With a Care

I came to realize in a series of waves the enormous impact this pandemic would have on the domestic workforce. The first was quite early on, before the travel ban, school closures, and state shutdowns.
Read MoreStay Sileni

In Titian’s early 16th century painting, as Meis reads it, the somnolent Silenus, who echoes the alert god’s posture as he is carried behind him by his followers...
Read MoreClose Reading Bob Dylan by Ed Simon

Temperamentally conservative poetry critic David Lehman chose only one lyric by Bob Dylan to include in his 2006 The Oxford Book of American Poetry.
Read MoreJanice Lee: After Benny

When I was a child, I didn't see the connection between dreams and life the way I do now. I didn’t see the way that parallel realities influence each other...
Read MoreJane Rosenberg LaForge: Spring Without Witness

This spring has arrived with a disturbing similarity, behind the storm and soundproof windows of my New York apartment. Jesus rises, Jews are delivered...
Read MoreEd Simon: VE Day 75 Years Later

If the lesson from World War II can’t be that the Allies were unassailably good, it can still be that the Axis was unambiguously evil.
Read MoreEmily Ogden: Mind Games

A Greek soldier once said to me on a private bunk in a ferry boat, “You are a good whore.” Well, I mean to say. This was absurd. I had bedded him.
Read MoreQuaintspace

By the time many writers were ready to seriously engage with surveillance capitalism, it had already redescribed their profession, along with the world.
Read MoreWho is free from Melancholy?

Melancholy is a condition unsuited to a pandemic. Like ennui, it is an ailment born of stability. The strong light of catastrophe withers it.
Read MoreCam Scott on Robert Glück

“In the 1430s, Margery Kempe wrote the first autobiography in English. She replaced existence with the desire to exist,” writes Robert Glück...
Read MoreAnandi Mishra: The Self in Quarantine

I was just wetting my toes into the sands of self-isolation in Delhi, when a putrid smell came along, an estrangement within another estrangement.
Read MoreIn these days of solitude and waiting…

Statue of Dietrich Bonhoeffer in Hamburg, Germany. via Flickr/KeokiSeu (cc) by Stephen R. Haynes Why did 13 people make their way to my campus on a dreary February evening in 2020 for a new class I was teaching on a long-dead German theologian called Dietrich Bonhoeffer? We obviously shared...
Read MoreNicholas Rombes: X’ed Out and Vivarium

Both X’ed Out and Vivarium assume an other world that leaks into the main frame world where most of the action happens...
Read MoreJulian Hanna: Do It Now

If you want to garden and you’re able, do it now. If you want revolution and you’re able, do it now...
Read MoreEli S. Evans: The Writer vs. the Pandemic II

I am “working” from “home,” in bed, when I have a cough that may or may not be dry but is definitely not wet. My stomach drops...
Read MoreRachel Howard: Midnight Sun

California has been ordered to shelter in place. And here we are, 50 miles from our home, buying chickens. A last act before lockdown.
Read More(More) Advice for Isolated Writers

We are day five into the long game of self isolation. Or is it day ten? I’m not sure when the quarantine actually started.
Read MoreEternity, Hell, Angels

Current conversations about the essay—and there are many—emphasize the provisional, speculative nature of the genre, the suggestion of a test, a tryout.
Read MoreAlbert Rolls: Pynchon in the Low Countries

Martin Eve is able to demonstrate in “Historical Sources for Thomas Pynchon’s ‘Peter Pinguid Society’” that Pynchon consulted a single source...
Read MoreEli S. Evans: The Writer vs. the Pandemic

If you played an instrument before the pandemic, but so badly that it would not have occurred to you to publicly disseminate videos of yourself playing it...
Read MoreThe tea should be strong. For a pot holding a quart, if you are going to fill it nearly to the brim, six heaped teaspoons would be about right...
Read MoreThe thing about new blooms is that they tend to bleed— / Those petals birthed / hugging close / that come warmer weather are tricked into jumping away...
Read MoreI spent a good part of my childhood at home staring outside my bedroom window, following the trail of planes approaching the nearby Paris airport in the sky from my banlieue. I envied the passengers...
Read MoreThe tea should be strong. For a pot holding a quart, if you are going to fill it nearly to the brim, six heaped teaspoons would be about right...
Read MoreThe thing about new blooms is that they tend to bleed— / Those petals birthed / hugging close / that come warmer weather are tricked into jumping away...
Read MoreI spent a good part of my childhood at home staring outside my bedroom window, following the trail of planes approaching the nearby Paris airport in the sky from my banlieue. I envied the passengers...
Read More