Anxiety

If I were face-up in the MRI machine, I’d see the cherry blossoms affixed to the ceiling. / But I’m face-down. / My arms are extended above my head. / A crane, I read this morning, can stay aloft for up to ten hours. / It barely needs to flap its wings.

The writer on her new novel, looking at the spectrum of privilege, and subverting female friendship tropes.

The life of mutant-pop songwriter Peter Ivers was really something.

Poets Enzensberger and Smith discuss politically engaged writing and their fondness for flops. Smith won a 2012 Pulitzer Prize for her collection, Life on Mars.

When the doorbell rings the boy sits in his room and grows short of breath. 

Ida Applebroog’s paintings master the secret of psycho-drama: always in the midst of an action, their denouement is left to our imagination and fears. Patricia Spears Jones speaks with the painter about the everyday violence that surrounds pop culture.

In Tenner’s view, it isn’t technology itself at fault, but rather our tendency to “anchor it in laws, regulations, customs, and habits,” coupled with an inability to anticipate the unintended and unpredictable interactions between individual components acting as a system. 

This First Proof contains an excerpt from the novel Already Dead.

Writers Donald Antrim and Thomas Bolt trade keys to iconoclasm and metaphor in Antrim’s novel, The Hundred Brothers.

“Because I’m such a Los Angeles brat, it’s about 18-year-olds, and it’s filled with that kind of like L.A. talk and shopping malls. My producer said it’s like a gay John Hughes movie directed by Godard.” Gregg Araki

When I looked in the bathroom mirror this morning, a crowd of people looked back. 

The pleasure Solovei took in the manner of Shea’s death, never mind that it was a suicide and Shea the very paradigm of what Solovei could not but help but helplessly think of whenever he, Solovei, had thought to set himself the meditation of what it must be to be the Gentile—oh so very big-boned, large-boned, heavy-boned, long and broad in all the central categories, the blithe inventor of every reckless declension, the very thing of this vexing life most lived.

The evening before the wedding I drove out to Eastern Long Island.