We’re Off to AWP
And if you are too, please stop by (we’re at Table 333) and check out our special deals…
On Memory and Mind-Swipes: An Interview with Robert James Russell
The stories in Don’t Ask Me to Spell It Out, Robert James Russell’s new chapbook out this month from WhiskeyPaper Press, follow a narrator perpetually on the verge. Over the course of 12 interlinked vignettes we see him come of age and stumble, get up and brush it off, always moving toward a greater understanding of what it means to be a son, a friend, a lover, a man. Russell is a quintessentially midwestern writer, and those who attended the recent Voices of the Middle West literary festival in Ann Arbor may remember him as a critical force in that conference—he helped bring in Stuart Dybek as the keynote speaker and organized panels featuring writers such Alissa Nutting and Laura Kasischke.
On Memory and Mind-Swipes: An Interview with Robert James Russell Read More »
Announcing MQR’s Open Call for Bloggers
We’re looking for writers with backgrounds in various disciplines to create unique, thought-provoking posts of interest to MQR’s online readership.
Announcing MQR’s Open Call for Bloggers Read More »
Perfect Vision
I do not remember the first time I tried on a pair of glasses. I know that it was the summer of third grade, and in pictures, the glasses are small and delicate. My bad eyesight was due to a penchant for reading books all the time, in bad lighting, usually because I should have been in bed. When I put on my glasses, there was no sudden burst of clarity. Maybe the words on the chalkboard became easier to read, but I certainly didn’t have any epiphanies. I did not, like Dr. Hahn on Grey’s Anatomy, go through the joy of finding out that the blotches of color on the trees were leaves. The glasses were simply slipped on and life continued as normal.
Modern Iranian Poetry in Translation
Classical Persian poetry has held an important place in English-language literature: Khayyam is a central figure of the Victorian era; Rumi remains a best-selling poet in America; and Hafez has been one of the most frequently translated poets. But modern Persian poetry is absent from contemporary surveys. No modern Persian writer appears in the “Norton Anthology of World Literature” or in the “Encyclopedia of Literary Translation into English.”
Modern Iranian Poetry in Translation Read More »
Shaping The Infinite, Or How Not to Die of Routine
Hilary Mantel, when she writes fiction, prefers to grab on a fact. A handhold, if you will. “I aim to make fiction flexible enough so that it bends itself around the facts as we have them,” she said in her Paris Review interview last week. If someone were to claim that the pursuit of the factual runs counter to the aims of fiction, she’d reply that most of human history remains unknown to us, anyway – we have only fragments of Sappho and stumps of buildings and broken statues and fields and fields of unmarked graves all over the world. So if you are lucky enough to build a human universe around any kind of factual handhold, why wouldn’t you use all you could get? To extend the climbing metaphor: just because you can, improbably, hoist yourself along a sheer cliff face doesn’t make the risk of falling any less, or the vista behind you any less stunning.
Shaping The Infinite, Or How Not to Die of Routine Read More »
On Going Home
At the age of thirty-two, I have done the impossible and returned home—not for a holiday or a funeral, but to set up residency in a region of the Florida Panhandle so remote that even Comcast Cable has declined the opportunity to overcharge us for Internet service. I say “impossible” because that’s how the saying goes, doesn’t it, that a person “can’t go home again”—or at least Thomas Wolfe and Joan Didion made compelling cases.
Brute Matter: Max Blecher’s “Adventures in Immediate Reality”
Adventures in Immediate Irreality: No, not a shorthand for my recent trip to Las Vegas—though that is where I read Romanian writer Max Blecher’s 1936 novel, recently reissued by New Directions.
Brute Matter: Max Blecher’s “Adventures in Immediate Reality” Read More »
MQR 54:1 | Winter 2015
In our Winter 2015 issue, Don Lago focuses on messages from outer space, Barbara Mann examines the films of Amos Gitai, Alesia Fay Montgomery looks at Detroit.
Fiction, recent and early, by Nicholas Delbanco (with introductions from Peter Ho Davies and Jonathan Freedman); also from Karen Heuler, Angie Pelekidis, Shubha Sunder, and Hannah Thurman.
Poetry by Martha Collins, Laura Kasischke, Circe Maia, Aaron McCollough, and Matthew Moser Miller.
MQR 54:1 | Winter 2015 Read More »
Voices of the Middle West Literary Festival
Can’t make AWP this year? Then come out this Saturday, March 21, for the Voices of the Middle West literary conference in Ann Arbor–a day featuring panels on writing and publishing plus words from keynote speaker Stuart Dybek. Michigan Quarterly Review will have a table at the festivities, so stop by the bookfair (in the atrium of the East Quad) to pick up a copy of our current issue. It’s dolphin-smooth and brand spanking new.
Voices of the Middle West Literary Festival Read More »