TOBI'S DESK

Our column  Feminize Your Canon explores the lives of underrated and underread female authors. Originally begun by Emma Garman, it will now be written by Joanna Scutts.  (Original Caption) One of the principal figures around which the Passaic, New Jersey, textile strike is surging is Mary H. Vorse, socialist, short story writer, globe trotter and correspondent. Mrs. Vorse, press agent for the strikers, makes her home in the art colony at Providence, Massachusetts, and for the last decade has been prominently identified with many phases of the labor movement in this country. Mary Heaton Vorse, prolific novelist, journalist, and labor activist, spent most of her long life trying to escape her upper-middle-class origins. The heroine of her 1918 novel I ’ ve Come To Stay calls the inescapability of a bourgeois upbringing life’s “blue serge lining”—a reference to the practical fabric that protected the inside of coats and suits, forming a barrier between the self and the worl...

We’re thrilled (read: jumping) to announce that Brittle Paper’s Deputy Editor Otosirieze Obi-Young has recently been awarded the inaugural The Future Awards Africa Prize for Literature. The list of five nominees from which Otosirieze emerged winner contained prominent names such as the writer and video artist Akwaeke Emezi, the novelist and writer Oyinkan Braithwaite, the […] from Brittle Paper https://ift.tt/2OeQXLS

In September 2019, we brought news of the English translation of Johary Ravaloson’s Return to the Enchanted Islands — the second novel in the history of Malagasy literature to achieve the feat of being translated into English. Originally written in French, Return to the Enchanted Islands is, in the words of Amazon Publishing publicity lead Lucy […] from Brittle Paper https://ift.tt/2qvXskI

It is no longer news that Nigerian speculative fiction writer, Tochi Onyebuchi, is set to release a new book soon, Riot Baby. According to its publisher, Tor Books, Riot Baby is about “two gifted siblings with extraordinary power whose childhoods are destroyed by structural racism and brutality and whose futures might alter the world.” It has […] from Brittle Paper https://ift.tt/2OfaBrd

Lawrence Ferlinghetti at Caffe Trieste, 2012. Photo: Christopher Michel (CC BY-SA 4.0 (https://ift.tt/2E6q6du). Via Wikimedia Commons. I have always loved November. I don’t know if that’s because I was born in it or because it’s when fall becomes the cruelest version of itself. The air bites; the final leaves fall to the ground. Either way, the month is tailor-made for nostalgia. At times like these, I often turn to the first poet I ever loved, Lawrence Ferlinghetti. In high school, I memorized “ The Pennycandystore beyond the El ” and recited it to myself daily, a strange sort of mantra. At the time, I thought myself the girl in the poem, a heaving form full of tragedy and potential. But now, I see I am the cat, strolling among the sweets, unhurried and unbothered. I don’t know if I’ll ever be the man. Or maybe that’s all I’ve ever been, sitting in the “semigloom,” “in love with unreality.” —Noor Qasim  I picked up Bernadine Evaristo’s Girl, Woman, Other one evening earlier t...

Jill Talbot’s column,  The Last Year ,   traces the moments before her daughter leaves for college. It will run every Friday this month, and then return for a month each in the winter, spring, and summer. I’m sliding into the corner booth when Steve sets down a water with two limes, the napkin already damp. About once a week, I drive two towns over—twenty minutes along the backroads beyond I-35—to write here. I call it my Writing Restaurant, and the only person who knows it’s this restaurant is my daughter, Indie. I text her before I take off, let her know where I’m headed. I’ll stay here for most of the day. A year ago, Indie got her first job here as a host, so I stopped coming to let her have this space for herself, but now she works at another restaurant a few miles from where we live. I’m glad to have my booth back. I like the drive, the disappearing, the secret. No one knows that while I’m sitting in this booth, I’m pulling into a gravel drive in Colorado or steppi...

Photo: Watson Perrygo. Courtesy of the Smithsonian Institution Archive, via Wikimedia Commons. My first encounter with Paulé Bartón’s folktales came in the unlikeliest of places: trawling through the deep wilderness of HTML on the back end of The Paris Review ’s website. I was an intern, dutifully scanning the archive for stories that had stumbled slightly on their way from print to the Web. Long before my time at the magazine, an error-prone computer program had been used to expedite the digitization process—a necessity for such a small staff and such a trove of pages. But the program occasionally made mistakes, and many stories and poems and essays, long forgotten to most readers, hung imperfectly online. The trick was to read a sentence on the page, then read the very same sentence on the screen, then return to the page. You could spend hours like this, swiveling your head, attempting to achieve parity between these warring formats, constantly searching for hiccups. The discrepa...

