TOBI'S DESK

Interior spread from issue no. 4 of  Yeah!   It was 1961. Eisenhower had cut ties with Cuba, JFK was sworn in, the Berlin Wall went up, the Shirelles were in the top ten for “Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow,” and America fizzed with the unchartered sexual dynamics created by the newly introduced pill. Meanwhile, on Manhattan’s Lower East Side, the homegrown poet-anarchist Tuli Kupferberg—already immortalized as the figure who survived after leaping off the Brooklyn Bridge in Allen Ginsberg’s 1955 poem “Howl”—put out the first issue of Yeah!  The opening page presented the zine as “a satyric excursion published at will,” and it begins: I want to put the revolution at the service of poetry. I want Comrade Stalin to say Tuli, tell me how to revive the bodies of my dead Ukrainian peasants with your magic words The pages of Yeah! are a mix of charm and rage. By issue 4, Kupferberg was printing extracts from the previous generation’s cultural critics, con...

In our eight-part series  Life Sentence , the literary critic Jeff Dolven takes apart and puts back together one beloved or bedeviling sentence. The artist Tom Toro illustrates each sentence Dolven chooses. The first thing I want to do is give you the sentence, so here it is. I typed it, and now you read it, in that order: And the first thing I wanted to do, but I did not do it, was pray. The sentence is the last line from an essay by Kristin Dombek, “ Letter from Williamsburg ,” which appeared four years ago in The Paris Review . If you haven’t read it, now is a good time, right in the middle of this column, or in a few minutes, after you’re done. In case you wait till later, I’ll say now that it’s about sex and the loss of faith, the two of them connected in ways that the essay itself can best explain. The sentence I quote comes after Dombek recalls her discovery of the world without God in it. The first thing she wanted to do was pray, but she did not. Like...

Muhammad Ansi, Untitled (Field with Windmill) .   Thirty-six artworks made by detainees while at Guantánamo Bay are currently on display at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice in midtown Manhattan. To view them, however, takes persistence. You must possess both a photo ID and enough patience to explain to the security guard that the college does indeed have an art gallery. You then have to navigate the building: down an escalator, up an elevator, past an indoor rifle range and a rooftop tennis court, until you finally reach the President’s Gallery, outside her offices. It’s hardly the Met. The exhibition opened in early October (my cocurator, Erin Thompson, wrote about it for The Paris Review .) On November 16, the Miami Herald reported that in response to the show, the Pentagon has stopped releasing security-screened prisoner art and has declared that, as the Herald wrote, “the art made by war time captives is U.S. government property.” One attorney even told the...

Have a question for Lynda Barry ?  Email  us. A self-portrait by Lynda Barry.   Dear Lynda, I am a bit of a snoop, though I’ve really been trying to be better about it. But lately, my new roommate has taken to leaving her diary in the bathroom. This is just curious behavior anyway. Is she documenting her bladder movements? I need to know! I must resist! Help me. All the very best, Nosy in Nashville   Dear Nosy, Get your own diary and make sure it’s about the same size as hers and leave it in the bathroom beside hers. Write in your diary about how badly you want to read her diary but you know you must resist. And how you have resisted. And why you must continue to resist. Do a still-life drawing of her diary in your diary. If her diary is still in the bathroom in a week, write about that. At the end of the year, you may have a book on your hands. Sincerely, Lynda B. * Dear Lynda, I have lost every water bottle I’ve ever owned. And on every gift-g...

When I was in high school I worked as a Christmas gift wrapper at the Chinook Bookshop in Colorado Springs. I can remember everything about the job except how I got it. I don’t remember an interview or even an application. All I remember is that every girl—and it was only girls—who wrapped books at the Chinook simply knew she was the sort of girl who wrapped books at the Chinook, and I was one of those girls. So on a weekday afternoon in early November of my junior year, I walked from William J. Palmer High School across Acacia Park to the Chinook, opened its heavy wooden door, and presented myself in the way that, just a few miles away at the Broadmoor hotel, a different sort of girl of the same age in the same season would present herself as a debutante in a white dress and a jeweled tiara. (At the Chinook I presented myself in a messy ponytail and button-fly Levis and a down jacket.) The gift wrappers at the Chinook were North End girls, the North End being the old downtown section...

