TOBI'S DESK

  Let the cubs devour the lions Let the puppies bark at the dogs If the kids can break the horns of the goats Then the waters will be still.   For when the cows eat all the hay Then the calves must stand at bay For even a pandemonium of parrots Cannot finish a … Continue reading Revolution!! → from NaijaStories.com http://ift.tt/2loqARX

Stephen Spender. Our complete digital archive is available now. Subscribers can read every piece—every story and poem, every essay, portfolio, and interview—from The Paris Review ’s sixty-three-year history. Subscribe now and you can start reading 0ur back issues right away. You can also try a free ten-day trial period . Stephen Spender, born on this day in 1909, was interviewed for our Art of Poetry series in 1980 . It’s a gossipy, unrestrained interview, with asides about Yeats, Hemingway, Eliot, Pound, and Auden, among others. But maybe Spender was running his mouth too much; the interview occasioned a pair of heated responses from Martha Gellhorn and Laura Riding Jackson, both of whom disputed the facts he’d relayed to his interviewer. Their letters were so long, and so full-throated in their denunciations, that  we published them in their entirety in our Spring 1981 issue , allowing Spender to respond to both.  Here’s the bit of Spender’s interview that upset Laura Riding J

Ukraine’s ultranationalist uprising has brought together two disparate groups: neo-Nazis and ethnic minorities. Kiev in January 2015. Photo: Sergey Galyonkin   The crisis in Ukraine turns three this month. From its outset, I was struck by how clichéd the news reports of the war were, in structure and in tone; European journalists seemed to be reporting on Ukraine as if it were an African country, and, mortifyingly, as if Binyavanga Wainaina’s “ How to Write About Africa ” had never happened. I wondered what would happen if the roles were reversed—if I, an Ethiopian woman, covered this European war. The conflict was said to have unleashed ultranationalist violence: as part of my preparation I hung out on Stormfront , the white-supremacist Internet forum, where I seemed to be welcome because they couldn’t tell that I’m a black intellectual. I decided that the safest way to report on these men would be to try and pass as one of them: to go in disguise as a neo-Nazi fighter. I acquir

Last December, Min Jin Lee introduced her new novel in a YouTube video . In the video, Lee recalls a university lecture she heard when she was 19 about the Korean population in Japan. The lecturer discussed Japan’s colonization of Korea, and told of a Korean-Japanese family he knew whose son had committed suicide by jumping off the roof of their apartment building. After his death, his parents found his middle school yearbook. In the video, Lee, fighting back tears, lists the things his classmates had written in it: “Go back to where you belong;” “You smell like garlic;” “Die, die, die.” It’s a story that has stayed with Lee for almost three decades. It was the beginning of her desire to write a historical novel about Koreans in Japan. Fans of Lee’s debut, Free Food for Millionaires , will recall a novel centered on Korean-Americans in working class Queens. But the author’s shift into historical fiction does not mean that Pachinko is a departure for Lee. Free Food fans will recogn

  Christine Lincoln’s fiction in our Winter issue , “ What’s Necessary to Remember When Telling a Story ,” comprises no more than fifteen hundred words, but its length belies its breadth. Braiding enchantment with sorrow and hope, it begins inside a dream, with a man carrying a small woman in his mouth—“a grown woman not much bigger than a bullet”—running from a dark-skinned girl thought to be coming after them. From there, it unfurls into an agonizing, tender portrait of the nameless dreamer, once an abusive partner, who spends the rest of the story musing over the love he ruined years ago. Lincoln, born in the sixties, hails from Baltimore; having  endured a period of addiction that left her briefly suicidal, she turned to fiction, which was, she told me, what she needed to save herself. She went on to pursue an M.F.A. and currently lives in York, Pennsylvania, where she is poet laureate emeritus.  I spoke with Lincoln over the phone, her voice gentle and heartening, about “What

Adichie is in love with Njideka Akunyili Crosby’s artwork. We are 100 percent here for this kind of artistic affection, especially when it brings into focus the work of two leading figures of Africa’s literary and art worlds. You might recall that last year, Adichie’s Facebook post on raising a girl child went viral. You might […] from Brittle Paper http://ift.tt/2lIRNR8

