I am 43 years old. I am Jewish. I wrote a novel about the Holocaust. I grew up in a synagogue headed by an Auschwitz survivor and by his wife, also an Auschwitz survivor. I have taught my students work by Primo Levi, Aharon Appelfeld, Charlotte Delbo. But until this month, I had never read the diary of Anne Frank.
On Never Having Read Anne Frank Read More »
“Making a home for a writer in exile ended up a way for us to make a better home for ourselves.”
* Kaveh Bassiri *
I looked forward to “State of the Art,” which opened on September 13, 2014 as the Crystal Bridges Museum’s first exhibition not based on its permanent collection. Such exhibit should tell us about the museum’s aspirations. Curators Don Bacigalupi and Chad Alligood traveled to about 1,000 artist studios in 170 cities from 44 states, and they selected 227 works made since 2011 from 102 artists, half of them art educators. Their vision in the catalog says, “What we are attempting here is to rethink the shape of contemporary art in this country.”
Crystal Bridges to Where? Read More »
* Airea D. Matthews *
We sat in my car for a short while before I turned the ignition. We needed to gather ourselves, to make some dumb sense of what just happened. We needed a moment, or a long lifetime, to figure out how beings think and move.
Fanon and the Case of the Diasporic Haints Read More »
* Zoe Tuck *
The audacious project is, like that of the living dead, one of learning how to live after— after money as the arbiter of all value.
Oakland’s Vampire Poetics Read More »
* Jeremy Allan Hawkins *
This is Strasbourg cathedral’s 1000th year, the first stone in its foundation having been laid in September of 1015 CE, and as the city begins a year of celebrations, it seems appropriate to meditate. Its lengthy tenure has seen world shaking events come and go. The cathedral survived two world wars and even some of the ordinance exploded during them. It survived the French revolution and it survived the Protestant reformation, which in another universe might have scoured its façade of all ornament. These events, and so many more, have swept past like the river sweeps past the city center and its vestiges of long-departed industry. The longevity of the cathedral, with all it has outlasted, feels almost eternal.
Soft Stone: Strasbourg Cathedral at a Thousand Years Read More »
* Paula Mendoza *
I read and enjoyed Sommer Browning’s Backup Singers recently, and it made me think about narrative.
“She Syntaxes Behind the Rose Bushes”: Sommer Browning’s Backup Singers Read More »
* Eric McDowell *
But this isn’t to say that The Trip to Italy is unaware of its own dubious status as “sequel.”
“The Trip to Italy”: A Sequel Read More »
* Elizabeth Schmuhl *
At the end of September, I was invited to attend a performance of R.B. Schlather’s direction of George Frideric Handels’s 1735 baroque opera Alcina at Whitebox Art Center in New York City. What I saw was mesmerizing.
Operatic Magic: R.B Schlather’s Alcina at Whitebox Art Center Read More »
* poetry by Kara Van De Graf from MQR 53:3, Summer 2014 *
From the grandmother of my grandmother, it lives
at the footboard of the bed, passed down to me
by my own mother. As a child, I traced
the blonde-wood petals of flowers, the garden
etched with dark walnut vines. And below,
near a lip of scrollwork, two narrow drawers kept
in check by a key. It was only when I slid
the drawers from their runners that I noticed
“Dower Chest,” by Kara Van De Graf Read More »
