Benjamin Paloff guest edited MQR’s Fall 2019 Europe Issue, and introduces the issue with the following essay. I spent Election Night 2016 in a tense information blackout high above the Atlantic. My wife, Megan, was seated next to me, and my colleague Ewa, with whom Megan had translated a 1920s novel with an unrelentingly dim […]
“Are they gone?” Danny gasps. He is still a heap on the platform, motionless except for the heaving of his chest.
“Nope,” I say. “We’re gonna have to wait.”
The transformation to bird woman happened so quickly in the past three years. Having my binoculars with me everywhere I go is surely the first clue that I’m always on the hunt.
Toni Morrison passed away late last night, at the age of 88. May she rest in power, and may we treasure gratefully all she has written. Here are her words from our Archives. Toni Morrison’s speech “Unspeakable Things Unspoken: The Afro-American Presence in American Literature” was given as the Turner Lecture on Human Values October 7th,
Unspeakable Things Unspoken: The Afro-American Presence in American Literature Read More »
I’m writing this on Monday the 16th. I hear a motor outside; is it them? I write because I want these things to be known. If something should happen to me, it’s important that people know what happened and how.
From Reinaldo Arenas: A Memoir of 1974 Read More »
Salar Abdoh’s essay, “Lies, Fame, Memory, Illness, and the Theater of Reza Abdoh,” first appeared in Michigan Quarterly Review‘s Spring 2019 Special Issue on Iran. My brother, Reza, was always pissed off at me, as he often had to bail me out of tough situations. One time, before I stopped going to, or got thrown
Lies, Fame, Memory, Illness, and the Theater of Reza Abdoh Read More »
On some days, the news informs me of a school shooting, and I drive blind. My brain fixates on the violence like a new romance.
Home and Spectacle Read More »
When I look at Viking l’s panorama I have an eerie sense that this may be what the Earth looked like before the origin of life-an interesting, reworked, eroded, developed landscape, but one without the transmuting presence of biology.
Two Ships in the Cosmic Ocean: Reflections During the Viking Missions 1976 Read More »
When my dad was little, he worked. He helped his father to strip furnaces in the basements of the wealthy and gathered scraps of metal and coal off the streets to sell. But even though he learned to work doing physically exhausting, menial tasks, his expectations for himself had nothing to do with the expectations that the world had for black boys in 1950s Detroit.
I was literally looking at life from la margen (the bank, the shore). I have always wanted to use the feminine gender form of margin in Spanish, the irregular line where land meets water, rather than the masculine one, which is an irrevocably peripheral band of terrain, edges outside the body of words on a page.
“Fronterislena,” Border Islander Read More »
