Prize News

Congratulations to Jesmyn Ward, who received the National Book Award last night for her extraordinary novel Salvage the Bones. Her debut story, "Cattle Haul," appeared in APS 5, a new story, "Barefoot," in APS 14. We wrote about Salvage here, Ron Charles reviewed it here, and you can hear her read from the novel here.

It’s easier driving through the country, especially when you doing a cattle haul. Two lanes on one side and two lanes on the other. Switch lanes and pass. At night, like now, the signs sharp and clear. The trees like waves at the side of the road, all black and blue, coming in and going back out like a tide. Ain’t no lights to distract me, to crowd up around me. Just taillights, red lights, like ants, leading me in a line westward. —Read on.

Posted on November 17, 2011 | Comment | Permalink

Announcing APS 14

“It had a great feeling of unreality. I mean, I was a designer of china; I was not in the business of killing Stalin. Imagine yourself! Most of the time I did not believe that I would have an opportunity to relate this to anybody. I really did not. There was very little probability that I would live; nobody wished me well.”

In her prison memoir, the designer Eva Zeisel describes her sixteen-month imprisonment, mostly in solitary confinement, in Russia, after being caught in early Stalinist purges and accused of plotting to kill Stalin.

I was drawn again and again to those places where the city had been cracked open and had not completely healed. Some of them, like the African Burial Ground and Trinity Church, were places I had written about in my novel Open City, but at which I still had unfinished business.

Teju Cole’s photographs of Lower Manhattan document the landscape beyond the actual site of the World Trade Center attacks, and serve to explore not only the present time, but also the “deep time… historical time” that crops up while walking down Wall Street.

The Rosencrantzes present The Tragedy of King Lear… With sock puppets! Jacob played the king. Leah played all the daughters but was least convincing as the nice one. Eli played everybody else and directed and collected the tickets. Seventy-five cents per bumpkin…

An excerpt from Peter Orner’s novel Love and Shame and Love, forthcoming from Little, Brown in November.

Plus, new work by Jesmyn Ward, John Haskell, Dorthe Nors, Therese Stanton, and Justin Tussing; poems by Roberto Bolaño, Billy Collins, Kimiko Hahn and others.

Posted on October 9, 2011 | Comment | Permalink

Excavating a Life
Evoking Gene Smith's Jazz Loft

This Friday, Sam Stephenson and Chris McElroen’s Chaos Manor premieres at The Invisible Dog, just down the street from A Public Space. Sam arrived from Raleigh-Durham over the weekend, his 138th trip to New York City in the fifteen years he’s been researching the photographer W. Eugene Smith. Chaos Manor culls material—audio recording and images—from Smith's archives, and is based on Sam's book The Jazz Loft Project: Photographs and Tapes of W. Eugene Smith from 821 Sixth Avenue, 1957-1965. Sam's 136 th and 137th trips were for Chaos Manor workshops this summer at A Public Space.

Chaos Manor / week 2 @ a public space / www.photosjg.com.

He sent an update over the weekend from the final rehearsals: Levon's saxophone from the third floor window reverberates up and down Bergen Street without amplification and the image of him through the window is impressive. The images are projected onto fabric hanging from the ceiling inside Invisible Dog's windows. With the figures moving between the projector and the fabric, it’s not unlike Smith's portrait of 821 Sixth Avenue with the silhouette cutouts. Pedestrians were stopped by curiosity and looked up at the building. A few lingered. A few people across the street closed their windows. When you add MLK giving a speech, Mr. Magoo commercials, Cuban Missile news, the drip of water, the typewriter typing, not to mention imagery...

Posted on September 12, 2011 | Comment | Permalink

Playing House
by Leslie Jamison

Leslie Jamison was first published in APS3, and is a graduate of the Iowa Writer's Workshop. Her piece, "Sublime, Revised," can be found in APS13. This post is part of The 75th Project, a series of essays by graduates of the Iowa Writers' Workshop, which is celebrating its 75th anniversary this year.

During my second year at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, I lived at 715 Iowa Ave., Iowa City, Iowa. In case my friends on the coasts didn’t get it, my address had to say it three times: I’m in the middle. Another workshop writer probably lives in that apartment now—a third-floor nest with peeling linoleum and rattling windows—because workshop apartments tend to be passed down this way, writer-to-writer, acquiring thick skins of dust, layers of heartache and epiphany and drunken stupor and all the other mythologies that are supposed to play out at the Workshop and, as it turns out, actually do. My apartment was also dusty because I never cleaned it.

Posted on June 28, 2011 | Comment | Permalink

On Minoru Ozawa

Minoru Ozawa's poem "Monkey Haiku" appears in the first issue of Monkey Business: New Voices from Japan. As part of the PEN World Voices Festival of International Literature and in celebration of the release of Monkey Business, there was a panel at the Asia Society, at which Joshua Beckman talked with Minoru Ozawa about poetry and translation.

