News

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

To read a Dorthe Nors story is to enter a dream and become subject to its logic.

October 22, 2014 by Daniel Woodrell

I'll read any poem about a machine.

September 15, 2014 by Patricia Lockwood

September 15, 2014

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

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