“A Wild and Scathing Happiness”: Philippe Petit’s On the High Wire

On the High Wire was written in 1972, when Petit was all of 23, and Paul Auster’s new translation of the book has just been published by New Directions. On the High Wire (2019) is a little (ahem, petit) thing, all of 115 pages including notes, with a trim size—4.5” x 7.3”—to match. In the hand it feels like a guidebook and reads like a dream diary. The book is both of those things.

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Resurrecting Walter Benjamin’s Archival Spirit: An Interview with Frances Cannon

“Work on good prose has three steps: a musical phase when it is composed, an architectonic one when it is built, & a textile one when it is woven.” These words come from the brain of 20th-century philosopher and cultural critic, Walter Benjamin. But they’ve been reimagined by Vermont-based artist and author Frances Cannon. In

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La Dolce Vita

The camp took place in the bucolic township of Yongpyong, a three-hour bus ride east of Seoul. Twenty professors from top conservatories convened at Alpine Valley Hotel with their flocks of protégés numbering about a hundred in all, predominantly girls. Over the next two weeks, we were to learn from the venerated masters and perform in the concerts held every other evening in the hotel’s grand banquet hall.

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La Regata, 1981 color lithograph on paper

“A New Yorker from Canaguey”: Notes on Emilio Sánchez, MQR’s Summer 2019 Cover Artist

Former Curator of University of Michigan’s Museum of Art, Pam Reister, writes on the Cuban artist Emilio Sánchez, who is the cover artist of Michigan Quarterly Review’s current Summer 2019 issue. Emilio Sánchez was born into one of Cuba’s most prominent families. He lived in privilege on his grandfather’s plantation in Camaguey until he was

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