The 2019 Miles Morland Foundation Writing Scholarship has been awarded to four writers. Two Kenyans: Gloria Mwaniga Odari and Parselelo Kantai won for fiction and nonfiction respectively, with Liberia’s Hawa Jande Golakai and Nigeria’s Nnamdi Oguike both winning for fiction. With almost 700 entries from 27 countries—including Nigeria, Kenya, South Africa, Cameroon, Cote d’Ivoire, Ethiopia, […] from Brittle Paper https://ift.tt/2qDXfvz

Congolese author Alain Mabanckou, possibly the most prominent name in Francophone African literature and renowned for his experimental writing, has a new book in the works: a collection of essays based on his lectures delivered during his tenure as a visiting professor at the Collège de France. The book, titled Huit leçons sur l’Afrique (loosely translated […] from Brittle Paper https://ift.tt/2XClrL0

In the corner of the gallery stands an unassuming white cube. A panel on the front of the cube periodically yawns open, revealing an endless, wondrous, lamp-lit nighttime. And then the door closes, extinguishing the dream. Even in the dreary November cold, people wait hours to enter the cube and experience what’s inside; nearly every color of puffer coat is represented in the line huddled outside the building. This is Yayoi Kusama’s INFINITY MIRRORED ROOM—DANCING LIGHTS THAT FLEW UP TO THE UNIVERSE , the centerpiece of the ninety-year-old artist’s “ EVERY DAY I PRAY FOR LOVE ” (on view at David Zwirner’s West Twentieth Street gallery through December 14), which features all-new paintings, sculptures, and installations that build on her legacy as one of the world’s most daring and openhearted artists. Faces are everywhere in this show—peeking out from stalks of succulent-like sculptures, squiggling along the walls like schools of fish, hiding in the vivid biology of her paintings. And ...

A writer I know, being a little flip, once said that you need to know only three things about James Merrill: he was gay, he was rich, and he was serious about Ouija. The subtext is that it’s already hard enough to be taken seriously as an artist, a writer, a poet in this country—so hush up about the damn board, James. Yet we treasure Hilma af Klint’s vibrant swathes of color and William James’s somber meditations, both influenced by spiritualism and the occult, as were scores of others, from Yeats and Dickens to Kandinsky, Rilke, and T.S. Eliot. In J.D. McClatchy’s interview with Merrill in this magazine , Merrill walks right up to this perplexing point with refreshing candor: Well, don’t you think there comes a time when everyone, not just a poet, wants to get beyond the Self? To reach, if you like, the “god” within you? The board, in however clumsy or absurd a way, allows for precisely that. Or if it’s still yourself that you’re drawing upon, then that self is much stranger and f...

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, Sarah Kay is on the line. Dear Poets, My romantic life has been a series of almosts. Something always intervenes—poor timing, too many miles, someone else—to prevent the early intimacy from flowering into something more. I am deeply thankful for each and every one, but I’m so tired of almost. How do I stay patient as I wait for a love that finally, forcefully blooms?  Sincerely, The Not-Quite-Ex Dear Not-Quite-Ex, I want to share a poem by Kathryn Starbuck called “ Trout ,” which is very short. It goes:  I do my best to keep pointlessness at bay. But here, wet above my knees, I let it fly. Here, hot and cold, fingers thick with thinking, I try to tie the fly and look for the net, loosening the philosophical knot of why I came here today, not yet ...

When she waved, I saw Those agile hands, That refused to plead for a place. But laboured to earn every kobo f her fort Calloused, but beautiful Those warm loving hands, That didn’t hush the little girl, Or to snatch the pestle from her brother, And walked them through life nd learning. Calloused, but beautiful … Continue reading Calloused but Beautiful → from NaijaStories.com https://ift.tt/2O6aIFu

There was a country There was hope It was a new leaf A new dawn. Finally The children’s future were bright. And brothers envisaged posterity. Well, why wouldn’t it be? Liberty, after calamity would only birth prosperity. Alas! That vision wouldn’t become history. For verily, As the ghouls were cast out. Demons arose! Greedy, callous … Continue reading There Was A Country → from NaijaStories.com https://ift.tt/2O6N7of

I was led into the house (well it was more of a mansion) by a huge man. He isn’t that huge or maybe he is, considering my height he looks like a giant to me. But to some like Mo Abudu or Kate Henshaw, he’ll be a few inches taller than them. With that description, … Continue reading The Writer Episode 2 → from NaijaStories.com https://ift.tt/2rb7bwy

Tony almost knock down the aged door as he rushed into the house. The duffel bag he brought in dropped on the chair beside his estranged brother. Dennis turn around and took a cursory look at his brother peeping through the window to see if anyone had followed him. The wide blood stain on his … Continue reading Bliss → from NaijaStories.com https://ift.tt/3464zyH

“Death is cheap, it only takes a bullet”. So you heard. Treading the tiled floor barefoot, you walked your way past the kitchen door where you left your last dinner untouched. Your feet glided past the bedroom and you caught a glimpse of the cradle you bought. It was empty and you remembered why. You … Continue reading Whispers → from NaijaStories.com https://ift.tt/2QygjWR

He called my name.From, a long distance. I overheard and turned back. To see who it was. I could not recognize the face. I placed my hand on chest. To asked and know if he was calling me. He nodded his head in affirmation. So, I waited for him. He walked briskly over where I’m. … Continue reading Change: another of its kind. → from NaijaStories.com https://ift.tt/37mwwUV

When the moon is lucent up in the sky, I yen for a long lasting talk which I could not behold your lips flapping endlessly at my presence. I cuddle the air in your absence as I walk strangely at the dawn of the morning when I heard the words like syringe injected into my … Continue reading Pains of Sweet Memories II → from NaijaStories.com https://ift.tt/2Xw1c1m

Hello Dear Readers, sorry, sorry, sorry. It took a long while, I bet you missed me as much as I did. It feels really good to be back again, but this time as dimmastories. So let’s enjoy the ride Episode 5 Two days later, Boma was with Anny in the students food café. She was … Continue reading The One Friend → from NaijaStories.com https://ift.tt/2CYrdND