An artist’s rendering of the Lunar Hilton lounge. Image via the Outline   The future looks so shitty now. Sure, maybe in fifteen, twenty years we’ll be able to get through airport security without taking our shoes off, or we could watch streaming high-definition video while we get an MRI. But we’ve lost sight of the one advance that really matters: building a luxury hotel on the moon. In 1967, Barron Hilton, scion of the hotel magnate, had his eye on the prize: at a conference for the American Astronautical Society, he shared his vision. Daniel Oberhaus explains, “ The crown jewel of the Lunar Hilton would, of course, be its Galaxy Lounge . ‘If you think we are not going to have a cocktail lounge, you don’t know Hilton—or travelers,’ Hilton quipped. In the Galaxy Lounge, lunar tourists would be able to ‘enjoy a martini and see the stars!’ Although the lounge would be underground, the guests would enjoy a view of Earth and outer space through ‘thermopane windows.’ All cocktails wou

My beloved father died suddenly almost five years ago. As it is for everyone who loses someone they love, my family and I found ourselves devastated. Adding to the shock of our loss was the guilt-ridden fact that my mother had not been there with my father during his final days to potentially catch the signs of his rapidly declining heart — she’d been with me, helping to manage my three young children while my husband was on a business trip. Afterwards, the balanced weights of grief and regret settled on my shoulders, refusing to let go. Breathing was difficult. Prayer left me more drained as I grappled with my anger at losing our family patriarch so early in his life, at the age of 59 and only the beginning of his grandfatherhood, and my shame at the role my own selfishness played. Mothering and remaining a partner to my husband felt like playacting, as I tried to be brave in the face of my shattered grasp on what my life now was. To state perhaps the obvious, I’d never known life w

Out this week:  Flâneuse  by  Lauren Elkin ;  Abandon Me by Melissa Febos ;  Lower Ed by Tressie McMillan Cottom ; Parable of the Sower   by  Octavia Butler ; No Other World   by  Rahul Mehta ;  Harmless Like You   by  Rowan Hisayo Buchanan ; and  To Be a Machine by our own  Mark O’Connell  (who we interviewed recently). For more on these and other new titles, go read our most recent book preview . The post Tuesday New Release Day: Elkin; Febos; Cottom; Butler; Mehta; Buchanan; O’Connell appeared first on The Millions . from The Millions http://ift.tt/2ltZ86q

“1985, the year you had the twins who died, you looked at the red sand under the hibiscus bush you buried them and cried for the future that had come to be.” *** Today, I am going to tell a story of a man I never married. Like water, some things are meant to be […] from Brittle Paper http://ift.tt/2m1T1cs

“We both always thought I would be the one to die first. The reasons were obvious. I was the one with asthma who carried an inhaler about.”   The day you died, nothing strange happened. It was a day like every other day. The sun rose at the right time. Everything happened as it was […] from Brittle Paper http://ift.tt/2m6nIxH

Working in advertising gave me the resources to do what I thought was art—with a logo. From the cover of Like Art .   Art school is the place you go to learn how to be a creative director, even if you don’t know that yet. You start out wanting to be a painter, a sculptor, an installation artist (an installer?) or performance artist (nonentertaining performer), and so you start out learning to be an artist—drawing, painting, and reading theory—and then one day you find yourself drawing storyboards for a hipster beer. It’s just a temporary thing, or so you tell yourself. You could drive a taxi or wait tables and make art in your spare time, but of course that is exhausting and dispiriting if not demeaning, compared to the big-time artists whose lives you read about. Where’s the loft? Who’s your dealer? Where’s your summerhouse? Somehow, you may find you don’t feel like painting in a room with a bathtub in it after a day sucking carbon monoxide as a bike messenger or taxi driver. 

