Announcing APS Books

News • October 16, 2017

We are thrilled too announce APS Books, a new, independent imprint at A Public Space that mirrors the efforts of the magazine. With launch titles by Bette Howland, Sally Potter, Dorothea Tanning, and more.

A Girl on the Hunt

Elsewhere • Rebekka Rafnsdóttir • October 16, 2017

We are pleased to share Rebekka Rafnsdóttir's essay "A Girl on the Hunt," the inaugural recipient of the Bette Howland Nonfiction Prize. The prize, given annually to a student at the New School in New York City, was established by Honor Moore, who first met Bette Howland in 1977: "​In the winter of 1977, I went to the MacDowell Colony for the first time. I had just had my first work—a memoir-as-play called Mourning Pictures—go public on Broadway.... The play had been a hit in a Massachusetts summer theater and closed quickly in New York, and though it was to be published in an anthology, I was having a hard time emerging from what was an up-down whiplash experience. At MacDowell I met a woman writer about eight years older than me—at the time, she seemed much older!—who had just published a memoir of her time in a mental hospital—the book was called W-3. We became friends—long talks in what I remember as her very dark writing studio—her typewriter in a pool of light. She was the first woman writer to encourage me."

I was brought up on the northernmost tip of the Earth. The environment is rough and cold there, barren yet somehow truthful. It gives you the truth bare, as if there is nothing further to add. It just is like frost that never melts, doesn’t grow and never dies. Forever constant change eternal. Where sky meets the ocean, it seems like the horizon reaches further than elsewhere. As if there is more spaciousness there, endless space, the sky so vast, the stars ever present. No boundaries in sight. But there is always a certain type of coldness, whether it be summer or winter. It is the type of coldness that radiates from emptiness. There is an abundance of nothing all around. The wild, and what scarce life inhabits it, has still been left undisturbed.

The 2018 Public Space Fellowships

News • September 8, 2017

We are pleased to announce that applications will open on September 15 for the 2018 Public Space Fellowships.

An Aesthetic Meeting of Minds

July 20, 2017

A conversation on editing with Emerging Writer Fellow Jai Chakrabarti and his mentors, Mary-Beth Hughes and Elizabeth Gaffney.

The 2017 Emerging Writer Fellows

February 15, 2017

We are pleased to announce our 2017 Emerging Writer Fellows.

The 2017 APS Emerging Writer Fellowships

September 22, 2016

We are pleased to announce that applications will open on October 1 for our 2017 Emerging Writer Fellowships.

There Will Never Be Another Person Like Jim Again

News • Yiyun Li • August 12, 2016

The first year I taught freshman rhetoric at Iowa, a young woman announced at the beginning of the semester that she was from a Catholic, white supremacist background.

On “A Lucky Man” by Jamel Brinkley

APS Classic • Victor LaValle • July 15, 2016

These stories deal in large-scale deceit and betrayal, there are painful things at work in this fiction, but much like the scene I described above, Jamel Brinkley regularly finds ways to pierce through the dramatic and find the subtle and humane lurking within.

On “Yes” by Elizabeth Gaffney

APS Classic • Sasha Saben Callaghan • June 2, 2016

I began reading Elizabeth Gaffney’s short story with a wince of parental recognition. Pets are hell, and having to explain their traumatic demise to a small, tear-stained child usually leads to an existential crisis, followed by the dubious consolation of hunting down some equally doomed replacement.

Days

Good Books • Dorthe Nors • May 20, 2016

In celebration of the forthcoming publication of So Much for That Winter by Dorthe Nors, the next A Public Space Book with Graywolf Press, we're excited to share this excerpt from "Days," one of the two novellas in the collection.