The Guardian has unveiled its Best Books of 2017. Unlike The New York Times Book Review‘s 100 Notable Books of 2017 which is selected by the newspaper’s editors, The Guardian‘s list is chosen by invited authors and is essentially those authors’ favourite books of the year. This year, seven books by Africans are selected: Uganda’s Nick […] from Brittle Paper http://ift.tt/2zPwl7j

In a review for The New York Times, of the American Harvard professor Maya Jasanoff’s new book The Dawn Watch: Joseph Conrad in a Global World, which considers the life and legacy of the Polish novelist, revered author Ngugi wa Thiong’o has revived the Chinua Achebe versus Joseph Conrad conversation, disagreeing with part of Achebe’s reading […] from Brittle Paper http://ift.tt/2zSFegv

​I first met him at the back of the hall. In front of the hall, on the stage, a new session was about to begin. He wore blue ankara—or was it green? I don’t quite remember. The space was bustling. He didn’t look very different from the videos I’d watched on YouTube; maybe a bit […] from Brittle Paper http://ift.tt/2zQ2SdI

The 2017 Ake Arts and Book Festival took place from 14-18 November 2017, at Kuto Cultural Centre, Abeokuta. It featured a workshop, concerts, visits to secondary schools, a festival of short films, and of course, panels of writers, filmmakers and other thinkers discussing everything around the festival’s theme, “This F-Word”: feminism, men who write women […] from Brittle Paper http://ift.tt/2zS3xuU

No wife slams the door behind her unless her body is burning inside her husband’s eyes, her beauty no longer in the eyes of her beholder. There’s a home behind slammed doors where burnt wives go down in ashes, tears and washed away love, where they try something like sitting, like bargaining for a breath. […] from Brittle Paper http://ift.tt/2zQ2pbg

A undated photo of Frances Coates, Ernest Hemingway’s unrequited high school crush.   It was as if a lightning bolt struck the teenage Ernest Hemingway, right there in the orchestra pit. Although Frances Coates, seventeen, was only cast as “Third Servant” in the high school performance of  Martha , her brief opera solo made an impact on Hemingway, sixteen, who was playing cello and gazing up at her. The biographer Carlos Baker describes how a classmate of Hemingway’s made a caricature of a boy with desperate eyes and labeled it: “Erney sees a girl named Frances.” Baker also notes that Hemingway was too shy to ask Frances to prom. Now, you can hear that voice, in recordings recently found by Coates’s family. Although they dated socially, Hemingway never became Coates’s boyfriend. He carried his crush with him over the years and across the globe. Three years after that high school opera, Hemingway was wounded in Italy while serving as a volunteer ambulance driver fo...

This is the fifth and final installment of Nina   MacLaughlin’s  Novemberance  column, which has run every Wednesday this month.  Sharon Harper, Germany, mise en scene. 1997. Courtesy the New York Public Library Digital Collections.   Some weeks ago, before the first frost, before the days got dark in the late afternoon, I took a walk in an unfamiliar place. The dirt trail gave way to a narrow planked walkway flanked on both sides by high grass and brambles. It smelled like late fall, that earthy vinegar stink of rotting leaves. To breathe in the damp and leafy woods-floor smell is to breathe in decay. It’s the fertile, fecund smell of compost, of farms, hay, ammonia, manure; there’s the fermenting yeasty tang of beer. It’s the smell of humification: a word that sounds more like the process of making someone. It’s a brown-red smell, deep and dense and fungal. I walked with someone who knew about plants, who’d tug at branches and l...

#WHITEMANINMYPOCKET (aka Dave Fowler) by Kenya (Robinson)   The fourth statue of J. Marion Sims was erected at Pioneer Works in Red Hook, Brooklyn, on November 10. The other three monuments to Sims—which live in New York’s Central Park; in Montgomery, Alabama; and in Columbia, South Carolina—celebrate the “Father of Modern Gynecology,” the man who developed the surgical technique for the repair of the vesicovaginal fistula, an injury often encountered during childbirth. This recently erected statue, however, is dedicated to the atrocities Sims committed: to the black women he tortured through bloody, nonconsensual, and nontherapeutic surgeries without anesthetics. His new plinth reads PONEROS , Greek for “Evil One.” To his right, is a gang of ten thousand five-inch-tall, plastic white men (cumulatively, they are eighteen feet tall) referred to by their maker as “Daves.” Both are part of Doreen Garner and Kenya (Robinson)’s exhibition“ White Man on a Pedestal  WMOAP),”...

