When he was 12, he was voted
Most likely to become Satan’s spawn
By the other sixth graders at Gesù
Catholic School in Northy. Lucas
We’re celebrating the release of Issue 01 in New York! Join us on May 10th at BookCourt in Brooklyn for readings by contributors Fiona Maazel and Ted Conover. Meet other local TC contributors, editors, and Brooklyn-based designer Gabriele Wilson, who will be taking postcard suggestions for the next cover (we supply the postcards; you supply the suggestions). The event begins at 7 p.m. and is free and open to the public.
Meet us afterward at 61 Local (61 Bergen Street) for drinks and some fun.
Come pick up your very own copy of red hot issue 01!
HANNAH GERSEN interviews ROLAND KELTS
Aside from Haruki Murakami, much of Japanese writing remains unknown in the U.S., simply because it is not translated into English. Now, thanks to collaboration between the Brooklyn-based literary magazine, A Public Space, and the Tokyo-based literary magazines, Monkey Business, a special English-language edition of Monkey Business is available in the US. This special edition, called “New Voices from Japan”, will showcase the best of the magazine’s first three years of publication and will include stories, poetry, and non-fiction, including an interview with Murakami.
As Stuart Dybek writes in a letter introducing the issue: “The books and anthologies that line my shelves attest to the fact that we live in a golden age of translation. Even so, it’s rare to have a literary magazine like Monkey Business appear in English. It arrives with the sense of discovery and immediacy that one reads literary magazines for.”
AMSTERDAM
October 21, 1998
Dear Diary,
My 39th birthday was spent in the airport, but walking down Herengracht I thought, “Happy Birthday.” Not too excited being here. Looks like just another New York City to me. Of course, it’s dark. We’ll see what daylight brings.
Men in red vests enter in the wake of the crowd’s leaving,
their sneakers rustling hollow soda cups and corndog sleeves.
This is the dingy hush of half-eaten pretzels, half-empty
popcorn buckets. When the crew has finished clearing debris
Book by TEJU COLE
Reviewed by
In Teju Cole’s Open City, Julius, a young Nigerian-German psychiatrist living in New York, wanders the city. For Julius, “the walks [meet] a need: they [are] a release from the tightly regulated mental environment of work….Every decision—where to turn left, how long to remain lost in thought…—[is] inconsequential, and [is] for that reason a reminder of freedom.” For readers, Julius’ meandering serves as a platform for meditations on history, art, human suffering, race, and culture, and the cumulative effect is anything but inconsequential. To call Open City a novel is like calling the White House a house: although it’s structured around a protagonist, it is driven by perceptiveness, the agility with which it moves from one idea to another, and its humanity.
Deb Olin Unferth likes to change it up. Her first book was the story collection Minor Robberies, then came the novel Vacation, and this winter she published a memoir. Revolution: The Year I Fell in Love and Went to Join the War, like much of her other work in other forms, tells a daring story rife with humor and touched with melancholy, desire, and regret.
In a long, low building with a tin roof, people from this village turn clamshells into buttons. Beyond the broken windows lie middens of clamshells, punctuated with precise and uniform holes. The gravel mixes with broken shells and thick, pale unfinished buttons.
Join us at the Brooklyn Book Festival, the “largest free literary event in New York City,” on September 18. Enjoy themed readings, panel discussions, and book signings, all at beautiful Brooklyn Borough Hall.
In Greece, people visit islands. There are a lot of islands to visit. They head for beaches, coastline, the sea, to lie on the shore and look out at the water. But to find an island, you should really look inland. The island is the thing behind you. Turn around.
On a small Cycladic island, a second home for me by marriage, I swelter by the beach. Idyllic, busy, and anonymous. A limited sense of context: a watery horizon; sand; shops, bars and restaurants. At 40°C in the shade, it’s all swimming costumes and ice cream and plastic toys.
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