Imprisoned behind glass in New York City’s Jewish Museum: a sinister grin in graphite. Too big-teeth and hairy brows crowned with a jester’s coxcomb. “I wanted something visually exciting,” Jerry Robinson said of his concept sketch of The Joker. “I wanted something that would make an indelible impression, would be bizarre, would be memorable.”
“Pynchon is like the lost minutes on the Nixon tapes,” Steele says. “The not being there just adds to the mystery. The fact he even came today ruins it. Like if the Red Sox won the World Series. The myth is dead. The real Pynchon would’ve never showed. I think it was a dumb move, actually.”
Solve this problem: Your daughter’s playing with a doll, a gift she just received from a friend. The doll is white. 1968: John Carlos gives the black power salute Arthur Ashe wins the first US Open. 1970: Toni Morrison The Bluest Eye the problem of “whiteness” as a standard of beauty Arthur Ashe wins The Australian Open. 1972: Bettye Saar The Liberation of Aunt Jemima 1975 the liberation continues Arthur Ashe outthinks Connors to win Wimbledon “no matter what I do, or where or when I do it, I feel the eyes of others watching me, judging me.”
“I help my clients open their chakras, channel their sensual energy, and find their heart space.”
“Heart space?” I ask.
“Yeah…like, you know,” she says, placing her hand just above my left breast. “Many of my clients have trouble with love.”
I stare at her.
Krystal developed into a first-string basketball player, and in junior high she’d been scouted. The acting-out years began and Krystal was sent to Elan, a residential school for troubled teens. It was here that the staff treated residents criminally. Often new students would be told that their throats could easily be cut in the night if they failed to get along with staff and other students.
When it became clear that Azar did not have the speed, synchronization or physical strength to filet an adequate number of codfish per hour, the manager moved him to the women’s line. He learned to find his station and turn on the intensely bright overhead lamp that would help him see if there were worms that had to be picked out from the flesh of the cod.
The day before the world was supposed to end, Kasumi woke up in the morning and slipped into her school uniform as usual. She had nothing else to do. Besides, she didn’t dislike school. On the other hand, her best friend, Tomo-chan, had left for a trip a few days earlier, saying she would spend time with her boyfriend. By this time, she would have lost her virginity.
It is in this bed, after all, our bed, that I have most exposed myself, that I have been both sick and happy: secure, protected, and yet in the next moment, utterly, existentially alone. In a real dark night of the soul, Fitzgerald writes, it is always three o’clock in the morning, day after day.
“The Paris of the Americas”
“Obligatorium”
“Monsoon Season: Morenci AZ”
“Plucked”
“Memory as Diary”
It all seemed too much to successfully handle, but there was nothing else to do.
Ruth couldn’t quite forget that her husband, David, had slept with Diana before he slept…
It isn’t genteel to point out, but spit can be beautiful. It’s an ordinary beauty—the parabola, the clearly practiced skill.
“Free Solo Climbing”
“A Beautiful Fiasco”
There’s a telephone. Three syllables, telephone, so it’s the kind with the handle—you could bring it from room to room only with the help of long cords, like a medical attachment of saline. Its speaking and listening parts imitated your own. Meeting in a kind of lonely kiss: plastic, teeth, cartilage, bone.
“Black people often comment on the fact that when you see some person’s name trending on Twitter among your circles, someone Black who you’ve never heard of, your first thought is, ‘My God, someone has been murdered again,'” Eve Ewing tells ACM poetry editor Tara Betts.
In 2010 life changed in Bear’s Corner. Outsiders know the place as Komi. That was the year the bears came to eat us.
“Make/Shift drops the reader and characters into worlds, time, and the mind itself. In this debut collection of eleven short stories with three ‘commercial breaks’ between stories, author Joe Sacksteder hypnotizes you with his imagination, beckoning you to join him down the rabbit hole,” Michael Gawdzik writes.
You won’t find much radical analysis in contemporary fiction: Trump is stupid, rude, a racist and a misogynist; his election was a completely unsuspected usurpation of both a deserving candidate and the norms that bound an imperfect but fundamentally good country together. Now it falls to the few good people left to struggle against him, like Dumbledore’s Army, like District 13, like The Fellowship of the Ring. It must be done, and it must be done now, but it must be done in a kind, hopeful, affirming way, or we will be no better than he is.
“Each inch of the park is designed to trick visitors into thinking they’ve left New York for a Parisian garden, the Catskills, Wonderland, or that they are themselves Henry Hudson discovering Manhattan…,” David Andrew Stoler writes of Stephen Wolf’s book on Central Park.
“Love Letter 16. Ring of Fifths”
“Love Letter 18. Words Are Wind in Shut Spaces”
“Growing Up With Brothers Meant Machines–”
“My Grandmother’s Candy Jar”
“Leaves”
“Ticket Thrown Away Before Not Leaving”
“To The Hunters”
“There Are Women Who Know”
“Prayer”
“Kaleidoscope”
“Elegy”
“Lineage”
“Optic Principle”
