When I left the house this morning, there was a ruckus in the grass, a rustling buzz, something digging under leaves. As I got closer and the buzzing intensified, I saw a cicada, pinned by a yellow and black, hard-shelled wasp. The cicada fought and shuddered and stilled. Then tried again to right itself. The…
I. I’m born at the end of the world. That is, geographically, in a small harbor town in southern California where the continent climaxes in a blaze of coastline, beyond it lying only the mirage-like remains of anarchipelago, the great gray curvature of the planet, and the sun whereit sets. My grandmother lives there too…
We had a garage sale yesterday to let some stuff go. It was like an Independence Day sale, or that’s what we called it, cuz my brothers said people buy more things for holidays. I put out my metal roller skates and old blue pogo stick and Big Wheel. It felt sad to give up…
We watch them watch us, a family of four, a tribe “in the world” but not “of it.” Our clothes are shirts-tucked-in-to-the-real-waistline and modest-the-dress and the hat-cannot-be-backwards. We shuffle and do not know how to stand when our parents ask for the grocery manager. Can you turn off the music while we shop? At the checkout counter,…
Charles Baxter recommends Question 7, by Richard Flanagan (Knopf, 2023). “A brilliant mix of memoir and both personal and social history, this book manages to say something new about the atom bomb, Leo Szilard, colonialism in Tasmania, and the author’s near-death experience, with all these strands braided together in a formal way that Sebald himself might have…
Charles Baxter, Blood Test: a Comedy (Pantheon, 2024)
So much in this world we can’t make better. So much in this world we can’t understand. For those reasons, literature sustains us. We need, more than ever, language that expands human perception, that opens us to the broken world. We need the compassion and outrage and tenderness and horror of language that nibbles at…
Vivian is still alive when it happens, sitting alone in Chicago on a far northside park bench overlooking Lake Michigan, as the storage war hipsters start selling her photographs. I have not seen pictures of her sitting there, but imagine a faded blousy dress, the scratched bench, the spray of waves against the broken revetment…
Education got us into this. – Murray Sinclair I will go to the archives. What will I look for? Another place, simply, where the past speaks? I call Linda Johnson, former Territorial Archivist of Yukon. I tell her I am going to the archives. What should I do there? What should I look at; what should…
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