News

We are thrilled to announce our inaugural Emerging Writer Fellows: Vanessa Hutchinson, Mahreen Sohail, and April Wolfe. We would also like to thank all of the writers who submitted manuscripts, and the readers who spent the past eight weeks evaluating, debating and championing applications.

June 20, 2014

All through my twenties I sat immersed in Kerstin Ekman’s novels. I believe she taught me to write.

May 2, 2014 by The Work of Kerstin Ekman | Selected and Introduced by Dorthe Nors

I have a memory of my father. It is suspended in time and space, as memories tend to be.

May 2, 2014 by Kerstin Ekman | Selected and Introduced by Dorthe Nors

The snow melted, exposing the dead body of a man on a hillside just behind Tubby Kalle’s tavern.

May 2, 2014 by Kerstin Ekman | Selected and Introduced by Dorthe Nors

Lie down. / You must have trust. / Still more trust. / Lie down. / Bare yourself to the knives.

May 2, 2014 by Kerstin Ekman | Selected and Introduced by Dorthe Nors

They all sit silently after Oda has spoken. The hissing of the radiators can be heard. A slushy liquid, neither snow nor rain, splatters the windowpanes.

May 2, 2014 by Kerstin Ekman | Selected and Introduced by Dorthe Nors

I do not have much confidence in medical science. That was a subject on which Harms and I were, for once, of the same opinion. He alleged that the human body is largely self-healing. Not entirely of course. We do all die in the end.

May 2, 2014 by Kerstin Ekman | Selected and Introduced by Dorthe Nors

At first Elis thought a Norwegian had driven up. But it was a Swede in a Norwegian rental car.

May 2, 2014 by Kerstin Ekman | Selected and Introduced by Dorthe Nors

The present was a tense she disliked. Banned in fact, calling it the angst tense. Personally, I thought she was exaggerating. You really shouldn’t overuse words like angst, I told her.

May 2, 2014 by Kerstin Ekman introduced by Dorthe Nors

A soundtrack for APS 20. A city government in northern California looks for a solution as its citizens' homes are taken away. Sounds of the city, a small collection inspired by the drawings of Nigel Peake. American crows. A poem by Lynn Melnick, and a reading from a short story by Colin Barrett. A librarian in Chattanooga, Tennessee. And Sam Amidon on the road with his new CD, Bright Sunny South.

April 4, 2014 by Robert Sullivan

May we talk about poetry and magic? Or is it passé? I have a feeling it is passé. But still I hear poets say, “I don’t choose the form. The poem chooses the form,” or “The poem speaks to me.” They say these things flatly[...]

April 1, 2014 by Jillian Weise

March 13, 2014

Do we need to make a case for fiction, you might ask. Especially if you write fiction, there may be no question, to you. But in my experience, for most of our fellow citizens, what we do is invisible, unimaginable. “I couldn’t do it,” so many people tell me. And if it is invisible and unimaginable, it is also, I’m afraid, indefensible.

November 25, 2013 by Alexander Chee

The first episode of The Land, a program produced in association with A Public Space, explores different interactions between humans and their spaces and places, many of which are mentioned in Issue 19.

This episode features a sound map of Montreal; a visit to Brooklyn's Fulton Mall; the ecology of cities; The Murphy Beds on the road; the Nobel Laureate’s library branch; Jorie Graham and Patrizia Cavalli in sonic translation; and a remembrance of Keith Basso. Read more about this episode here.

November 19, 2013 by Robert Sullivan

Aaron Crippen's translations of Du Fu's poems appeared in Issue 17.

For a poet, there must be no greater pleasure than reading classical Chinese. For a translator, there may be no greater challenge than translating it. For Chinese writing is unique, with its pictographic roots. Fundamentally, its words do not denote sounds, as in alphabetic languages, but objects—such as 日, the sun—or combinations of objects to express ideas—such as 明, the sun and crescent moon together, meaning “bright” or “clear.” Its curves have been straightened and standardized, but in 日 we still recognize what was once a circle, like the sun, with a dot at its center.

November 4, 2013 by Aaron Crippen

The thought of interviewing Tom Drury and Yan Lianke with a set of similar questions occurred to me because in an ideal world, without geological and language barriers, I would have liked to listen to a conversation between the two.

October 1, 2013 by Yiyun Li

This article originally appeared on May 18, 2012.

When I moved into my current flat in Jangpura Extension, New Delhi, my landlady told me that her father-in-law had designed the neighborhood as a settlement for refugees from Pakistan, after Partition. I asked her who and what had been here before the 1950s. Her answer, more than once, was, “Nothing.”

October 1, 2013 by Tania James

This article originally appeared on November 3, 2011.

Recently, I was asked by literary friends in the United States whom we Danes were hoping might win the Nobel Prize in Literature. I had no real idea of any consensus, but as happens every year a large number of male culture scribes over the age of sixty seemed to think it should be given to Bob Dylan. Which always makes me wonder why, if the prize really should go to a troubadour, no one ever talks about Leonard Cohen, but that’s just my own personal aside.

October 1, 2013 by Dorthe Nors

This article originally appeared on October 18, 2011.

A recent review of Salvage the Bones considers the novel in the context of a Salon essay about Modern Steinbecks. These novels, the reviewer suggests, “play into the exoticization of lives unlike those of readers who are inclined to pick up literary fiction.”

Salvage the Bones, like her stories “Cattle Haul” (APS 5) and “Barefoot” (APS 14), is set in rural Mississippi (the state with the greatest percentage of poor people in the nation, and one of the top ten in terms of income inequality). It takes place in the days before Hurricane Katrina. The narrator, Esch, fifteen and pregnant, lives with her three brothers and father in a clearing in the woods they call the Pit.

October 1, 2013

This article originally appeared on September 13, 2011.

821 Sixth Avenue was a hub for jazz musicians from 1954-1965, and many big names in New York found themselves there. The photographer W. Eugene Smith moved into the building in 1957 and eventually wired the place, intent on recording as much of the rehearsals, jam sessions, conversations, and daily life in the loft as possible. The result, though vast (40,000 photographs and 4,500 hours of audio recordings), accounted for a sliver of what was going on culturally, artistically, and politically in the city during the time. Explore a selection of significant spots on the map below.*

October 1, 2013 by Sam Stephenson