In the past five years a magazine from Dallas, Texas, has made a small but palpable stir in the world of literary journals, publishing stories, poems, and essays by some of the most exciting writers from several Latin American countries, including Ecuador, Mexico, Bolivia, and Colombia, in addition to some extraordinary voices from the United States. Southwest Review, for anyone paying attention...
To study Nicolas Cages rise is also to study Francis Ford Coppolas fall from grace. You cannot write about one without the other. In the early to mid-80s, their trajectories were almost conversely linkedCage siphoning power from his uncles desperate need to work, like Michael Corleone growing stronger with the Godfathers faltering health. Except it wasnt Coppolas physical health that was...
Here is Rosebud Yellow Robe, a confident, handsome gentlewoman in early middle-age, looking off to her right, apparently indifferent to her portraitist. She wears a loose elk-skin ceremonial dress with beaded figures of cavalrymen and warriors worked in on fine sinew. It is a representation of the Battle of Little Bighorn, in which her grandfather had fought. If you were a child in New York in...
It’s odd to think that this history of artist David Edward Byrd started with a trip to the bathroom… but it did. However, this visit to the john was far removed from much of the history youre about to read. It didnt take place in the artist hatchery of 1960s Carnegie Tech (later Carnegie Mellon University), where Byrd studied. It wasnt among the grimy streets of New York, where Byrd first created...
When I was 25, I moved to the Netherlands from London.The reasons were two. I wanted to be with my Dutch partner, and I wanted to have a go at writing. Moving abroad, starting a new life with someone, leaving my jobin publishing, stepping into the void of a writing career: it was the kind of leap that you only take when youre young. But even if you muster the courage, theres still nobody to tell...
Childrens books have always been an important part of my life. They made a reader out of me, starting not with the Dick and Jane books, which even as a child I thought were silly, but with fairy tales, and picture books like Paddle to the Sea, and with a wonderful anthology of stories and poems called Beloved Tales that my parents gave me for Christmas. I still have that book, though the cover is...
November 17, 2023, 11:53am In further evidence of Mayor Eric Adams’s absolutely disastrous run as mayor of New York City, it was announced yesterday that the New York Public Library system will see widespread Sunday closures of many branches as a resulting of a 5 percent budget cut (amounting to almost $40 million). This is truly terrible and misguided. Full stop. Budget will also be cut for...
Lingering elegiac evenings of the summer solstice, when the parted day slips behind the mountains to the north like a child hiding behind a sofa, are the best for exploring the valley of Ballynakill Lake. Elements of this little world apart that might not be noticed at other times become quietly insistent on presenting themselves, and those prominent by daylight sink back into obscurity. The...
I am good at many things. I can grow vegetables, bake from scratch, cook for a family or a dinner party without embarrassing myself. I can read maps and navigate foreign cities and make minor household repairs. I can do a headstand and paint a room and tile a backsplash and operate a jackhammer. Im an excellent driver, a fine teacher and a compelling public speaker. I can carry a tune and not...
An extended community nurtured the achievements of The Sisterhood. Many other Black feminist groups and individual intellectuals in the 1970s and early 1980s shared The Sisterhoods goals of publication and publicity for Black women writers, as well as the belief that political and social change could and should be made through culture. In this larger network of Black women literary activists, the...