Artist: FRANCES STROH
“I realized these were all the snapshots which our children would look at someday with wonder, thinking their parents had lived smooth, well-ordered lives and got up in the morning to walk proudly on the sidewalks of life, never dreaming the raggedy madness and riot of our actual lives, our actual night, the hell of it, the senseless emptiness.”
― Jack Kerouac, On the Road
Cliff Forshaw transposes Dante’s Inferno to Hull, England.
Amherst College posts videos from the various Lit Fest 2016 events. The videos feature Angela Flournoy, Lauren Groff ’01, Deborah Treisman, Harold Augenbraum and Jen Acker ’00.
SARETTA MORGAN interviews MAURICE EMERSON DECAUL
Maurice Emerson Decaul is a poet, essayist, playwright, and librettist, whose work has appeared in The Common, The New York Times, The Daily Beast, Narrative, Callaloo, and Holding it Down: The Veterans’ Dreams Project, among others. A graduate of Columbia and New York Universities, he is currently working toward his MFA at Brown University.
Saretta Morgan corresponded with Decaul over several weeks by email, in person, and on the phone during the winter of 2015–2016. Both poets and military veterans, Morgan and Decaul talked about New Orleans, theater, race, and the military, as their conversation moved between themes of structure, dreams, and collectivity.
Arablit.org reviews our March 2015 conversation on contemporary Arabic fiction, which included readings by short-story writers Hassan Blasim and Hisham Bustani.
Admirers of slim, erotically charged novels will greet Noy Holland’s first novel Bird with a sense of discovery. For fans of her three short story collections, Bird is a satisfying evolution of her lyrical, unsettling prose that ratchets the tension between poetic language and mythic narrative, and feels both deeply modern and ancient.
Bird is a ballad to vanished love, to an erotic connection akin to rapture that the main character, whose nickname is Bird, cannot escape, even though Mickey, her golden bad boy lover, took her places she shouldn’t have gone.
The present is one autumn day 12 years after Mickey’s abrupt departure “in order not to kill her.” Bird is breast-feeding her infant daughter after a difficult birth, her second child. She might be suffering from post-partum depression—certainly she has let herself go. Married to the doctor who treated the wounds Mickey inflicted, she lives in the countryside, trying to find solace in domesticity, but yearning for the thrills of the past.
107 Water Street, Stonington, CT
One day I entered this room and wasn’t afraid of ghosts. It was after a friend phoned, spoke in a register that calmed me. But tonight, opening the yellow door with its gold metal sun, there’s a knitting-up in me. As if a spider lives in my throat, wove a web inside my chest. Inner bodice of silk he runs up, pulls. On a pound-for-pound basis spider silk is stronger than steel. Remember that Ivy said the scarlet room always felt occupied.
On our first date he took me to a bar disguised as an apartment. Down a narrow alley (they call them laneways there), up a step, through a door marked “1A.” The room was small and nearly empty, all dark wood and white walls. A fire did its quiet work in one corner, its light gleaming on the unlabeled bottles that lined the shelves. He knew everyone, and the beautiful, tattooed bartenders spoke to me like family.
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Celebrating 15 Years