue, Megan Staffel makes a return to our pages — indeed, to any magazine’s pages — after an absence of twenty years, and this fall, her third book, The Notebook of Lost Things, will be published by Soho Press twelve years after her last novel saw print….
Many people in New York City stay up all night. I am one of them. I don’t know who the other ones are. Except for Walter, and Walter says things like, “I think my fingerprints are wearing off.” Things like that, things other people don’t think about. At two a.m., my phone rings. “Get lost,”…
after Joao Cabral de Melo Neto To go to it often, to catch its level impersonal voice, says de Melo Neto in the graveyard’s moon-white orchards. To being hammered, the lesson in poetics, the speller of spells, he says. What did you learn standing with the east wind cutting over the fields of tilting stone,…
Favorite Poems Robert Pinsky has just finished two consecutive terms as the Poet Laureate of the United States, and he has ensured that he will be a difficult act to follow. Traditionally, the only specific duties of the poet laureate, who is appointed by the Library of Congress, are to give a lecture and reading…
Charles Baxter can’t sleep at night. An insomniac most of his adult life, he takes comfort in Nabokov’s claim: If writers don’t stay awake thinking about their work, how are they going to make their readers stay awake? Baxter—the author of two novels and four collections of stories, as well as a book of essays—is,…
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