Frances McDormand has acted in the Coen Brothers’s Blood Simple, and Raising Arizona.

Set against Robert Frank’s Cocksucker Blues, A.M. Homes and artist Gregory Crewdson scrape the layers off suburban homes, revealing the surreal, the pornographic, and the psycho-sexual desires in her novel, The End of Alice.

Winner of the Cannes 1995 Camera d’Or, The White Balloon by Iranian filmmaker Jafar Panahi brings drama and humor to a seven-year-old’s quest for a New Year’s fish.

Padgett Powell is one of the funniest men alive. If he weren’t such a great writer—Edisto, Edisto Revisited—he could always be a comedian. V. Hunt tracks the laughs.

With his ten CD box set, Testament: A Conduction, composer/conductor Butch Morris gives voice to the collective imagination and re-envisions the way we hear music.

“What has held my interest in performance art for over twenty years is not simply marveling at the weird things artists think up to do, but attempting to understand the motivation for these works of art.”

The Bohen Series on Critical Discourse. John Elderfield, Chief Curator-at-Large of the Museum of Modern Art, speaks with philosopher David Carrier about Matisse, Mondrian, Prud’hon and contemporary theories of taste and interpretation.

Malcolm Morley discusses growing up in London during the war and making realism abstract with Richard Francis. 

Thomas Nozkowski’s paintings sit between the authentic and the fabricated. This is because they are a product of his struggle against the entropy of abstract painting’s own history. 

The worst will come tomorrow
When we load the saddle horses.

Brutus had intense yellow eyes that locked onto yours when he looked at you and cocked his head, but his eyes were closed when he was on the operating table. Joe had the OR nurse cover him with blue sheets and only his feathery, mottled tail stuck out. Joe was operating on his leg.

These New York City pigeons
cooing in the air shaft

Survived the war but
was having trouble

As lately pattern had developed, Ciam awoke with the dawn, and went out for his morning jaunt.

Say for instance you’re a girl/    but citified/    a hard sister

All images by Archie Rand, excerpts from a novel, Appointment in Wipe-Ola, 1993.

This article is only available in print.

They lay side by side on the driveway, almost napping. Wyatt K., typically, hadn’t shown up yet; the boy was always late.

Every few days Fanya made some motion to leave; she began to gather the cosmetics she had spread over the dresser-top in Tami’s and Nachum’s bedroom, or she asked for the telephone number of a taxi company for the Jerusalem/Tel Aviv route.

each is beautiful
a woman’s life

At night I hear the dog bark
the wind blows my swing

You can’t tell a book by its cover, agreed, but imagine flipping open the “book” of television and discovering a Poem there?!?

I found the toilet igloos; inside, wood.

I had never met Quentin Carr.

Artist Tina Girouard spent several years traveling to Haiti to work with Vodou sequin artists. Along the way, she became a “Mambo of Art,” inducted into the Vodou ceremony. Excerpts from her journal.

Wish we could, but we can’t include all the droll anecdotes from our interviews. Space provided, we’d print them all; however, we’ve saved a few because we thought you’d be amused.