TOBI'S DESK

Kaveh Akbar, left, and Leslie Jamison, right. Leslie Jamison makes her life more difficult than it needs to be. In her most recent essay collection, Make it Scream, Make it Burn , the subjects she chooses—the world’s loneliest whale, Second Life devotees, the Museum of Broken Relationships in Croatia—could carry the pieces with their propulsive novelty alone. Certainly, Jamison is brilliant enough as a sculptor of language that we’d happily oblige her. But what makes Jamison one of the essential essayists of our generation is her rigor. She renders her subjects, the world that made them, and her own gaze all within the same frame. In each of these essays, there is the subject, but there is also the long history leading up to it, and then there is also Jamison herself, observing and writing. So should we call her new book journalism? Or literary criticism? Or memoir? Yes. For an imagination, a curiosity, as expansive as Jamison’s, there can be no partitions. Her writing, like her mi...

Brandon Taylor. Photo: Bill Adams. David Ferry’s poem “ At Lake Hopatcong ” has its narrator considering a family portrait taken a year before he was born. He knows everyone in the photo, and yet it is “of no country I know.” Over and over again, I tried to picture the lakefront in Brandon Taylor’s debut novel, Real Life —I who toured endless college campuses, lived on several, visited friends on still more, I who am white and have lived in majority-white communities for deep decades at a time. In the descriptions of this life with which I am so familiar, I both recognized and didn’t recognize the world displayed, so fresh and frank are Taylor’s observations of the daily hurts of being Other. Taylor’s protagonist, Wallace, is a bright, lovable biochemistry Ph.D. candidate at an upper-Midwestern university who as a queer black man is repeatedly made to feel he is neither bright nor lovable—I kept thinking of Waugh’s line “a blow, expected, repeated, falling upon a bruise.” He feels t...

The subject of mental health is often synonymous with shame, silence, and the need to hide away from the world. The age-long stigma attached to it has made the conversation a difficult one to have. According to MentalHealth.gov, mental health problems are actually far more common than people think. Early warning signs range from eating […] from Brittle Paper https://ift.tt/2lz13vL

The Ghanaian American author Yaa Gyasi has a new novel coming in July 2020 from Alfred A. Knopf. Titled Transcendent Kingdom, it tells the story of a small Ghanaian family in Alabama, and charts the course of a young woman named Gifty, studying to become a neuroscientist, who grapples with faith, salvation, and science after […] from Brittle Paper https://ift.tt/2luKf92

In our column Poetry Rx, readers  write in with a specific emotion, and our resident poets—Sarah Kay, Kaveh Akbar, and Claire Schwartz—take turns prescribing the perfect poems to match. This month, Kaveh Akbar is on the line. © Ellis Rosen Dear Poets, I am at a point in my life where I have very little structure, where every day is full of small decisions and every move feels like a long shot. I am in the process of beating an addiction (I hope), but this means that I am fully sober, grounded, and often a very raw kind of awake for every long minute of the day, however brilliant, brutal, or just plain boring it is. Do you have a poem that could quiet my mind or offer me clarity? Thanks, Actively Awake Dear AA, I remember so clearly the early days of sobriety. I’d stare at my watch willing the time to pass faster, only to see, like in those old high school movies, the second hand seemingly move backward. When your whole life is predicated on feeding your addiction, and the...

What if plants are smarter than we think—a lot smarter? Miguel Rio Branco, Untitled, Tokyo, 2008  © Miguel Rio Branco   A few years ago, Monica Gagliano, an associate professor in evolutionary ecology at the University of Western Australia, began dropping potted Mimosa pudicas. She used a sliding steel rail that guided them to six inches above a cushioned surface, then let them fall. The plant, which is leafy and green with pink-purple flower heads, is commonly known as a “shameplant” or a “touch-me-not” because its leaves fold inward when it’s disturbed. In theory, it would constantly defend itself against any attack, indiscriminately perceiving any touch or drop as an offense and closing itself up. The first time Gagliano dropped the plants from the measured height—56 of them—they responded as expected. But after several more drops, fewer of them closed. She dropped each of them 60 times, in five-second intervals. Eventually, all of them stopped closing. She continued ...

