Display Format: Prose

The main prose format for posts.

A Curse on Chavez Ravine

by Lou Mathews

Posted on by Zack Ravas

I’m reading in the newspaper today and I see that Peter O’Malley wants to build a new football stadium, next to Dodger Stadium. Some of the neighbors are upset. ¡Que surprise! Some of them have been upset since the first O’Malley built the first stadium.That one was Walter. A big, smart, mean Irishman from Brooklyn.

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Pen Pals of the Pandemic, Unite!

by May-lee Chai

Posted on by Zack Ravas

My father at nearly 90 years of age can no longer safely live on his own so he has moved in with me, into my apartment in San Francisco. We’ve sold his home, auctioned off the lifetime accumulation of his possessions, boxed his books, stacked the remnants in storage. Then the pandemic hits and we can’t go to movies or museums or anything to break the tedium of being confined together in my small, studio apartment. Sartre thought he was being clever but not literal when he wrote No Exit, putting three narcissists in Hell made up of a single […]

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Ramiro

by Patricia Engel

Posted on by Zack Ravas

Ramiro will tell you himself he was just another slum kid from El Cartucho. He lived in a one-room apartment with his mother and another family of seven who let them take up a corner. They’d come from Pereira with Ramiro’s father when Ramiro was just beginning to walk, but his father got stabbed beneath

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‘Popular Longing’ by Natalie Shapero: To Remain in This Life

by Owen Torrey

Posted on by Zack Ravas

At the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston, you can see a picture frame with nothing in it. The frame is nice enough: gold and engraved, waiting in a light-filled room on the second floor of the gallery. In this spot, in 1990, two men smashed the glass of Rembrandt’s The Storm on the Sea of Galilee before cutting the canvas out of its stretcher and leaving with the stolen work in tow. The painting hasn’t been seen since. Still, the museum keeps the frame hanging: a symbol of its awaited return. In the longest poem in Popular Longing, the […]

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Locking Down with the Family You’ve Just Eviscerated in a Novel

by Julian Tepper

Posted on by Zack Ravas

On March 13, 2020, I was in Los Angeles, having flown there from New York for the launch of my latest novel. The event would take place at Book Soup on Sunset Boulevard, and we—my father, four brothers and stepmother, all locals, as well as my mother and son, who had come out west for

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‘Let Me Tell You What I Mean’ by Joan Didion: Telling Things As They Are

by Zack Ravas

Posted on by Zack Ravas

In times of crisis, we often look to the voice that is calm, rational, not prone to high emotion; perhaps it’s fortuitous, then, that a year into the global pandemic we’re receiving a new book from Joan Didion, one of our most controlled stylists—a writer known for her careful, neutral tone, and one who can observe an incident and report her findings with a precision that often belies the extremities of her subject matter. It’s right there in the title of this latest collection: Let Me Tell You What I Mean (149 pages; Knopf)—would readers really expect Didion to do […]

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‘Bring Me the Head of Quentin Tarantino’ by Julián Herbert: The Inevitability of Influence

by David Emmanuel

Posted on by Zack Ravas

It’s no surprise that Julián Herbert’s story collection, Bring Me the Head of Quentin Tarantino (167 pages; Graywolf Press), features a cast of questionable characters, gory violence, and punchy dialogue—all are hallmarks of the eponymous screenwriter’s films. Within the collection, the profane becomes sacred and the sacred is made profane: a Mexican official throws up on Mother Teresa, a photographer films “gonzo-porno-AIDS movies,” and a journalism professor masquerades as author M. L. Estefania. As diverse as the lives and professions of these characters are, they are all Mexican men who are seeking a better life by traveling outside the bounds […]

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‘An Inventory of Losses’ by Judith Schalansky: The Innumerable Items of the Past

by Lily Nilipour

Posted on by Zack Ravas

In the human endeavor of preservation, there is an intimate relationship between memory and those tasked with preserving it. In his essay “Between Memory and History: Les Lieux de Mémoire,” French historian Pierre Nora writes that “today…professional archivists have learned that the essence of their trade is the art of controlled destruction.” Among other things, this suggests that a true archivist has a love for not only what remains in the archive, but also what is lost. Memory is an art—the artist the recaller but also the forgetter. Judith Schalansky’s An Inventory of Losses (238 pages; New Directions), newly translated […]

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‘The Copenhagen Trilogy’ by Tove Ditlevsen: What Goes On Inside Other People

by Owen Torrey

Posted on by Zack Ravas

When Tove Ditlevsen died in 1976 from an overdose of sleeping pills, thousands gathered in Copenhagen for her funeral. There, beneath the chestnut trees, a crowd followed Ditlevsen’s coffin, remembering her life and legacy as one of the country’s most celebrated literary figures. In Denmark, Ditlevsen has since remained just as beloved as she was on that late March day. One of her novels, 1943’s Barndommens Gade, was voted a “Danish Book of the Century,” and her poetry and memoirs continue to be taught as part of the mandatory national literature curriculum. In the English-speaking world, however, chances to encounter […]

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‘Love is an Ex-Country’ by Randa Jarrar: An Unexpected Destination

by Kyubin Kim

Posted on by Zack Ravas

When we think of the American road trip novel, it’s easy to recall Jack Kerouac’s On the Road and the manic adventures of Sal Paradise and Dean Moriarty, traipsing from New York to San Francisco as carefree and self-destructive as white men in the Fifties were allowed to be. That was America for them. But Randa Jarrar’s road trip memoir, Love Is an Ex-Country (240 pages; Catapult), demands a re-landscaping of America for a queer Arab American woman. The road trip is not a linear starting point-to-destination; it’s an evolving struggle to claim and inhabit a home in a place […]

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Folk Tales: Lucie Elven on the inspiration behind ‘The Weak Spot’

by Lucie Elven

Posted on by Zack Ravas
Photo Credit: Sophie Davidson

It’s a cliché that bi-nationals never feel they really truly belong anywhere, that they always have another, unlived life ticking away in reserve in the back of their minds—mine’s in an emptying village in the most rural region of France. The Auvergne is a poor part of the country, wilder than the image of France abroad. As a child it seemed to me a place heavy with tradition and significance, the kinds you couldn’t determine for yourself but were imposed by others. Many generations of my family are buried in the graveyard up the road, and many neighbours are cousins. […]

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‘Girls Against God’ by Jenny Hval: Outside the Binary of Light and Dark

by Zack Ravas

Posted on by Zack Ravas

By the late ’80s in America, the term “heavy metal” conjured the image of bands who were as well known for their big hair and backstage antics as their music. It’s little wonder then that the Norwegian “black metal” scene felt like something new, with its shrieking vocals and monolithic riffs, and restoring some of the danger associated with the genre ever since Black Sabbath released their debut LP in 1970. The dark and sadistic imagery many of these bands conjured on their albums (sample song titles: “Necrolust” and “Deathcrush”) wasn’t simply for show, however, and by the late ’90s […]

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