The issue also features work from Sarah A. Strickley, Mary-Beth Hughes, Tania James, Matthea Harvey, Kathleen Ossip, W.G. Sebald, and Bin Ramke, among others.
Refreshments will be served and issues will be available for purchase.
]]>Spufford's latest book is Red Plenty (Graywolf, 2012), an impressive examination of the ideals and ideologies behind the construction of the Soviet Union.
APS founding editor Brigid Hughes will moderate. Books will be available for purchase.
]]>Matthea most recently collaborated with Amy Jean Porter on the delightfully odd Of Lamb.
APS 15 (due out in February), includes a brave and poignant essay by Leslie Jamison on the WM3 case and the human beings at the center of it.
Columbia University will screen the third installment of the series, Purgatory, followed by a conversation with filmmaker Bruce Sinofsky.
The time of this event is TBA. Find more information here.
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Thank you to everyone—writers, readers, supporters, mentors, friends—who has been a part of
A Public Space this past year. Please join us for another year of art and argument, fact and fiction, by contributing to our annual fundraising campaign, or giving a subscription to all the writers, readers, travelers, and dreamers on your list this holiday season.1878: Eadweard Muybridge photographs the racehorse Sallie Gardener at a gallop. John Haskell’s essay “The Persistence of Muybridge” appears in APS 12: “I believed I could find, somewhere in his armor of control, a crack, and in that crack I could find his desire, and by giving him that desire, I could make him happy.”
1886: Arthur Rimbaud writes Illuminations. John Ashbery’s translation appears in APS 13.
1887: Walt Whitman’s poems are the subject of a Contemporary Humor column in the Brooklyn Daily Eagle. Omaha Girl: “Why, they are not even rhymed.” Eastern Man: “Nevertheless they are marvels, considering that they were written in a place where the poet had to stop between every word to fight mosquitoes.” Therese Stanton imagines the poet’s swarming tormentors in APS 14.
]]> 1903: Marcel Proust and Jean Gabriel-Louis Pringué attend a party hosted by MMe Deiulaffoy (“the only woman in France then authorized to wear male attire”). Jeffrey Lependorf translates Pringué’s Trente ans de dîners en ville, the socialite’s memoir about the people and parties that Proust fictionalizes for In Search of Lost Time in APS 12.1909: The Grand Concourse in the Bronx is completed. One hundred years later, Katie Holten walks the four and a half mile boulevard with a forester, selecting one hundred trees for her Tree Museum. Robert Sullivan reports on the project, public art in the city, and chance connections in APS 13.
1932: Eva Zeisel, living in Berlin and, according to her grandmother, inebriated on amusements, decides to visit Moscow to “see what was beyond the mountain.” Accused of plotting to assassinate Stalin, she is arrested in 1936 and held for sixteen months. Shortly before her 105th birthday, her Prison Memoir is published in APS 14.
1957: Photographer W. Eugene Smith moves into 821 Sixth Avenue in New York City and begins recording life in the building, a late-night haunt of jazz musicians. APS contributor Sam Stephenson spends a decade researching Smith’s archives for The Jazz Loft Project, and A Public Space collaborates with him and director Chris McElroen on Chaos Manor, a multimedia theater installation based on the book, in September 2011.
1976: John Gardner reviews Charles Newman in the Washington Post, calling him “one of the most interesting, intelligent, and, I suspect, secretly optimistic prophets of doom now writing fiction.” A Public Space partners with the Brooklyn Philharmonic to present a concert inspired by his novella “The Five-Thousandth Baritone” (APS 11) in January 2011.
1979: Jane Byrne is elected mayor of Chicago. APS 14 contributor (and Chicago native) Peter Orner’s novel Love and Shame and Love, “an hommage to my family’s obsessions, which were divorce, falling out of love and politics,” is published in November 2011: “Remember Jane Byrne? Fighting Jane, Mike Royko called her. Mayor Bossy. She ran against the Democratic machine and squashed it, the whole goddamned machine.”
1994: Tom Drury introduces the Darling family and Grouse County, Iowa, in The End of Vandalism and is hailed as one of the most original writers in America. The Darlings return in “Joan Comes Home” in APS 12.
1994: Dorthe Nors reads Kirsten Ekman. “Few writers possess the ability to truly change the lives of their readers, even if we’d love to do so. But Ekman changed me and, more than that, she opened the box that became my writing. Most writers have their own literary midwives.... It’s a beautiful thought: a young person must first encounter the literature to release the talent.” Dorthe’s stories appear in APS 12 and APS 14.
1999: APS 8 contributor Danielle Evans calls her parents in tears, “having exhausted my willingness to pretend that I wanted to do something practical with my life, and told them I wanted to be a writer when I grew up, and who essentially said, Well then I guess you better stop crying and write something.” She receives the 2011 PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize for her debut collection of stories, Before You Suffocate Your Own Fool Self.
2005: APS debut author Jesmyn Ward’s hometown of DeLisle, Mississippi, is hit by Hurricane Katrina. It becomes the central event in her novel Salvage the Bones, which receives the 2011 National Book Award.
2006: After working on the Focus: Japan portfolio in APS 1, Motoyuki Shibata decides to start a magazine of his own in Tokyo. Monkey Business debuts in 2007, and Monkey Business: New Writing from Japan, a special English-language edition, is published in April 2011.
2011: Teju Cole goes walking in the city. “Epigraphs of the Eye,” a photo essay about sites of troubled memory, appears in APS 14.
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