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

What to Read Next: Announcing Issue 9

Take a walk along the Nile Corniche in our Cairo Portfolio; enter the Glitter Girl Contest with Danielle Evans; question Reality and Memory with David Shields; visit Strange Lands and People with Richard Powers; and go fishing with T. C. Boyle. Poetry by Derek Walcott, Idra Novey, Eric Pankey, Ron Padgett, and Mary Jo Bang; Gary Amdahl at play in the fields of Cinnabar; Antoine Wilson says good-bye; and much, much more. Renew or subscribe now to ensure you get your copy, and watch for excerpts on the website. Issue 9 is here.

Posted on October 13, 2009 | Comment | Permalink

Description of Issue 8

On the battlefield with Atsushi Nakajima
Samantha Hunt gets noticed by her neighbors
Yiyun Li eavesdrops on hers
Fiction by Shena Mackay & Petina Gappah
Impossible Sightseeing with John Wray & Matt Dojny
Poetry by Adrienne Rich & Mahmoud Darwish

Posted on June 5, 2009 | Comment | Permalink

Announcing Issue 8

Head west for indulgence at the casino in Primm, Nevada; to Zimbabwe to dance at the Why Leave Guesthouse and Disco Bar; to China to live among the enemy; to England to ride the Atmospheric Railway; or stay right here for an impossible sightseeing tour of New York. We’re talking Jesse Chehak, Petina Gappah, Atsushi Nakajima, Shena Mackay, John Wray, and Matt Dojny; Samantha Hunt getting noticed by her neighbors and Yiyun Li eavesdropping on hers; poetry by Adrienne Rich, Matthew Zapruder, Rebecca Wolff, and Mahmoud Darwish; fiction by Sara Majka and Naomi J. Williams; and much more. Renew or subscribe now to ensure you get your copy; watch for excerpts on the website; and, if you’re in New York, come to BookCourt on June 15 for a launch party featuring readings by Samantha Hunt and Sara Majka.

Full Table of Contents

Posted on June 5, 2009 | Comment | Permalink

Sail On, My Little Honey Bee

Congratulations to Amy Leach, whose essay from Issue 7, "Sail On, My Little Honey Bee," has been chosen for Best American Essays 2009!

Posted on April 2, 2009 | Comment | Permalink

Saadat Hasan Manto

The new issue of A Public Space includes a portfolio on Saadat Hasan Manto, an Urdu writer who lived in Bombay in the 1940s and 1950s. He is a revered name in the world of Urdu letters, perhaps best known for his Partition stories. But Matt Reeck has put together a portfolio that looks at his other great subject: Bombay. Manto’s Bombay was an immigrant city - according to the 1921 census, an amazing 84 percent of the population were immigrants, most of them extremely poor - and a large cross-section was comprised of a motley crew of exiled dreamers and the woebegone. Manto’s stories are populated with film stars and prostitutes, pimps and writers (as well as the occasional rich man), and full of the life of the street. His interest in depicting the lives of Bombay’s disenfranchised often put him at odds with the leading literary movement of his day, the Progressive Writers Movement, which saw literature as a vehicle for social uplift. The state put him on trial for obscenity five times. Manto left Bombay in 1948, a year after Partition, and moved to Lahore. But the city had a strong hold on him, and he wrote some of his best Bombay stories as an exile from the city he loved.
This is from the postscript to Yazid, a collection of his stories that was published in 1951:
It was a blow to have to leave Bombay, where I had lived such a busy life. Bombay had taken me in, a wandering outcast thrown out by even his family. She had told me, “You can live happily here on two paise a day or on ten thousand rupees. Or if you want, you can be the saddest person in the world at either price. Here you can do whatever you want, and no one will think you’re strange. Here no one will tell you what to do. You will have to do every difficult thing on your own, and you will have to make every important decision by yourself. I don’t care if you live on the sidewalk or in a magnificent mansion, I don’t care if you stay or go. I’ll always be here.” I was disconsolate after leaving Bombay. My good friends were there. I had gotten married there. My first child was born there, as was my second. There I had gone from earning a couple rupees a day to thousands - hundreds of thousands - and there I had spent it all. I loved it, and I still do!

Manto died in Lahore in 1955. The Daily Times of Pakistan remembered Manto on the fifty-third anniversary of his death last month. You can read one of the stories from the portfolio, in full, here.

Posted on February 9, 2009 | Comment | Permalink

Issue 7 Is...

Peter Orner on Governor Blagojevich; Saadat Hasan Manto on Bombay's lowlifes; Amy Leach in outer space; and Tom Drury in LA. With new fiction by Mary-Beth Hughes, Clare Wigfall, and John Haskell; Anne Carson's Variations on the Right to Remain Silent; new poems by Mary Jo Bang, Arda Collins, Brandon Shimoda, Tom Yuill, and others; and translations by Walter Murch, Mira Rosenthal, and David Ferry.

Full Table of Contents

Posted on January 27, 2009 | Comment | Permalink

Dirty Politics, Designer Kisses, and More

Issue 6 is: Peyton Marshall on celebrity family reunions; Dubravka Ugresic on setting off alarms; Keith Lee Morris on getting lost on purpose; Colleen Kinder on defining Iceland; and Martha Cooley on the sounds of silence. With new stories by Peter Orner (with illustrations by Eric Orner), Gary Amdahl, Sana Krasikov, and Preeta Samarasan; and new poems by Cathy Park Hong, Tom Yuill, Major Jackson, Billy Collins, and others, and translations by John Ashbery and Luc Sante. In the Focus portfolio, the state of Italian literature. And Jono Rotman at White Sands Missile Range Museum on the cover.

Full Table of Contents

Posted on July 29, 2008 | Comment | Permalink