1. This is about Damascus, the city where I was born and raised. Today I live in London and my contact with Damascus is painful. I met a lovely old lady in our community allotment garden a couple of months ago. We had a nice chat about growing plants and growing children. My daughter was running around, her grandchildren too, we talked about the beautiful things in life. And then, in the conversation, I mentioned that I was Syrian. She looked at me and said: “Oh, you poor girl, I want to hug you and cry.” It’s important that the memory of a place survives the horror that overcomes it. So I find my Syrian voice in the sweet memories of a grand city. 2. I woke up that morning and my room was orange. It smelled of heaven. My mother had made apricot jam and poured it into big round silver steel pans, to sit in the sun, on the balcony outside my room. The sun was shining and it was hot. The...

Celebrating Buchi Emecheta 09:30-20:00, Saturday 3 February 2018 Brunei Gallery Lecture Theatre & Suite, SOAS, Thornhaugh St, Russell Square, London WC1H 0XG An all-day celebration of the life and work of the acclaimed Nigerian novelist Buchi Emecheta, who passed away in January 2017. As a novelist and story teller Buchi Emecheta touched the lives of many people, and continues to inspire a new generation through the example she set as an immigrant, single mother of five children who rose to became an international literary figure. This anniversary event will be a celebration Buchi Emecheta’s life and work as well as an opportunity to hold a public conversation about her legacy. The event will include a curated installation of The Life and Times of Buchi Emecheta, panel discussions, dramatisations of excerpts from two of her best know novels, music and dancing and of course Nigerian food. Also expect a colourful cultural tribute from members of the Ibusa community in Lond...

Every week, the editors of  The Paris Review  lift the paywall on a selection of interviews, stories, poems, and more from the magazine’s archive. You can have these unlocked pieces delivered straight to your inbox every Sunday by  signing up for the Redux newsletter .   This week, we bring you our 1984 interview with  James Baldwin ,  Raymond Carver ’s story “Why Don’t You Dance?,” and  Dorothea Lasky ’s poem “I Had a Man.” You can also listen to all three in the  third episode of our new podcast , featuring guest readers LeVar Burton and Dakota Johnson.  James Baldwin, The Art of Fiction No. 78 Issue no. 91 (Spring 1984) I think that it is a spiritual disaster to pretend that one doesn’t love one’s country. You may disapprove of it, you may be forced to leave it, you may live your whole life as a battle, yet I don’t think you can escape it. There isn’t any other place to go—you don’t pull up your roots and put them d...

“It only took me 10 years to get the verb tenses right!” Our own  Garth Risk Hallberg reflects on the process of updating his debut novella ,  A Field Guide to the North American Family , recently reissued in a new edition by Knopf. See also: our interview with him on the occasion of the release of his blockbuster  City on Fire . The post A Field Guide to A Field Guide appeared first on The Millions . from The Millions http://ift.tt/2AdSKuB

  “I saw two wonderful and weird creatures / out in the open unashamedly / fall a-coupling,” wrote a monk in Old English a thousand years ago, either composing or transcribing a riddle about a rooster and a hen. This riddle and a hundred others—as well as elegies, proverbs, and dreams—were written into one big book, which was bequeathed to Exeter Cathedral by its bishop and subsequently used by the monks as a cutting board and a beer coaster and left vulnerable to bats and bookworms. Still, ninety-four riddles survived. A thousand years later, I found two dozen of these riddles, translated into modern English and collected in a slim volume called The Earliest English Poems , and a few years after that—now, to be precise—I have published a book of my own riddles and elegies and proverbs. Riddles aren’t confined to English. There are riddles etched into clay tablets from ancient Babylon, and Sanskrit riddles in the Rig Veda (1700–1100 B.C.E. ). Samson posed a riddle to the Philis...

Photo courtesy Library of Congress (Prints and Photographs division).   In 1905, when seventy-year-old Mark Twain began to collect a bevy of adolescent girls, whom he called his “angelfish,” he defended his predilection by insisting that he longed for grandchildren. His own daughters were grown—his favorite, Susy, was dead by then—and he was lonely. But grandfathers can have grandsons as well as granddaughters, and Twain, the creator of one of literature’s most famous adolescents, surely celebrated boys’ cheeky energy. There was more, then, to his strange sorority than an elderly man’s yearning for grandchildren, more even than nostalgia for his daughters’ childhoods. “As for me,” Twain wrote at the age of seventy-three, “I collect pets: young girls—girls from ten to sixteen years old; girls who are pretty and sweet and naive and innocent—dear young creatures to whom life is a perfect joy and to whom it has brought no wounds, no bitterness, and few tears.” Innocent they w...