Below is a small gathering of the poems read by Joshua Beckman and Minoru Ozawa at the event. (The poems by Joshua Beckman are from his book Your Time Has Come; the poems by Minoru Ozawa were translated for this event by Ted Goossen and Motoyuki Shibata.

Two new sparrows,
the tourists don’t know
they’re new.
—JB

I said the dragonfly drawing was sad
And made myself
A laughingstock
—MO

Posted on May 4, 2011 | Comment | Permalink

On Haruki Murakami
by John Wray

"Pursuing Growth," an interview with Haruki Murakami by Hideo Furukawa, appears in the first issue of Monkey Business: New Voices from Japan.

Meeting Haruki Murakami in Tokyo the spring of 2002, and spending the better part of three days with him, discussing the minutiae of his writing process, was both the fulfillment of a cherished fan-boy dream (Haruki Murakami! in person! talking about Haruki Murakami!) and one of the riskiest pitfalls I've encountered in my development as a writer. I'd flown the twelve hours from New York for no other reason than to sit at the feet of the master, ostensibly to interview him, but in fact to discover whether any aspect of his M.O., from his precisely structured daily routine to his notions of concept and style, might somehow prove adaptable to my own. The answer was no, as it turns out.

Absolutely not in any way.

Posted on May 2, 2011 | Comment | Permalink

On Hiromi Kawakami
by Rebecca Brown

"People from My Neighborhood," a collection of vignettes by Hiromi Kawakami, appears in the first issue of Monkey Business: New Voices from Japan.

Last year I lost my sense of smell. A few weeks ago, after not being able to smell anything for months, I thought I was able to smell coffee again. It was a sour, yellowish rotten coffee smell. I thought my coffee had gone bad and threw it out. But then when I went to cook dinner that night—with a lot of greens and garlic—I got the same sour, yellow, rotten coffee smell. Coffee and garlic smell very different, but my broken sense of smell was telling me they didn't. I couldn’t imagine trying to tell someone without a sense of smell what coffee smelled like, or garlic. Does one smell brown and the other green? Does one smell like sand paper and the other like linoleum or fur? How do you to describe the sense of smell to someone who doesn’t have it? The color red to someone who cannot see.

In Hiromi Kawakami’s work it’s like there’s some different, unbodily, yet also sort of bodied, sense that’s trying to come alive inside her characters. In the novel Manazuru, a woman whose husband has disappeared keeps seeing or feeling or something—people? shadows? Sometimes it’s a woman, sometimes a man. Her husband? Alive or dead? She senses—for lack of another word—these things out of the corner of her brain.

Posted on April 30, 2011 | Comment | Permalink

Distance and Disaster
by Roland Kelts

I was in Oregon when the quake and waves hit. More specifically, I was in a little farmhouse-style comfort food eatery called Belly in downtown Eugene. I’d given two talks, answered questions, and chatted with students and faculty from the university that day, mostly about my usual topics: Japan’s contemporary culture, its images, and its apocalyptic visual narratives, especially on the anniversary of the fire-bombings of Tokyo, March 10, 1945.

Posted on April 29, 2011 | Comment | Permalink

Announcing Issue 11

Joy Williams and Paul T. Winner reintroduce Charles Newman; Stephen Burt introduces New American Poets; Martha Tennent translates Mercè Rodoreda; Annie Coggan Redecorates the Grant Home, and Rachel Cohen visits; Francis Spufford tells the Story of an Idea; Frank Hunter photographs Allan Gurganus; plus new fiction from Julian Gough, D. Wystan Owen, and Melissa Pritchard; and in If You See Something, Say Something, a good case of levity with Maud Casey, Tom Pope, Julian Gough, Brian T. Edwards, Aviya Kushner, and Ian Chillag.

Renew or subscribe now to ensure you get your copy, and watch for excerpts on the website. Issue 11 is here.

Posted on September 22, 2010 | Comment | Permalink

Announcing Issue 10

An Irrelevant Writer: The Letters of Shen Congwen; A Word on Tomorrow with Grant Wood, Graham Foust, Amy Leach, Jenny Davidson, and Paul Glimcher; new fiction from Mary-Beth Hughes, Tim O'Sullivan, David Potter, and Yiyun Li; Daniel Alarcón translates Samanta Schweblin; Alec Soth's Las Vegas Birthday; new poems from Matthew Rohrer, D. A. Powell, Jennifer Moxley, Giampiero Neri, and much, much more. Renew or subscribe now to ensure you get your copy, and watch for excerpts on the website. Issue 10 is here.

Posted on February 25, 2010 | Comment | Permalink