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Nothing But the Sea

November 7, 2012 Dispatches

I live a few blocks from a cruise ship terminal. When ships dock there, they tower above the nearby buildings, which top out at four or five stories high. At night, their decks and windows glitter in neat rows, like high-rise apartment buildings, as if downtown Manhattan has suddenly been pulled close. When the ships finally depart, their horns boom dramatically, out of place in my quiet, unassuming neighborhood of Red Hook, Brooklyn.

Reading Place: Is Geography Destiny?

November 5, 2012 Essays, In House

By HANNAH GERSEN

Last week, as Hurricane Sandy bore down on my waterfront neighborhood, I found myself worrying about the future of coastal areas across the country. I live in Red Hook, Brooklyn, a low-lying area that has always been prone to flooding, but which saw new levels of damage with Sandy. For years, people have been predicting a rebirth of Red Hook, in part because of its spectacular ocean views, but perhaps those same views will spell its demise. Will neighborhoods like mine eventually be washed away? In short, is geography destiny?

Grocery Domestic Product: Inside the Park Slope Coop

November 1, 2012 Essays

Honeycrisp

The first Honeycrisp of the year carries more significance than any piece of fruit should. Its annual appearance in September’s produce aisle—a brindled globe of green, yellow, and red—is still a shock to me. Shelves on each side are stocked with plastic cartons of withering raspberries and the last crate of pluots, still summer-sweet but invariably mushy-bottomed. The lustre of summer is spent. The bin of Honeycrisp apples—peeking out from beneath the words, “NEW CROP” — announces that fall is on our doorstep.

My Greek Epiphany

October 31, 2012 Dispatches

By JULIA LICHTBLAU

EXODOS. I deciphered the Greek letters, extrapolating from the Cyrillic alphabet learned in college Russian. Exodus! A hairy Charlton Heston parting the Red Sea in The Ten Commandments popped into my mind. A domestic Moses, my husband spurred our lagging, quarreling kids on to baggage claim and immigration.

Review: NW

October 30, 2012 Reviews

Book by ZADIE SMITH
Reviewed by SARAH MALONE

Asked in Granta to compare her writing process in her latest novel, NW, and in her previous novel, On Beauty, eight years before, Zadie Smith responded:

It’s my feeling that the process of being edited by American journals improved my sentences. It was like going back to school. And with a tighter sentence I was able to writer a tighter book.

A View from the Cheap Seats

October 29, 2012 Essays, In House

By ELIZABETH BYRNE

For me (and thousands of others), it’s not always easy being a Jets fan. Week in and week out, it’s virtually impossible to predict how they will perform. While this can make for exciting, come-from-behind wins, it can also be devastating. This unpredictability, plus the melancholy of being a Jets fan far from home probably explains why I’ve been thinking about Steve Almond’s quest for a sports bar in which to watch his beloved, and often unsuccessful, Oakland Raiders every Sunday. Now that I’m living in Massachusetts, I find myself doing the same thing: slouching on hard wooden stools, trying to keep my outbursts to a whisper because, for the most part, everyone around me hates—I mean, hates—the Jets. They may wonder why the one TV in the corner even has a game on that isn’t the Patriots. This is New England, after all.

Poems by Bruce Bond and Paintings by Aron Wiesenfeld

October 26, 2012 Poetry

Poems by BRUCE BOND and Paintings by ARON WIESENFELD

Scenic View

Woman on rock

The woman alone atop the precipice,

what does she fear more, falling or jumping,

Homesickness for “The Philadelphia Story” and Other Fictions

October 25, 2012 Essays

By OLIVIA WOLFGANG-SMITH

If it weren’t for its title, you’d be hard pressed to pin down the 1940 film The Philadelphia Story to a location. True to the traditions of theatre and the Hollywood Golden Age, the film’s sets are few and mainly interior. Socialite Tracy Lord teeters on the brink of remarriage, with a catty-charming ex-husband, populist tabloid reporter, and absentee father descending on her parents’ mansion for the occasion. The beloved characters, expertly played by Katharine Hepburn, Cary Grant, and Jimmy Stewart, hardly venture beyond their manicured lawns. They speak in their famous transatlantic voices, the fine-bred, trained accents of no town and no country. It sometimes seems that the film may as well have been set on the moon as in Pennsylvania—as long as there could still be fine drawing rooms and elegant patios, of course, for class conflicts play a much more vocal role in the film than regional color. The Philadelphia Story treats place much the way Tracy herself does: when Macaulay Connor asks, “Say, this is beautiful country around here. What is it all, anyway?” Tracy replies flippantly, “Oh, part of our place.” And on the story moves, as dismissive as Tracy herself.

The Road to Thunder Bay, Pt. 1

October 24, 2012 Dispatches

By JAMES A. GILL

This is the first part of a two-part Dispatch. Pt. 2 will be published online in November.

She slept for the first two hours of the trip, and when she woke up, the first thing she said was, “When we get back I want a divorce.” We were headed north with the hopes of going to Canada for no other reason than to say that we’d left the country. We’d decided on Thunder Bay, Ontario, because it was the closest destination across the border from our home in southern Illinois. And now, it seemed, the trip was doomed before we’d covered half the length of our own state.

The Views

October 23, 2012 Essays

By KOBUS MOOLMAN

Above all else, as a writer, I need a view. And it doesn’t have to be a view of anything particularly striking. If I think back to all the rooms I have worked in as a writer, and all the different views that each of those rooms looked out on, then certainly there have been no rolling hills or mist-swept vistas. Quite the opposite.