A feature by Éric Chevillard
Meanwhile, outside, nature takes its course. Today all our landscapes resemble a Chernobylian Eden. Animal species threatened by poaching, deforestation, and man’s innumerable destructive activities are reassembling their packs, their flocks, their herds, their hordes. A drone reportedly captured an image of a dodo frolicking in the Loir-et-Cher region. Or was it a baby phoenix?
A feature by Éric Chevillard
Now, the anxiety that comes with menace and peril doesn’t prevent us from also feeling that bitter yet very real pleasure of cancellation. Because everything that must be experienced, everything we have to make time for, these patiently constructed plans, all these prospects disturb us too. Simply because it’s coming, because it’s inescapable, because there’s no way to get past it without going through it, the smallest scheduled event vexes us like a dark omen. . .
A feature by Éric Chevillard
In a storage closet I found a big bag of masks, a treasure of incalculable worth in these times when they are critical to our survival and yet so difficult to procure. There’s one small hitch, which is that they’re Zorro masks left over from a costume party I held in the garden some years ago. Now, we all know the mask of Zorro is a deceitful bedfellow, hiding only the top of your face, leaving your nose and mouth exposed. All it protects is your anonymity, in other words, and I’m not sure the killer virus targets its victims so precisely, nor that it chooses them based on looks. And so, since even the tightest-lipped mutes can still let out a nasty cough, the intrepid Don Diego de la Vega could have been fatally contaminated by his faithful servant Bernardo. . .
A feature by Éric Chevillard
So yes, it’s inevitable, every writer working today is keeping a quarantine journal. It’s a required subject. It’s the only subject. Do not condemn us: it’s by writing that we develop our antibodies. The hippopotamus rolls in the mud to protect his delicate leather from ultraviolet rays. If he didn’t, he would turn pink and we would laugh at him. Nobody would confuse him with the rhinoceros anymore, and he likes being mistaken for that brute; it gives him courage. The writer has similar reflexes. He carries himself onto the page, and there he forges his weapons, his tools of resistance. . .
A feature by Jan Wilm
The dreams are dead, there’s only yesterday. And yet, the snow lies before me, and you lie behind me. In my deserted city, like a fiction you lie behind me. Before me, ahead of me, in an airport-sized edifice on a hill in Los Angeles, on paper, there lies the snow. Without wanting to be there, I’m there, and there is now here. Without wanting to be here, I’m here, punished under the sky-high palm trees, my home at home in ruins, shattered, driven into the ashes. Having to go to summer camp on Monday morning when your parents yelled at each other on Sunday night. . .
A feature by Sofia Samatar
For me, the space of writing has always been visual. When I am starting a new piece, I usually see images before anything else (for example: a tropical farm, an animal or a person, an illustration in a children’s book). Often these images are vivid, but sometimes they are blurry or faint, so that I can’t completely make them out. As I write, they begin to define themselves, coming more strongly into view. I see a short story or a novel as a space, not as a linear set of events.
A feature by Brent Hayes Edwards
Eclectic and captivating, Joseph Jarman’s 1977 Black Case is perhaps the most extraordinary of an efflorescence of literary publications by jazz musicians in the 1970s. Although it includes a selection of Jarman’s verse, the book is more capacious and variegated than a poetry collection. It is equally a spiritual Baedeker, a compendium of “old new prayers” that opens with a repeated supplication (“we pray o God / for the ego / death / and that the power / of the evil vibration / be taken / from our presence”) that Jarman kept taped on the wall above his desk for decades. At the same time, it can be described as an organizational statement: Black Case includes some of the earliest declarations of the aspirations of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM), the influential collective founded in 1965 in Chicago by Muhal Richard Abrams, Jodie Christian, Steve McCall, and Phil Cohran. As such, Black Case is also a manifesto, the “theme song of a new breed. . .”
A feature by Greg Gerke
I don’t know when I developed the habit of veering in and out of multiple books at the same time, but for at least as long, I’ve been inclined to deride the practice. I’d just come down from Swann’s Way and a long season given over mostly to poetry and essays when I slapped down an injunction—I should really get back to Patrick White, maybe the most under-read and underrated English-language novelist of our time. So I began his 1973 novel, The Eye of the Storm. Yet, I read slowly—more than just a “page-hugger,” as Gary Lutz would say, I grasp the page for an uncomfortably long time, checking the texture of the paper and the number of sailboaty y’s per line, hovering over the author’s punctuation and other foibles before proceeding. . .
A feature by Fernanda Melchor
As I’ve mentioned, this prize has enormous importance to me given both the personal story and work of Anna Seghers herself, in particular owing to the relevance of migration to her work: not merely as a theme but as a central ethical concern. . .
A feature by G.C. Waldrep
I met Christopher Cerrone in 2015 at the MacDowell Colony. Cerrone’s innovative opera Invisible Cities had premiered only a short time before, in 2013, with the happy result, for him, of being named a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in music the following year. I was fascinated with Cerrone’s work: the way it partook of the legacies of both Romanticism and serialism and, above all, Cerrone’s facility in setting English texts. As a trained singer who later became a poet, I know all too well how hard it is to set English text effectively. That Cerrone can do it, effectively—he can even make it seem effortless—made him and his work stand out to me, even among the other musical visitors at MacDowell. . .
