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Words, words, words

McMullan has crafted an impressively taut, thoughtful novel from these exuberant materials. He writes with a muscular lyricism; the book’s moral gaze is both pitiless and ambivalent. The idea for the village’s great wall came to McMullan, a journalist, when he was teaching in rural China. In one small village, he found a building scrawled with the misdeeds of the community: a palimpsest of slights and sins. It was a relic of Mao’s Cultural Revolution, a communal purging of bourgeois sentiment.

Alex Diggins reviews The Last Good Man by Thomas McMullan.

Guruphobia: Satori Salesmen and their Seductions

Of all the prides, the most pernicious is spiritual pride—a holier-than-thou, more-learned-than-thou, or more-advanced-than-thou superiority, overt or (more often) under wraps. The most enslaved of the spiritually proud are the self-deifiers of whom there have been more than a few in every faith and cult.

By David B. Comfort.

Post Void Dribbling: On Rebecca Gransden’s Sea of Glass

When literature correctly strives to be gonorrhea of the throat, each book should burn till the chords melt. Sidewalk chalk in a storm as your magnum opus, an erasure more meaningful than birth. A little dribble in the void never killed anybody. The novella seeps from ileum to Iliad. Cavities keep congested with mythic creatures and quests.

David Kuhnlein reviews Sea of Glass by Rebecca Gransden.

Maintenant #106 – Aušra Kaziliūnaite

With the physical cancellation of the European Poetry Festival in London during 2020, a series of new longform video interviews are presented here at 3:AM Magazine, again with some of the most dynamic contemporary European poets, whose work is exploring the possibilities and potentials of the artform, as part of the decade long interviews series – Maintenant.

In the 106th of the Maintenant series, SJ Fowler interviews the Lithuanian poet Aušra Kaziliūnaitė.

Maintenant #105 – Krišjānis Zeļģis

In the 105th of the Maintenant series, SJ Fowler interviews the Latvian poet Krišjānis Zeļģis.

Disclaimer

Recently, I won’t say exactly when but embarrassingly late in life, I realized that books had been lying to me.

A short story by Jackson Arn.

The Squeak Strikes Down the Story

A man on a marimba plays a discordant “Flight of the Bumblebee” while a violinist imitates a mouse. When people call me Josef K., I nod my head painfully. When they shout, “Gregor,” and offer to toss me peanuts, I open my mouth obediently. But now—in these precarious times of cat-like shadows creeping in the corners—might I not vault onto the painted pail of the ringmaster and assert my Josefineness all the same? I am Diva, in a sequined red jacket and black top hat, snapping a bullwhip as I whine about my utter lack of vocabulary when it comes to music writing. I have entered into a conversation for which I have no words. And yet, I will sing.

By Nathan Dixon.

Architectural Possibilities of Renee Gladman’s Prose Architectures

Gladman’s work registers that “space as such,” whatever it is, is probably not the affectless cypher to structure but a structure already structured, “geometric or morphological.” Yet its implications are rangier than what might be summarized by a curator as those pertaining to “genre-bending.” Architectures makes to unravel the religious and industrial facing that is empty space. As such, the often pathetically ambivalent “post-ironic” spatially-charged genre of the installation is not just the spelling-out of a-s-s-e-m-b-l-a-g-e or c-u-l-t-u-r-a-l p-a-s-t-i-c-h-e across a gallery room.

Albe Harlow on Prose Architectures by Renee Gladman.

Of Musil and his Translator: An Interview with Genese Grill

The greatest challenge in translating Musil is also the greatest joy. And both the challenge and the joy are embodied in the third noun of your question: “Surprise”. Musil is a writer at war with what he calls “congealed metaphors”—clichés, received ideas, “dead words”. The freshness of the words, the images, and the sentences’ syntax is as important as the ideas they carry, and a translator must always resist the temptation to replace his surprising arrangements with common phrases or more conventional concepts.

Joseph Schreiber interviews Genese Grill.

the swedish beest: a poetry film

From a lonely London a figure calls out for the lost poets and three Swedes will answer, each in their own way, with poetic precision and desolate northern sensibilities. The Swedish Beest is less than a cry for help and more than a poetry film; it is a documentary of those who are not there, a gathering of readings out of time and place.

A new poetry-film by SJ Fowler, Aase Berg, Jonas Gren and Ida Borjel.