A World Beyond Our Skin: Jenny Erpenbeck and the Potential of Fiction
By Culture Issue 109
It is a horrible, wrenching, annihilating sentence. Erpenbeck, in all her unsentimental moral rigor, refuses to look away from the moment of absolute horror.
Read MoreLola’s Funeral
By Essay Issue 109
I was so undone—not by Lola’s death but by the prospect of flying halfway around the world again only to turn around to fly halfway around the world again again—that I had to Skype my therapist in New Jersey for guidance. Meantime, Sam was jabbering away in idiomatically perfect Hebrew on his cell phone and telling me to chill out. “Mom, it’s not like we’re being put on the next transport to Poland.”
Read MoreIn the Unwalled City
By Essay Issue 109
Memories—so many people say, “You’ll always have your memories.” But even though my son died almost three years ago, memories of him are almost entirely painful. They are not Wordsworthian “recollections in tranquility,” but sharp stabbing pains that arise out of nowhere.
Read MoreRecording Angels: New Fiction by Phil Klay and Christopher Beha
By Culture Issue 109
For if there were a heavenly recorder, then Frank could be assured that someone would make sense of his life, that it would not be lost to memory but would always be an object of significance.
Read MoreFrom the Faraway Nearby
By Essay Issue 108
One way to describe what O’Keeffe did with landscapes is to say that she was trying to figure out a way to look out at the horizon and to see things out there as deeply as she was able to see things like flowers and plants up close.
Read MoreUntranslatable Mother: Tarkovsky, Zurlini, and the Madonna del Parto
By Culture Issue 108
Later on, in high school, I would see those same artworks in my books and listen to my professor explaining their importance. Probably because they were within a five-minute walk and I knew them by heart, I didn’t have any real interest in them, nor in any of what Pasolini would call “my intimate, profound, archaic Catholicism.” I was interested in Hegel.
Read MoreThe Mushrooms
By Essay Issue 108
I’d read that they were edible, so, using both hands, I plucked one from the ground and carried it inside, where I moved it, slowly, from the table to the fridge and then back outside.
Read MoreWith My Body I Thee Worship
By Culture Issue 107
Glück’s novel was a particularly poignant book to read this spring, when I found myself abruptly unable to touch another person, go to Mass, or receive the Eucharist. Lent rolled on without any anticipation of a liberatory Easter; then it was Easter, and I was still alone.
Read MoreFacts and Lies
By Essay Issue 107
Sometimes it seems inane. A woman visiting my church one Sunday morning came up and told me she saw a picture of me in a beautiful yellow dress. That was it, the whole prophetic word. Me in a yellow dress.
Read MoreAn Aesthetic of Lack, or Notes on Camps
By Culture Issue 107
Paschal could not leave his beloved mother’s head bare. How could he? For he knew that nature gapes with lack. He knew that we’re meant to be hooked up to something else, as if our skulls were plugs. Or to put it another way: he knew that all of us are amputees from moment we’re born.
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