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Between Parentheses

On Wednesday, December 4, 1935, beneath an article about the removal of a controversial monument from the front lawn of the county courthouse, the twenty-first page of the Los Angeles Times carried an item about the death of an assistant professor, thirty-two years of age [sic], a graduate of the Universities of California and Paris, then employed in the Classics Department at Harvard, in a hotel suite overlooking downtown’s MacArthur Park, where he and his wife, Marian (née Tanhauser), were staying during a visit to her gravely ill mother, whose estate they were putting in order.

Short fiction from Ryan Ruby.

Duos #18 – The Earth Will Come to Laugh and Feast.

The book evokes the strong bond between art and literature, and of ekphrastic writing that evokes images by highlighting hidden relationships and implied mysteries. The result is a moving collection of poems and short stories revealing the profound state of existence and the fate of our torment, the inevitability of suffering, and of our helplessness from pain.

As Tinti says “This partnership moves from the rubble, passes through cemeteries, sniffs out the signs of what has gone. Roger Ballen’s photos, my words, are a kind of defense against the terrible power of death. They are an accumulation of enthusiasm, injuries, obsessions. They are effigies composed to disturb the reader, to ambush the thought, the things.”

In the 18th of the Duos series, new poetry by Gabriele Tinti and Roger Ballen.

Burroughs and Scotland

Kelso documents a precursor of sorts to Burroughs’ transatlantic shit-stirring in the serial killer and rapist Peter Thomas Anthony Manuel. I think the inclusion here of these grim and apparently unrelated facts is not entirely normal in a biography, but feels like an important hangover from Kelso’s fiction. He’s always been good at making unusual connections, and his idea that Manuel was a demon seed from across the water whose planting on Scottish soil was the beginning of mutations in the country’s collective psyche preparing its population for further subversions is an interesting one.

Matt Neil Hill reviews Chris Kelso‘s Burroughs and Scotland.

The Hearing Trumpet

“People under seventy and over seven are very unreliable if they are not cats,” somebody says a few pages into Leonora Carrington’s 1974 novel The Hearing Trumpet. Most people would agree; if anything, the bad run of septuagenarians of late shows this age range is too narrow. The statement is characteristic of this chatoyant novel. Cats are everywhere in The Hearing Trumpet: their sheddings are collected to form a sleeveless cardigan; psychic powers are attributed to them; the earth freezes over and an earthquake thins out the human population, but the cats survive. Beneath its cattiness, the remark also offhandedly conflates species (the way “people” transmutes into “cats” at the end of the sentence) and recognizes the virtue of people usually excluded from civic life for being too young or too old. This broadening out of our ordinary categories of human life is at the heart of the novel.

Jim Henderson reviews Leonora Carrington‘s The Hearing Trumpet.

The English Fear of Cities and Europe: Patrick Keiller

Then there are Herzen’s “absence of Continental diversions”; the absence of a credible London newspaper — it seemed to me that the Evening Standard was written for and read mostly by commuters on trains to dormitory towns and suburbs all over south-east England; the absence of metropolitan government, abolished in 1986; and, finally, that London was characterised by all this absence. When he said, in the next-but-one sentence, “London was the first metropolis to disappear”, I don’t suppose he meant that London was physically absent — that would be silly — but that it’s absent as an idea.

Andrew Stevens in conversation with Patrick Keiller.

The Real Thing

Even in the face of the histrionic Royal Mail suspension of deliveries to Europe over Christmas, or Donald Trump’s claims about postal ballots leading to voting fraud in the U.S. election, a novel dedicated to the question of whether competition should be permitted for letters weighing less than 50 grams hardly seems evocative. And yet, Hjorth’s novel is a jolting tour de force impossible to put down, gleaming with philosophical insight and tenderness in the most unexpected places.

Denise Rose Hansen reviews Vigdis Hjorth‘s Long Live the Post Horn!

Beyond Sugar Hill

When I talk about female friendship, I feel a kind of ambivalence: there’s a whole school of chick lit and soppy movies about the redemptive qualities of female friendship, how your female friend is gonna be there no matter what and is more important than anyone else out there. I don’t mean that friendships like that don’t exist, but what I’m more interested in are depictions of friendships Lila and Lenu’s in Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan Quartet, which is all over the place — both dangerous and nurturing — depending when you drop in.

Linda Mannheim in conversation with Kit Caless.

Poem Brut #112 – Horoscopes

These poems are collaged horoscopes cut out from Harper’s Baazar’s “real” horoscopes.

In the 112th of the Poem Brut series, new poetry by Ariadne Radi Cor.

Poem Brut #111 – Karen Carcia

These pieces come out of thinking about the gap between language and perception, between thought and utterance, thought and mark-making. They come out of the tradition of erasure poetry and steady stitching as a response, approach and way into world.

In the 111th of the Poem Brut series, new poetry by Karen Carcia.

The rain surrenders to the town, Al Capone is no longer there

The bachelor enters to a bar on the back alley. He notices that the tune in the Chinese restaurant is chasing him. The happy rhythm of ‘La en gañadora’ is coiling around him in the dim light. ‘La engañadora’ means the fraudster in Spanish. But it was translated in the US as “Anything Can Happen When You’re in Havana”.

A short story by Hiromi Suzuki.

3:AM Magazine

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