American South
The artist and documentarian on capturing the vernacular South.
Unseasonably exposed to fuchsia, / I left that Southern town / knotted to why-what / secrecy. # Like my / first time on a Ferris wheel.
On writing without moral objectives, Florida’s thunderstorms, and jobs both terrible and sublime.
A film uncovers an episode at the origins of the civil rights movement.
“I didn’t want to paint figuratively. I didn’t want something that was overtly referencing the social issues around me, but I wanted to find a way to describe them. How do you internalize this? How do you make a form that forces a painting to be an experience that is not necessarily easy to see, handle, or look at?”
A painter talks about portraits as love letters, the poetry of country music, addiction and compulsion, drawing out painful archetypes, and finding both resentment and dignity in daily life.
Congratulations to Ward on winning the 2017 National Book Award for Sing, Unburied, Sing.
Talking back to diagnosis
Life and death in a mining town in Kevin Canty’s The Underworld
“The reward is getting through the tough stuff. And that’s what’s perplexing about the art thing. When I was going to school there were kids that could draw their asses off. There were kids that were better draftsman than me, for certain. But no one was more determined than me.”
Sarah Gerard’s essay collection, Sunshine State, embodies Florida’s unpredictability in the best sense.
In the spring of 2015, An-My Lê was invited by film director Gary Ross to photograph on the set of Free State of Jones, his period war film inspired by the life of Newton Knight, a Mississippi farmer and Southern Unionist who led an armed revolt against the Confederacy in 1864.
Nicotine, the author’s third novel in as many years, dives into the world of East Coast anarchists.
“I think violence is inherited, it’s taught, and some of the characters are born into bad blood. …The characters are raped and so is the land.”
Fable and fact—an editor’s perspective on the poetry and cult of Frank Stanford.
