Berfrois

Eli S. Evans: Is That It

Eli S. Evans: Is That It

Thanks, Berfrois...

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Elias Tezapsidis: Plato’s Academy

Elias Tezapsidis: Plato’s Academy

While I had much success in my multiple attempts to create relationships where I was the person switching the intimacy dimmer higher or lower based on how well my expectations...

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Crüe’s Cover

Crüe’s Cover

Evan calls them “bitchin’,” betraying his California roots and never-ending supply of boyishness. I embrace that Gen-X-y “meh”

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Amit Majmudar on Anthony Madrid

Amit Majmudar on Anthony Madrid

Not all limericks are not-quite-nonsense, but the most limerickish ones are. As Anthony Madrid, author of a new collection of limericks illustrated by Mark Fletcher, says in a short essay...

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Elias Tezapsidis: Return

Elias Tezapsidis: Return

The day that I returned to Greece after a decade in the US marked a grand failure, at least in my head. If I had written this three years ago

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The Poetry of the Present

The Poetry of the Present

It seems when we hear a skylark singing as if sound were running forward into the future, running so fast and utterly without consideration...

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SCREWBALLED

SCREWBALLED

Two ladies on an outing to the Queens Museum one weekend last fall wander into “The Art of Rube Goldberg” exhibition. They enter casually and chuckle at a monitor playing a few moments from Charlie Chaplin’s Modern Times.

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Cry On My Stomach

Cry On My Stomach

The title of Elaine Kahn’s new collection, Romance or The End (Soft Skull Press, 2020), feels like an ultimatum. Traditionally—heteronormatively—the end comes just after the wedding

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Eric D. Lehman on Karl Ove Knausgaard

Eric D. Lehman on Karl Ove Knausgaard

When I picked up the first book in Karl Ove Knausgaard’s autobiographical series My Struggle, I had an unusual reaction: “It’s boring”...

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Elias Tezapsidis: Election Cabaret

Elias Tezapsidis: Election Cabaret

On a Sunday atypical of the usual routine, a lot was felt. A typical Sunday routine consists solely of coffee and reading the newspaper front to back as if the Internet did not exist...

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Joe Linker on Jeremy Fernando

Joe Linker on Jeremy Fernando

A writer likely will have, like Jeremy Fernando’s grandfather apparently had, a skin condition, an itch. If so, writing is the only lotion that will solve, salve, the skin problem.

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Writing Differently

Writing Differently

Danilo Kiš famously observed that the western bracketing of Balkan literature as narrowly ‘political’ rested on a set of mutually reinforcing stereotypes.

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Jessica Sequeira: A Wager with Nectar

Jessica Sequeira: A Wager with Nectar

You can get a sense of the tone of this book before even opening it. The title, a dizzy mirror and paradoxical double, casts into doubt fixed ideas of both “India” and “translation”...

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A loss in the vocabulary of attention…

A loss in the vocabulary of attention…

I am 18 years old. It’s the first week of college. I’m sitting in the third row. The classroom is overflowing — students are spilling out of benches, their voices bigger than their bodies — when the professor walks in.

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