Individual Medley

by Dale Davis

On the hillside west of the swimming pool, men with shovels followed the line of the fire, turning dirt onto glowing patches. Above them, on the ridge, a bulldozer clanked and roared as it cut a gap. The fire burned slowly through the dampened yellow grass, flaring only when a bush caught. Ashes lifted and

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It’s Nice to Be With You Always: Remembering Neeli Cherkovski

by Joshua Bodwell

“I am the way I am / because nobody could convince me / to be otherwise” — From “Hello,” by Neeli Cherkovski The first time I ever read the name Neeli Cherkovski was on my seventeenth birthday. My father gave me a copy of Charles Bukowski’s Septuagenarian Stew and there on the dedication page it declared: For Neeli Cherkovski. Years later, Neeli told me with a chuckle, “That’s the best line he ever wrote.” Shortly after gifting me Septuagenarian Stew, my father gave me his own old hardcover copy of Neeli’s biography of the poet, publisher, and bookseller Lawrence Ferlinghetti. […]

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More, more, more: ‘All Things Are Too Small,’ by Becca Rothfeld

by Marius Sosnowski

Hunger is a need. Desire is a need stylized, like hunger filtered through the imagination. But where hunger feeds function, desire seeks expression. Ever since Montaigne invented the form, great essays revel in their attempt to express desires and their ability to articulate the revelatory. Accordingly, great essays become food for the imagination. And a well-fed imagination, it follows, is good for all.   Full of verve, wit, and no shortage of voluble passion, Becca Rothfeld’s debut collection of essays, All Things Are Too Small (Metropolitan Books; $27.99), investigates today’s conditions of love and desire and suggests what it might take […]

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Down to a science

by Ben Greenman and ChatGPT

I am in a basement.I see. Is there anything specific you need assistance with while you are in the basement?I do need assistance, though perhaps not in the way you are thinking. Which raises an interesting question. Are you, in fact, thinking?As an AI language model, I do not “think” in the same way that

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Literary treat: ‘Bite By Bite,’ by Aimee Nezhukumatathil

by Jonah Raskin

There couldn’t be a better title for the latest book by Aimee Nezhukumatathil: Bite by Bite: Nourishments and Jamborees (Ecco; $26.99). This account by the author of the popular essay collection World of Wonders serves vivid, heartfelt vignettes about food and four generations of family—from her grandparents and parents to her children who devour the often distinct and wonderful fruits that their mother puts on the table with panache. Nezhukumatathil’s children may not know or remember that “jamborees” are defined as boisterous celebrations; aptly, the word has no known origin. She writes that her favorite fruit is the jackfruit, which […]

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Naked truths: ‘Tits Up,’ by Sarah Thornton

by Mieke Marple

Tits are back, baby. “Breasts,” a show of tits throughout the ages, just opened at the ACP Palazzo Franchetti in Venice for the Biennale. This comes on the heels of “Darker, Lighter, Puffy, Flat” at the Kunsthalle Wein, which examined the significance of breasts, from the maternal to the sexual to the biological. Last year, there was also “Boobs in Art” at Berlin’s DITTRICH & SCHLECHTRIEM, a comprehensive exhibition of 100 artists grappling with mammary glands that included a painting by Paula Modersohn-Becker from 1906, considered the first self-depicted nude by a woman. Sarah Thornton’s new book, Tits Up: What […]

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The Blue Angels / The Spirituals App

by David Roderick

The Blue AngelsHave you heard the sound of themduring Fleet Week the threat of our bruteaerial power flaying whole afternoonsin formation and turgid fumes over the Baymy friend at the Chron says they fly700 mph and 18 inches apartskimming the filigree of a sound barrieruntil they bang through foglike a truncheon hitting a skull I

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The Art of Stories: A Conversation with Steve Almond

by Christine Sneed

Steve Almond is one of the few writers whose books I await with genuine impatience, and his newest was no exception. I read Truth Is the Arrow, Mercy Is the Bow: A DIY Manual for the Construction of Stories (Zando; $18) in a few fervid sittings, underlining passage after passage, Almond’s characteristic wisdom and wry sense of humor wholly present in each of the book’s four sections. Truth Is the Arrow is an addictive blend of fiction-writing craft essays, writing prompts, and poignant reflections on the challenges and felicities of making a life as a writer. Almond is also the […]

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Parable of the Perfect Translator

by Kit Schluter

It happened with great simplicity, without affectation.— Virgilio PiñeraOne early May afternoon at a café on Rue Scribe, a strange man presented himself to the university students as France’s greatest translator. Yet when these students looked into the name this man had given, they could find no trace of either him or his work. The

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‘Limitarianism,’ by Ingrid Robeyns

by Jonah Raskin

Not that long ago, it would have been dangerous to denounce “extreme wealth,” as the Dutch scholar Ingrid Robeyns calls it in her new book, Limitarianism: The Case Against Extreme Wealth (Astra House; $28). But then along came the financial crisis of 2008, and the global Occupy movement that surfaced in 2011 and popularized the notion that one percent of the U.S. population controls most of the wealth—and that the 99 percent have been excluded from the American Dream. Soon, dozens of books, flooded the marketplace. Joseph Stiglitz’s The Price of Inequality (2012), T.M. Scanlon’s Why Does Inequality Matter? (2008), […]

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‘Nefando,’ by Mónica Ojeda

by Lillian Burnes Heath

Mónica Ojeda’s latest novel speaks in many different tongues, including Catalan slang and plain nonsense, and both its triumphs and challenges come from that. Translated from the Spanish by Sarah Booker, Nefando (Coffee House Press; $17.95) details the creation of a darkly twisted video game, the titular Nefando, by three siblings with satellite help from their trio of roommates in Barcelona: Kiki is the writer, her friend Iván is a master’s student with violent gender dysmorphia, and El Cuco Martinez, the most popular and chatty roomie, is a video game designer moonlighting as Robin Hood. Then there are the Teráns—Irene, […]

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The Köln Concert

by D.S. Waldman

We showed up with a U-Haul and a Prius and could not see the ocean. They lay it on thick there, a friend had said of Pacifica, two, three weeks at a time. We pulled off at the bluffs before taking our things to the cottage on Winona. Five hours it took for the cat

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