News

What we're talking about this week at A Public Space.

June 11, 2018

What we're talking about this week at A Public Space.

June 4, 2018

Brigid Hughes, founding editor of the independent literary magazine A Public Space, announced today that Lauren Cerand will join the magazine, effective immediately, as Marketing and Development Director...

March 22, 2018

A Public Space seeks a Marketing and Development Director.

January 5, 2018

We are thrilled to 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.

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."

October 16, 2017 byRebekka Rafnsdóttir

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

July 20, 2017

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.

August 12, 2016 by Yiyun Li

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.

July 15, 2016 by Victor LaValle

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.

May 20, 2016 by Dorthe Nors

In which a small group—poet, historian, and reporter—search for the last two words missing after a five-year search for all of the words in the Langston Hughes poem “Island.”

May 4, 2016 by Robert Sullivan

A. N. Devers talks with debut author Sara Majka about the Wu-Tang Clan, Alice Munro, and the intimacy of fiction. Cities I’ve Never Lived In: Stories by Sara Majka, is the newest A Public Space Book, with Graywolf Press.

February 16, 2016 by A. N. Devers

Throughout the summer and into the fall, we will be distributing postcards at various bookstores, performance venues, and cultural institutions around Brooklyn asking people to document a public space in the borough on a 4" x 6" canvas. Here is what we've received so far.

June 15, 2015

Translation may be the invisible art, but the translator's mission is precisely to bring visibility to a work of literature, and at times to rescue an author from obscurity. This is especially true when translating Italian women writers of the past who struggled for visibility even within their own culture.

April 23, 2015 by Olivia E. Sears

Belinda McKeon on Colin Barrett's "Stand Your Skin."

March 31, 2015 by Belinda McKeon

Leslie Jamison on Charles D'Ambrosio's "The Dead Fish Museum."

November 12, 2014 by Leslie Jamison

Hello Readers,

I’m sitting in Slottsparken, in Oslo—on the stone steps in front of the Royal Palace, in the shadow of a looming bronze king on his looming bronze horse—and I’m thinking about public spaces, how they summon an inadvertent gathering stripped of intention or annotation: a young artist in Converse high-tops holds a baguette in one hand and a splattered canvas in the other; an elderly couple strides by in matching sunglasses, still holding hands after however-many years; a group of children convulses collectively around the fact of a tiny toffee-colored dog; a woman bends over to reach her arm down into a garbage can.

October 23, 2014 by Leslie Jamison

Deborah Pease was a dear friend, devoted reader, and founding benefactor of A Public Space. She was the author of the novel Real Life (W. W. Norton), and several books of poems, collected in Another Ghost in the Doorway (Moyer Bell). Her poems also appeared in AGNI, The New Yorker, The Paris Review, Parnassus, and other journals; as well as in the chapbook The Crows at Appleton (Monogram Editions) and Opposed to Indifference: Poems of Memory and Conscience (Haybarn Press).

August 18, 2014

We are absolutely thrilled to be publishing a story from Kelly Link’s forthcoming collection in our fall issue. Part Philip K. Dick, part Pygmalion, “The New Boyfriend” is a twisted send-up of Twilight-era teenage love. APS Readers, we’re giving you the chance to illustrate it for us.

July 31, 2014

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