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Dream Logic: An Interview with Joseph O’Neill

March 16, 2020 Interviews, Podcasts & Audio

JENNIFER ACKER interviews JOSEPH O’NEILL

Joseph O’Neill is an Irish and Turkish writer who grew up in the Netherlands, practiced law in England, and now lives in New York City while teaching at Bard College. His novel Netherland won the PEN/Faulkner Award and the Kerry Group Irish Fiction Award and was praised by President Obama. O’Neill’s novel The Dog was nominated for the 2014 Booker Prize. He is known for sentences that are both precise and extravagant, that build on each other to undulating and dazzling effect. His work is founded on a bedrock sense of humor, and a healthy sense of the absurd is never far away. And yet his novels and stories are never merely funny; they are also rich excavations of character and observations of modern life. This keen eye, alongside evident empathy and wit are on display in his first collection of short stories, Good Trouble, which was released in 2019 and has been called “an essential book, full of unexpected bursts of meaning and beauty.” This conversation is adapted from O’Neill’s visit to Amherst College this winter.

Antipode

April 17, 2019 Fiction, Issue 17, Issue 17 Fiction, Podcasts & Audio

By RIVER ADAMS

“Miss Val! Miss Val!” A swarm of five-year-olds buzzes around me in the kindergarten playroom. Marni is standing in the middle, feet planted, lower lip sucked in, staring down her blood-coated finger from under her scrunched-up eyebrows as though the finger should have known better. This is leftover hubbub from bigger and scarier trouble in the courtyard, which involved a stuffed monkey, the edge of the sandbox, and a superficial but profusely bleeding head wound, but the ambulance has already left, whisking away the lollipop-loaded victim, and the droplets of blood are being cleaned up outside the courtyard doors.

What My Father Said

April 15, 2019 Issue 17, Issue 17 Poetry, Podcasts & Audio, Poetry, Poetry Recordings

By DIANA BABINEAU

You go where you belong, my father says to me,
ten years old, listening at bedtime to his story

about how he once was mugged in Brooklyn
in 1974, a small, polite Canadian

Roach

April 15, 2019 Issue 17, Issue 17 Poetry, Podcasts & Audio, Poetry

By ELIZABETH METZGER

The quickness of living.
The quickness of wanting to kill something.
Forget dreams, they attack me and
I welcome their landings.

Trousseau

April 15, 2019 Fiction, Issue 17, Issue 17 Fiction, Podcasts & Audio

By ROWAN BEAIRD

In all the early photos of my life, you are wearing a long skirt. It is pleated, with an elastic waistband, patterned with purple and red Japanese flowers. I imagine you purchased it from one of the consignment stores in Lincoln Square, their window displays nothing more than dresses and shirts hung on latticed wood wound with fake ivy. I imagine you kept wearing it because the polyester didn’t need to be dry-cleaned and you preferred not to shave your legs.

Outside, on my grandparents’ back lawn, which rolled off into an alleyway, I would crawl between your ankles. I did not want to be near the dog, or my cousins with their large chins and black eyes. My father would tell me to run through the sprinkler, or to play with the peeling block puzzle that had been scattered across the grass, the same one he had played with as a child. But I wanted to be inside, on the quiet, humming floor of our kitchen, so I tried instead to hide beneath your skirt.

Autobiography

April 15, 2019 Issue 17, Issue 17 Poetry, Podcasts & Audio, Poetry

By MATT W. MILLER

For a moment I was a failed skip of stone
sunk into the river for a moment I was the river
purling in long last shadows of September
for a moment I was a skinny grizzly climbing
from a beer can

Malibu Beach

April 15, 2019 Issue 17, Issue 17 Poetry, Podcasts & Audio, Poetry

By JENNIFER JEAN

—for my brother Joey

What if there were no light, he wondered. Just sound & scent owning the night, without the invasive

Surf Shop green neon, or PCH streetlamps glowering at everyone.
Their glint was wrong, false, while the waves sounded
like aloe on a burn, a quick fix.
Some blue & some red lights also flooded the water—flashed

Andromeda Came to the Silver River

April 15, 2019 Issue 17, Issue 17 Poetry, Podcasts & Audio, Poetry

By ANGIE MACRI

as a girl approaches a mirror,
not yet a queen, and maybe never,
seeing in the water
no man’s voice to answer,
to say you are better
than another.

Only the Surface Breaks

April 15, 2019 Issue 17, Issue 17 Poetry, Podcasts & Audio, Poetry

By CALLY CONAN-DAVIES

Breaching beyond
the break wall, opening
the open sea like a long polished wound,
baffling the wind
with a force mustered from currents
where free is
two things—
unfathomable as the drowned book,
barnacled as if born and raised
between Aphrodite and the devil’s thumb

a whale heaves out a whale-tail
flaunting sunken love at the sunned earth