No. 11
Mercè Rodoreda at Carnival; Francis Spufford on the Soviets and the story of an idea; Stephen Burt on new American poets; Julian Gough explains how to fall in love properly; Geoffrey G. O'Brien catalogs three years; Annie Coggan makes a home for Ulysses Grant, and Rachel Cohen takes a tour; Allan Gurganus's Lair and Refuge; Ian Chillag, Maud Casey, Brian T. Edwards, and Aviya Kushner on laughter; and reintroducing Charles Newman.
If You See Something
Falling and Laughing
No. 11 • Julian Gough
Comic writers laugh at the folly of humanity (“Poor, sufferin’ Hugh Mannity,” as Flann O’Brien put it).If You See Something
Wanting to Be a Fact
No. 11 • Maud Casey
In Max Frisch’s strange and beautiful little novel Man in the Holocene, an old man named Geiser is trapped in his home in an Alpine valley in southern Switzerland by the collapse of a supporting wall that blocks the highway to the tiny village.If You See Something
You Had to be There
No. 11 • Brian T. Edwards
No one jokes with me when I go to Tehran.If You See Something
I’m Not Crazy About That Part
No. 11 • Aviya Kushner
One of my biggest fears is that I will die because I have talked too much.If You See Something
I Was a Microagent of the Body Guard
No. 11 • Ian Chillag
Red blood cell. For twenty-five years, every time I’ve heard or read the term, I’ve thought of Arby Sea.Fiction
How to Fall in Love Properly
No. 11 • Julian Gough
Slowed a little by a stone in my shoe, I arrived in Galway City a while after dark. Galway City, the Sodom of the West!Art
Julia Grant’s Opera Shawl and All That it Suggests
No. 11 • Annie Coggan
The Grants moved into a brownstone on East Sixty-sixth Street—financed by the general's supporters—in 1881.Art
Interiors and Exteriors in the Life of Julia Grant
No. 11 • Rachel Cohen
The house at 3 East Sixty-sixth Street was the third from the end in the Grants’ lives together.Poetry
Three Years
No. 11 • Geoffrey G. O’Brien
Toying with a gun as a train goes past / June is what I’d imagined, dark / intermittent woods set off / by the whiteness of a collar, a book / I can’t believe we’re left alone with.Fiction
The Dentist’s Chair
No. 11 • D. Wystan Owen
On the morning of his ex-wife’s appointment, Kenneth Rivers still owed her an RSVP.Poetry
On New American Poets
No. 11 • Stephen Burt
Poems routinely solicit—they may even include outright—generalizations about everything from barbecue methods to categorical imperatives, but they raise special puzzles, or paradoxes, when they solicit generalizations about themselves, since good poems try to be as unlike one another as possible.Poetry
Small Philosophies
No. 11 • Jennifer Chang
Now the fever root, / the marsh weed, the marigold.Poetry
I Was Married and You’re Supposed To
No. 11 • Katie Degentesh
Do you think everything you’re supposed to think?Poetry
Snow
No. 11 • Michael Dickman
The beautiful invisible music falling from the speakers in the other room / is Mahler imitating the snowPoetry
The Science of Parting
No. 11 • Carmen Giménez Smith
You’re a wet thing in my throat: oyster.Poetry
Praise Song for the Donkey
No. 11 • Aracelis Girmay
Praise the Mohawk roof / of the donkey’s good & grey headPoetry
Road
No. 11 • Jennifer Kronovet
The ice encases the branches / of trees as if beauty can just.Poetry
Gun Show
No. 11 • David Lau
The earliest writing in Golden City / left turn-signal sensors / trafficking / in Variegated Solomon’s SealPoetry
No Vehicles Beyond This Point
No. 11 • Joseph Massey
Tape unspools from a cassette, / collects—a nest—between two / pieces of driftwoodPoetry
From Film Two
No. 11 • Anna Moschovakis
I don’t know a thing about paradise || In my house nobody ever brought it upPoetry
From Block Chapel
No. 11 • Fred Moten
the way orchestra sounds in birmingham / that’s my sound.Poetry
Heart Set: The Antique Sun
No. 11 • Zach Savich
Having fixed the typewriter, / eaten the oranges and eggs / the house’s owner left, I sat / at the white table and tried to tend / to the need for deepening sacrifice / without upsetting my urge / for everything to be responsible / and pure.Fiction
Ecorche (Flayed Man)
No. 11 • Melissa Pritchard
The Collector—wearing an oilcloth hat, overcoat, and soaking-wet boots, slogged through rain, a fish-shaped basket of gray willow sealed by a flap of leather across his shoulders.Feature
Blues for Charlie
No. 11 • Paul Winner
A decade ago, I was Charles Newman’s student in St. Louis. A celebrated novelist came through that fall to read a list of current faculty when she stopped at a name. “Newman? Charles Newman?” she said. “God, he’s an icon.”By the time I came into his life, he drank too much and ate too little.Fiction
The Five-Thousandth Baritone: A Masque in Five Parts
No. 11 • Charles Newman
All that we know definitely about Purcell’s history as a choirboy is that his voice broke in 1673... beyond that lies the territory of invention.Feature
Midsummer Night, 1962
No. 11 • Francis Spufford
It had all taken longer than it needed to, of course.Order A Public Space
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