June News

APS TOGETHER
Read The Lover by Marguerite Duras with Honor Moore
Starts Wednesday, June 11

I often think of the image only I can see now, and of which I’ve never spoken. It’s always there, in the same silence, amazing. It’s the only image of myself I like, the only one in which I recognize myself, in which I delight. —Marguerite Duras, The Lover

Join us starting this Wednesday, June 11, to read Marguerite Duras's shape-shifting novel together daily. Find additional details here.

SMALL SCALE SINNERS
Stories by Mahreen Sohail
Mahreen Sohail’s debut offers the same thrill as celebrated first collections by Jamel Brinkley and Colin Barrett and Yoon Choi: the pleasure of watching a singular sensibility awaken to its own expression. A flawless eye for detail meets a daring instinct to tack and swerve and startle; stories rewrite themselves paragraph by paragraph..., always following the pulse of life. Small Scale Sinners is wonderful on sisterhood, on sex, on Pakistan, on coming of age… It brought me to the "plasma level of happiness." —Garth Risk Hallberg

A PUBLIC SPACE No. 32
It was my private suspicion that my grandfather’s silence was a performance, an art piece of sorts. He wasn’t a stranger to wanting attention. My grandfather liked simple things—a quiet house on the river, a long, monogamous marriage—but he also liked a show. A little surprise. —"The Cove" by CJ Green. Order your copy of A Public Space No. 32, here. ("A gorgeously curated collection we experience as a cabinet of wonders." —Whiting Literary Magazine Award)

A WEEKEND WRITERS' RETREAT
Thursday, September 11-Sunday, September 14
This fall, nurture new work and expand and explore technique at a Weekend Writers’ Retreat with A Public Space. Join us in New York's Hudson Valley for morning workshops with J. Mae Barizo, Samantha Hunt, Mary-Beth Hughes, Robert Sullivan, and Peter Trachtenberg; afternoon literary talks; and an array of evening events. Find additional details here.

PUBLIC ACCESS
This month's Public Access—work from the magazine's archive, made free and open to all—is selected and introduced by Mary-Beth Hughes. Her story “Lost Cat” appeared in A Public Space No. 15 , and she is leading the workshop “How to Pass, Kick, Run and Fall” at this fall’s Weekend Writers’ Retreat with A Public Space at Kaatsbaan.

Selected and Introduced by Mary-Beth Hughes
It’s springtime in the Hudson Valley. The morning is cool and bright, and the daily insistent news pours in fast. But lately, looking through the archives of A Public Space, I believe I see a curious, counter-story unfolding there. And because it is springtime, the story I see emerging is about desire. John Haskell writes: “by desire I mean any emotion that draws us toward connection, with people and with the world.” That seems just right. And Marilynne Robinson maps why the desire for fiction can feel like a way in rather than an exit strategy when the world judders and spins. Goli Taraghi traces a first desire too big to grasp and so misdirected, only to come slipping back like a whisper on a word. Michael Thomas looks hard and hopeful at this America and keeps a promise to a child about a baseball game. Young dancers in a summer meadow. Some mid-air, all mid-glory. Black Mountain College in the 1940s and Hazel Larsen Archer’s photographs tell the story. Years later Buckminster Fuller is still trying, still praising her to an awards committee. As if to say: Look! I keep telling you, look!

The Persistence of Muybridge
John Haskell
It’s usually a mistake to change another person, but I believed I could find, somewhere in his armor of control, a crack, and in that crack I could find his desire, and by giving him that desire, I could make him happy. Continue reading.

You Need Not Doubt What I Say Because It Is Not True
Marilynne Robinson
It may be that, in acknowledging fiction as fiction, the readers or hearers divest themselves of a kind of self-interest…Fiction relieves us of this defensiveness—in fiction we expect surprise, irony, reversal. In effect, we expect to be fooled. Continue reading.

The Pear Tree
Goli Taraghi
It wasn’t that I had stopped loving her or I had forgotten her. No. Never. I had just given myself a little time, and didn’t know that time passes faster than the speed of imagination. Continue reading.

Who’s Your Daddy?
Michael Thomas
Afterwards, can you strike the brokering from memory—renegotiate, or at least, rephrase what one whispers to oneself. And what is the wish, what is the world you desire when you return from those inner chambers? Continue reading.

ELSEWHERE
CLMP celebrates independent publishing and the books and magazines that make “a significant contribution to literary culture” at the Firecracker Awards on Thursday, June 26. APS contributor Chloe Garcia Roberts is a finalist for the creative nonfiction award for the incandescent Fire Eater: A Translator’s Theology (co-im-press): “There is a light in this book, the light of the spiritual explorer who ventures into the darkness of her origins” (Fanny Howe).

At the daadgallerie in Berlin, a fabulous collective of “workers of the imaginary”—including APS contributors Fiona McCrae, Mary Jo Bang, Jericho Brown, Nick Flynn, Farid Matuk, Therese Stanton, and Mónica de la Torre—celebrate the “poetics of being” in For Real For Real, an exhibition presented by Claudia Rankine’s Racial Imaginary Institute in collaboration with the DAAD Artists-in-Berlin Program.

In Washington, DC, Take care of your blessings at the Phillips Collection celebrates the work of Essex Hemphill (1957-1995)—poet, performer, editor, and activist during the height of the HIV/AIDS epidemic—and explores the interdisciplinary relationship between his writing and contemporary visual art. Hemphill’s glorious selected poems, Love Is a Dangerous Word, edited by APS contributor John Keene and Robert F. Reid-Pharr, was published earlier this year by New Directions.