There’s a new biography of  Angela Carter  on shelves. Is it worth your time, even if you’re not a fan? In  The New York Review of Books ,  Alison Lurie  gives the book a thorough read . The post The Inventor appeared first on The Millions . from The Millions http://ift.tt/2ls2aYT

Leí sobre el libro por primera vez en el blog Literafrica , me llamó la atención el título "la vida en un psiquíatrico de Kenia" dí por entendido que posiblemente sería un relato sobre el trabajo de  un psiquiatra en un centro psiquiátrico o incluso el relato de un enfermo psiquiátrico ya recuperado. Pues, no acerté, no se trata ni de lo uno ni de lo otro. Tierra de brujas, es la experiencia de una jovencita española de unos veintitantos años en un pueblo cerca de Nairobi, la historia se podría leer como un diario. Parece ser, que acabó la carrera de psicología en España, al no saber que rumbo darle a su vida decidió emprender una aventura a este pueblecito de Kenia dónde hay tanta desgracia y aparentemente (supongo con razón) todo le daba asco y se enfermaba cada dos por tres. Es un libro corto, de apenas unas 145 páginas de fácil lectura. No obstante, no es un libro que pueda decir que me haya gustado, ya que es simple y superficial. from Mary Okeke Reviews http://i

Listen to me rant. Just listen. One wonders: What is being taught in Nigerian universities in the name of contemporary literature these days? One gets the unfortunate impression that many of the professors have only read Chinua Achebe, Wole Soyinka and Chimamanda Adichie. The greatest tragedy of modern literature is that those who are invested […] from Brittle Paper http://ift.tt/2lYMwXW

i walked into a poultry house it was emptied the day before to customers —save for one hen it stood at a corner and gradually, the house emptied its emptiness into the hen’s eyes it glanced from memory to relic lost in this home that smells of space and not safety, of stale memories and […] from Brittle Paper http://ift.tt/2mwFYgV

Nigerian essayist, Oris Aigbokhaevbolo, recently led a rich and illuminating conversation on Facebook about literary experimentation. Experimentation is the lifeblood of aesthetic innovation. Nothing new happens if someone doesn’t break out of the mold and show us that we don’t have to stay enslaved to convention. But experimentation has always been a contested aspect of literary practice. […] from Brittle Paper http://ift.tt/2mDworZ

Lovers of African romance, rejoice! In the spirit of Valentine’s and all things love-related, Ankara Press has just added two new titles to its romance e-book series. Kudos to Cassava Republic Press for working so hard to consistently expand the catalogue of the romance imprint with new and exciting stories that explore the love, life and […] from Brittle Paper http://ift.tt/2mwbI5V

CHAPTER NINE   Tjay sat in his office chatting with his colleagues, a group of four men and two ladies. They argued and discussed the recent events in the country. Each one of them had his or her own idea and solution for solving the national problem. No one noticed when Bina walked in. She … Continue reading Broken Bottle 9 → from NaijaStories.com http://ift.tt/2mDauoE

  Entries are officially open for the second edition of the Nigerian Students Poetry Prize. All entrants stand a chance to win 100,000 naira, 60,000 naira and 40,000 naira for the first, second and third positions respectively. Established in 2016, the prize’s main objective is to stimulate the creativity and intellectual life of Nigerian students. […] from Brittle Paper http://ift.tt/2lMEroI

An exhibition of drawings by Jackson Mac Low surveys his restless reinvention of the line. Jackson Mac Low, Hi , n.d., ink on paper, 9 1/4″ x 12″.   At the poetry readings I attended around New York City in the eighties and nineties, a familiar figure often occupied the front row: an elfin gentleman with dramatic eyebrows and a great wave of hair to match. At my very first events, he drew notice because he sat with pen in hand, writing throughout the reading, as if he were taking dictation. I recall wondering if he was a journalist or another poet cribbing lines from his fellows. I soon learned that he was the legendary composer, performer, and poet Jackson Mac Low (1922–2004) and that in all likelihood he was culling words and phrases to deploy in the many recombination schemes he used to create his texts. With roots in the Fluxus movement and an early association with John Cage in the fifties, Mac Low emerged as one the most rigorously adventurous American poets in the decades t