November 2014

At one point near the end of his unfinished novel Jean Santeuil, Marcel Proust describes a painting by Claude Monet from 1897, titled “Bras de Seine près de Giverny”. It shows, in the painter’s hazy and colorful style, the branch of a river as it peacefully makes its way...

I’d rather it was an adventure novel, or a sex-romp novel. As it is, you’ve got me holed up in a rather ratty motel (not even hotel!) for three days, drinking bourbon every time a reader picks up the book and reads about me drinking bourbon.

No one perhaps has ever felt passionately towards a lead pencil. But there are circumstances in which it can become supremely desirable to possess one; moments when we are set upon having an object, an excuse for walking half across London between tea and dinner.

My father wrote his share of poems in high school in India. He still recites verses—though never his own—in Punjabi on occasional late evenings. My mother, the daughter of a schoolteacher and at the top of her high school class in a village not far from my father’s, could...

One evening during the westward retreat of the defeated Austro-Hungarian forces, he announced his own intention to shoot himself, but was forcefully disarmed by his comrades. His committal followed on October 6, and he died in hospital on November 3. His medical file lists the cause of death, complete...

I write in my rental apartment on Rue de Seine in Paris, while trying to simultaneously ignore the tolling of the church bells in my vicinity as well as the continuous barking of my next door neighbor, Georges. I have never seen him or his owners; however, given...

Jewish-American comedy, in particular, has Eastern European and Germanic roots. It came over from Europe; and in many ways, as Jews became more and more assimilated, Jewish comedy became… American comedy. It lost a lot of its ethnic particularity and has, to a major extent, become generic. Nonetheless, Jewish-Americans...

by Lauren Berlant I experimented with taking a day off. It was likely to be a failure, because it had to be an experiment, as I have no habits of leaving the desk, only habits of clawing a path back to it, which is odd because I never leave...

The best way to encounter Tara Donovan’s work for the first time may be by accident. I walked into her show at Pace on a whim (I had come for Joel Shapiro next door) and was immediately transported into her world, or rather the two worlds of her massive...

Our new sister publication, Queen Mob’s Teahouse, is now open for submissions.