I enter Katharina Grosse’s latest installation at MASS MoCA and I am awed by the sheer dimension of the piece and by the intensity of the encounter.

In the ambitious stories in Shepard’s latest collection, You Think That’s Bad, psychological insight is derived from the characters’ exposure to extreme duress. Shepard discusses his short stories with fiction writer Christie Hodgen.

Writer Thomas Pletzinger and New York-musician Sufjan Stevens on life on the road, their favorite brooklyn haunts, and Pletzinger’s novel Funeral for a Dog.

Sebastián Silva’s highly realistic films are also thrillers. Set in Chile and performed by ensemble casts who replicate their counterparts in life with stunning veracity, his latest film, Old Cats, opens in New York this spring.

Musician and composer Robert Wyatt, renowned for his vocals and complex blends of pop, jazz, and world music, bridges the generation gap with the emerging “first lady of Arabic hip-hop” Shadia Mansour.

The two playwrights and performers on the drawbacks of being in constant production mode versus the pleasures of, and requirements for, the incubation of plays: a dose of folly and wonderment.

Inspired by a card in Brian Eno and Peter Schmidt’s 1975 deck of cards titled Oblique Strategies: Over One Hundred Worthwhile Dilemmas.

The man was doing chores when he noticed the first baby bird. His little boy was with him, in his arms, held against his hip.

This First Proof contains an excerpt from The Color of Night, by Madison Smartt Bell.

This First Proof contains four poems by Rebecca Wolff.

This First Proof contains three poems by John Tranter.

I zoom in on two of Jorge Queiroz’s drawings and think: vignettes gone awry, stories within stories, eyes and eyeballs looking in, inviting in. My eyes are drawn to the two graphic circles in the upper right of the first Untitled from 2010. 

I zoom in on two of Jorge Queiroz’s drawings and think: vignettes gone awry, stories within stories, eyes and eyeballs looking in, inviting in. My eyes are drawn to the two graphic circles in the upper right of the first Untitled from 2010. 

Uncanny, maybe. Troublemakers for sure. Between reality and fiction, Rona Yefman’s Let It Bleed brings us the flawless collaboration between photographer and actor, in this case, the artist and her sibling Gil. 

Hervé Le Tellier’s two recent works, Enough About Love and The Sextine Chapel, present an intellectual, geometrically woven, and wholly stimulating take on erotic-lit.

Sic Alps’ most recent album, Napa Asylum, is made up of the degenerate splendors of rock n’ roll—boxed wine, being broke, life on the road.

Danzig Baldaev, hired by the KGB to document tattoo symbolism within the Russian penal system, secretly sketched the atrocities inflicted on political prisoners. The drawings are now published in Drawings from the Gulag.

Zoe Leonard: You see I am here after all (2008) documents the artist’s two-and-a-half year Dia installation while expanding upon the art of mechanical reproduction.

Francine Prose’s novel, My New American Life, explores the story of Lula, an Albanian immigrant hired to nanny a motherless, morose teenage boy in the middle of the Bush/Cheney years.

Radical Light recounts the sprawling stories and diverse trajectories of Bay Area avant-garde artists, who formed an experimental cultural landscape through film and video.