To mark our seventh anniversary in 2017, Brittle Paper hosted a conversation on its Facebook page. Themed “Un-Silencing Queer Nigeria: The Language of Emotional Truth,” it featured 14 editor-in-chief and Caine Prize 2017 finalist Arinze Ifeakandu, Brunel Prize 2017 winner Romeo Oriogun, Commonwealth Short Story Prize 2017 finalist Kelechi Njoku, and 14 editor Laura Ahmed, […] from Brittle Paper https://ift.tt/2lQP4tB

Imani Perry photo: Sameer Khan. Sons— You have been running away from lies since you were born. But the truth is we do not simply run away from something; we run to something. I do not think you fully believe me, but I am not a mother who yearns for you to be a president or captain of industry. I will not brag about your famous friends or fancy cars, and I will not hang my head in shame if you possess neither. I am practical, to a certain extent. I want you to be able to eat, to keep a roof over your head, to have some leisure time, to not struggle to survive. I want you to be appreciated for your labors and gifts. But what I hope for you is nothing as small as prestige. I hope for a living passion, profound human intimacy and connection, beauty and excellence. The greatness that you achieve, the hope I have for it, for you, is a historic sort, not measured in prominence. It is a kind rooted in the imagination. Imagination has always been our gift. That is what makes formulations ...

Omega chairs in the Dining Room at Charleston. © The Charleston Trust Penelope Fewster In the summer of 1913, at 33 Fitzroy Square in London, the ornate Georgian house where the Pre-Raphaelites once gathered became the venue for another visionary artistic enterprise. Founded by the Bloomsbury painter and art critic Roger Fry, the Omega Workshops Ltd. was an interior decor and furniture company that sought to provide struggling artists with a regular income. “There is a certain social-class feeling, a vague idea that a man can still remain a gentleman if he paints bad pictures,” Fry observed, “but must forfeit the conventional right to his Esquire, if he makes good pots or serviceable furniture.” At the Omega, the distinction between fine and applied arts was dismissed. In the upstairs studio, fine artists designed colorful and original furniture, ceramics, textiles, and rugs, while downstairs two showrooms were open to the public, who could browse and purchase the wares. Fry, who co...

Nearly two months after the arrest of Sahara Reporters publisher and 2019 Nigerian presidential candidate Omoyele Sowore on 3 August 2019, the Federal High Court in Abuja has ordered his immediate release, following the conclusion of investigation into his #RevolutionNow movement. The 24 September decision, reports Premium Times, stated, in the paper’s wording, that “there […] from Brittle Paper https://ift.tt/2mEwhl3

As revealed earlier this month, Brittle Paper will be at the 2019 Lambda Literary Festival in Los Angeles, on Friday, September 27. We will be featured in an event focused both on our curatorial work in African literature and on the work of queer writers and the evolution of representations of queerness in Nigerian literature. This year’s […] from Brittle Paper https://ift.tt/2lqAA3w

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie and Sefi Atta will be among the guests at the 2019 Felabration, the annual music festival in memory of the legendary Nigerian musician Fela Kuti. The week-long event, to be held from 14-20 October at the New Afrika Shrine, Ikeja, will also be graced by the Ugandan pop star-turned-politician Bobi Wine, the […] from Brittle Paper https://ift.tt/2n4T3TE

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 . Ali Smith, with Leo, in Cambridge, 2003. This week at The Paris Review , we’re in an autumnal mood. Read on for Ali Smith’s Art of Fiction interview , the second part of Katharine Kilalea’s novel in serial OK, Mr. Field , and Jane Hirshfield’s poem “ Autumn .” If you enjoy these free interviews, stories, and poems, why not  subscribe  to  The Paris Review  and read the entire archive? You’ll also get four new issues of the quarterly delivered straight to your door.   Ali Smith, The Art of Fiction No. 236 Issue no. 221 (Summer 2017) INTERVIEWER Were you pleased to see Autumn referred to as “the first serious Brexit novel”? SMITH Indifferent. What’s the point of art, of...