Storytelling
Several years ago, I began reading books about how to write books.
The crisply constructed short stories for which David Means has become renowned are high and tight. His new—and first—novel, Hystopia, is something shaggier, departing, in its theoretical approach, from the New Yorker School of Fiction for the emerging field of narrative medicine, in which testimonies of trauma are inherently wooly and chaotic rather than refined and concise.
“I intended The Fugitives to be as close to a zero-research book as possible. I decided that if I couldn’t find something with Google in ten minutes, then I should forget it, or make it up.”
We gathered around you while you told ghost stories. It was a familiar, reflexive, ancient act to draw close to the beat and the voice. When the drummer tripped out a beat, your speech became a song.
Claire of the Sea Light and the mysteries the ancestors share.
On Siegel’s film Provenance and its insertion into the global circuit of art and design objects.
Kelly Copper and Pavol Liska of Nature Theater of Oklahoma on their series Life & Times, new episodes of which will be presented this September by FIAF as a part of its Crossing the Line festival.
Mia Engberg discusses her latest film, Belleville Baby, and trusting the filmmaking process.
Sung Hwan Kim’s The Tanks at Tate Modern uses mixed media to challenge reality, and how the artist and the viewer are both figments of the imagination.
“The reason I am writing fiction is so that I can tell the truth from a vantage point that allows me some space.”
“I think that ‘consciousness’ is thinner than we like to believe.”
“You can renovate your soul and change your behavior and lie to yourself, but maybe the face is the last frontier of truth. There’s only so much that plastic surgery can do for you.”
After a lunch consisting of meatballs, rice, and lemonade, Francis Alÿs coordinates the afternoon plans for his son Elliot. The main activity is soccer practice, but Alÿs determines it’d be best to get to homework right away.
I first learned of Joanna Newsom when I read a review in the UK’s Observer six years ago. I was initially struck by her beauty, and I was inspired by knowing that she was “in the world.”
This First Proof contains the short story “My Life with Cars,” by Erica Hunt.
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.
Check out two exclusive videos from the collaborative artists and then read their discussion with Craig Kalpakjian, featured in Issue 115.
“The true star of this collection is not plot or characters, it’s storytelling itself: the weird literary ventriloquism we perform as we divide out the speaking roles of our inner lives.” Andrew Zornoza reviews Lynne Tillman’s Someday This Will be Funny.
