I discovered Brandon Harris’s brilliant work of film criticism and memoir, Making Rent in Bed-Stuy, just a month before my own novel about a fictional race riot in contemporary Brooklyn, Bed-Stuy Is Burning, was due out. Fictionalizing events in the neighborhood allowed me to dramatize the lives of Bed-Stuy residents during one day of heightened […]
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Granny’s heart still beats in Valley Nursing Home, Room 11A with a happy face white board hanging on the door. Her home is a colorless, stagnant pool of muted, disintegrating leaves, fingers of dead limbs her canopy. She hovers in her rail-bed with a bag of urine hanging off the side with a crooked, yellow piss tube reminding me of a lopsided dead neck.
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While reading Amelia Gray’s latest novel Isadora, I thought of one family in particular, the Elemezeyans.
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Upon beginning The Nun & the Bandit, I recognized the exact desert I was living in. Watson had come fantastically close to Mount Magnet, with guides both white and Aboriginal. He put into words for me the desert’s stunted bushes, its dramatic bleak escarpments, its arid plain. For him, the desert aroused awe; it was wilderness, a place of silence and apartness.
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I should move the African violets. Apparently direct sunlight will kill them, there on the ledge. So said my date, a man who works at a plant nursery.
“It looks like you’re using cold water,” he diagnosed. “Room temp only, in the saucer. Let them drink through the roots.”
“I always kill my plants,” I acknowledged.
This month’s letter-writer at Ace Hotel New York is Claire Vaye Watkins, author of Gold Fame Citrus (Riverhead, 2015) and Battleborn (Riverhead, 2012), which won the Story Prize.
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A little girl standing in front of gloomed woods, her face etched away by light; an otherwise unremarkable field haunted by a delicate brume; the enchanting chaos of seedpods charmed still while falling; a child blurred limbless before a glowing, eye-white screen—the B&W photographs in Emil Handke’s series From Silence evoke an uneasy mystery, a shifting amalgam of innocence and menace. What they are, really, is uncanny, that itchy mix of the familiar and the utterly foreign.
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I feel pity for my sister who is dying somewhere in a lonely house I feel pity for my dog who had to die without me on a table after months of pain I feel pity for the stranger in the hospital bed who is never touched but sleeps there nonetheless What love for me What love […]
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During that first trip to Indiana I found the photos in his wallet, a girl with moony brown eyes lifting her blouse, pressing her breasts together and staring into the camera like she knew him. “She was crazy, that’s all,” he said, when I asked why he kept them.
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Picture a Shanghai high-rise. On the sixteenth floor lives a cat named Turnip. In autumn Turnip goes into heat. When the cries come from Gail, a moody and shorthaired bicolor in Tower C, Turnip has already been searching herself for weeks, trying to gather and name her feelings. Now she hears the cries and creeps to the bathroom. The window is open an inch.
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