As she attempts to trace the increasingly portentous-seeming name in her grandfather’s WWI journal chronicling his time digging trenches in France, the narrator of Forgotten Night is haunted by the absence of Jewish life in the villages she travels through, by the desolation of the scattered traces remaining.
Dead, We Will Not Give a Shit About Our Legacy: Jordan A. Rothacker interviews Debra Di Blasi
Research suggests that reading literature improves theory of mind because it provides a complex look into the lives of people whose circumstances, experiences, and histories are different from our own. Does an improved theory of mind result in selfless behavior? No. If it did, we wouldn’t have literary writers, professors, and readers who are assholes, but we do.
“It’s the Accessibility I Like”
An Interview with Erika T. Wurth
By Jordan A. Rothacker
I first became acquainted with the work of Erika T. Wurth when Astrophile Press sent me an advanced edition of Buckskin Cocaine for review in 2017. I instantly loved the book and was excited to write about it. I was captivated by the interconnectivity of the “Hollywood Indian...
Scorn Conquers Fate: David Winner Interviews Tyler Gore
A digressive approach gave me the freedom to shape a narrative ostensibly about my “routine surgery” into a detailed portrait of my world and my state of mind during those two particular weeks of my life.
“Language Itself Is the Only Limit”
Thomas Dolby once said that he writes songs like a frustrated novelist. I like to say that I write books like a frustrated musician. I first started out writing lyrics to songs I was making in high school. Then I moved to writing poems before migrating towards stories and, eventually, novels. No surprise, my early poems were mostly about music and musicians as well. So, I think it’s always...
A Legacy of the Art Life — and Magnificent Hair By Jordan A. Rothacker
An Interview with Tosh Berman
Tosh Berman can never be separated from his pedigree—that his father Wallace was an artist of such originality and aesthetic coolness he was on the album cover of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band—but his father passed in 1976, and Tosh is here now and doing great work. Tosh Berman manages his father’s artistic estate...
The Ghost Hour is Upon Us: Kate Belew Interviews Laura Cronk about Ghost Hour
I always want to feel some kind of intellectual searching and an emotional charge in a poem. My experience with poetry is a lot like my experience with movies. I just want to sit in the dark and think and feel. But I can admire and be made better by poems I don’t connect with or understand, too. If someone writes something and calls it, with any sincerity, a poem...
A White Man in Naples: David Winner Interviews John Domini about The Archeology of a Good Ragù
The core project of my Archeology, rather, is expressed in the title: a digging down into an older culture, one closer to life’s raw materials, in order to put together my own best life.
To Sit on Sidewalks (A Conversation with Wang Ping)
by John Casquarelli
Wang Ping’s Ten Thousand Waves is the telling of the migrant explorer’s story for survival. Packed with voices of the dead, Ping’s book reminds the reader how sacred each laborer’s life is in the face of unjust labor practices. Each person is more valuable than their labor, even when multinationals, banks, and political institutions act otherwise when...