No. 23
G. R. Swenson protests MOMA with a ? / Pita Amor in neon lights / Fame and Rejection / Saul Bellow’s letters from a safe-deposit box / Looking for Natalie de Blois on Park Avenue / The last years of Black Mountain College / Elena Ferrante and the art of concealment / Merce Cunningham dances / On the life of studios / The architecture of freedom
Fiction
Interiors
No. 23 • Kathleen Collins
I’m moody, damn it, and restless… and life has so many tuneless days.Poetry
The Book of Petitions
No. 23 • Vénus Khoury-Ghata
Who will find lost time / who will tie it to the foot of the bed.Portfolio
Lady Antaeus
No. 23
An out-of-print book discovered in the one dollar cart at a used bookstore leads to the rediscovery of an acclaimed writer, her unpublished work, and a forty year correspondence with Saul Bellow in a safe-deposit box in Tulsa, Oklahoma.Portfolio
W-3
No. 23 • Bette Howland
At last it had dawned on me that these obstacles were my life. I was always rolling these stones from my grave.Portfolio
A Life in Letters
No. 23 • Jacob Howland
Thirty-one, a single mother of two young sons, she labored at her typewriter day and night, worked part time as a librarian and an editor for the University of Chicago Press, and often threw bills directly into the trash.Portfolio
A Visit
No. 23 • Bette Howland
I was wondering what the chances might be of undertaking a crash course in self-improvement here in Eternity. Not so hot.Portfolio
The American Heroine
No. 23 • Bette Howland
Edna is no American Bovary. She is American—period. The American heroine on her quest for experience, in all her problematic American innocence and ignorance.Portfolio
Ever Your Friend
No. 23 • Saul Bellow
One should cook and eat one’s misery. Chain it like a dog. Harness it like Niagara Falls to generate light and supply voltage for electric chairs.Portfolio
Blue in Chicago
No. 23 • Bette Howland
And yet I found myself reacting to her in the same way—noticing all through the meal that she seemed to talk only when her mouth was full and her cheek was bulging like a fist. As if she were chewing a quid of tobacco, and about to squirt. Alarming.Cahiers
Time’s Weather
No. 23 • Friederike Mayröcker
I let myself be carried by my language as if it were endowed with tiny wings.Poetry
Three Poems
No. 23 • Rosemary Tonks
Sin pricks me like a convict’s suit of arrows / For here my evil, blue, and moody youth / Has found its old lair.Fiction
The Goldfish
No. 23 • Susie Mee
Cannot we create a new world by emptying this one out and adding fresh colors one by one?Reminiscence
Early On
No. 23 • Isobel and Michael Armstrong
It was absolutely revolutionary and liberating, and so full of possible experiment.Portrait
Pita in the Arms of God
No. 23 • Elena Poniatowska
I believe in the time of my glands and arteries.Fiction
The Truck
No. 23 • Elisabetta Rasy
The “nothing” I am talking about is a perfectly successful cocktail of darkness and fog.Fiction
Souvenir Button
No. 23 • Rosalyn Drexler
Never in the course of history has a work of art disposed of itself. A strange suicide indeed.Memoir
Outside Inside
No. 23 • Martha King
Baz and I had Fame and Rejection. We lived in a flow of contradiction.Essay
She’ll Make Herself Alive
No. 23 • Antonio Romani
Concealment, discretion, secrecy: I found myself thinking of Epicurus’s advice, lathe biosas: “live in obscurity.”Meditations
Night
No. 23 • Etel Adnan
I peeled every trace of light off the walls. Withdrew into blurred definitions.Order A Public Space
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