A feature by Cecilie Seiness
Yes, a lot has happened over the past ten years. So much was happening that I had to take a break from writing. I experience things in life, and I experience things when I write. What I experience when I write has as great an impact, if not greater, than what I experience in life. To write is to dream while awake, to place oneself in a controlled dreamlike state where one advances by listening. So I didn’t want to write in a fragile period, one where I had stopped drinking and had recently converted. I would first have to return to my usual reality.
A feature by Efrén Ordóñez
Guadalupe Nettel: That collection of stories, which will be published in the United States at the start of 2020 as Bezoar by Seven Stories Press, translated by Suzanne Jill Levine, brings together stories that I wrote in my youth, and I think it’s one of the books that best represents me. It’s really a personal reflection on beauty, the beauty of anomaly. As human beings, we tend to hold a very limited idea of our own beauty. We believe what we’re told by advertisements and fashions. They form us. Conversely, when we look at plants or trees, our minds become far more flexible and open. We don’t judge them in the same way. We’re more receptive to the presence of trees and their unique character. We don’t think: “That tree should be taller and slimmer and have more leaves up there and less down there.” We simply let the tree be and appreciate its beauty. The characters in these stories are somewhat monstrous – some of them physically, others in their behavior – and that is what makes them appealing, moving even, but they themselves spend their whole time trying to make sure no one notices. They try with all their might to be “normal” in order to survive in a world that strives to standardize, that represses difference.
In tribute to the great translator George Craig, who died in March of this year, Music & Literature is publishing the following excerpt from Writing Beckett’s Letters, Craig’s reflections on the process of translating Samuel Beckett’s letters from French into English for Cambridge University Press. Writing Beckett’s Letters was originally published as no. 16 of The Cahiers Series (Sylph Editions, 2011).
A feature by Dan Gunn
This month, Music & Literature pays tribute to the great translator George Craig. A professor of French at the University of Sussex for thirty years, Craig translated and co-edited the four volumes of Samuel Beckett’s letters published by Cambridge University Press. His former student, co-editor, and friend of over forty years, Dan Gunn, delivered this eulogy at Craig’s funeral on 1 April 2019 in Lewes, Sussex.
A feature by Mira Rosenthal
Litery has many themes, one of which is time. When I wrote the poems, it seemed to me that I was telling a deep truth about what I went through in and around 2016. It seemed to me that the only way to stop time for a moment was to cast a spell on those moments, the minutes of my life, and to transform them into letters. Now, when I look at those poems, I feel like I succeeded, and I see them as if they are amber, each one with a small insect submerged inside forever. I am that insect. . .
My friend Benjy made the gloaming, all-windows building that is on the cover of a book I wrote and that inspired the architecture of the shack I built and inhabited for a while in Tennessee. The cottage he built shines like someone is arriving in the moonlight, but the window framing on my shack is salvaged gray wood, spongy soft and without a good gleam. Before I move to Chicago I take a bus down to Tennessee to visit him. His house is similar, cedar slats and old barn windows for a greenhouse, row after row of flowers I can’t identify, steps up the hillside so the top opens to a garden like the bottom does.
David Auerbach: You clearly took joy in writing your version of Keats. Is The Warm South fan fiction of a sort?
Paul Kerschen: No doubt! There must also be a touch of Frankenstein in my resurrecting him for my own purposes. I gained and lost a great deal over the course of writing, but whatever the endpoint, it did at least start from a felt intimacy with Keats’s own words, and perhaps in that respect it isn’t too much worse a distortion than other kinds of reading.
A feature by Yevgenia Belorusets
Yevgenia Belorusets is a Ukrainian photographer who lives between Kyiv and Berlin. Her photographic work calls attention to the more vulnerable sections of Ukrainian society: queer families, out-of-work coal miners, the Roma, people living in the warzone in the East. She has just published a book of stories called Fortunate Fallings, about women living in the shadow of the now-frozen, now-thawing conflict in the Ukrainian East, the result of Russian military intervention after the Kyiv Maidan of 2014. The book’s linguistic eclecticism—the stories are in Russian but the publisher and packaging are Ukrainian—silently defies hardline cultural propaganda in both countries. Apart from being political, Fortunate Fallings is also an astonishingly intelligent, moving, and exquisitely written work of ironic European literature. The publishing house Matthes & Seitz will issue it in Germany in the fall; meanwhile, we have translated two stories from it into English, as well as asking the Russian writer Maria Stepanova to review the whole. . .
A feature by Will Alexander
SL: Obviously, I’m drawn to language that works on several levels at the same time. Maybe the poetic properties are there and I’m the one who unearths them. Or maybe I impose my own musical and poetic sensibilities onto unmusical material. I don’t know that it matters. When I was working on The Hideous Hidden, even other poets found it hard to imagine that one could find music in glands!
A feature by Elodie Olson-Coons
I first wrote to Claude Ber when I became acquainted with her startling, fragmentary meditation on grief, La mort n’est jamais comme (Death Is Never Like), which won the Prix international de poésie francophone Yvan-Goll in 2004. The book already had an English translator, she wrote back, but perhaps I’d be interested in her latest work? A thin cream paperback from Éditions de l’Amandier came in the mail shortly afterwards, signed. . .
