Comedies of Seeking: New Fiction at the Borderlands of Belief
By Culture Issue 114
Where else but in fiction—both reading and writing it—can one try on so many different kinds of salvation?
Read MoreReading and Writing for the Life Outside Our Own
By Book Review Issue 108
Obviously, autobiographical experience, even matched to extraordinary artfulness, cannot be the lone standard against which to measure the accomplishment of a novel.
Read MoreField of Encounter: A Conversation with G.C. Waldrep
By Interview Issue 107
It is one thing to write an inspirational poem about the raising of Lazarus, from this great distance in time and space, and another to be Lazarus: to be the one who is raised. I think any genuine religious art leads the reader (and presumably the writer) to a place of encounter, an encounter with radical otherness.
Read MoreGlobes
By Poetry Issue 107
Son’s / net-/ works / / veins under / the skin / of the dark / / call / see/ knock! / / a chandelier / glows / in the dark
Read MoreFrom the Stranger in Me to the Stranger in You
By Editorial Guest Editorial Issue 106
It may have been the first time someone had used the word pornographer to describe me, but it was not the first time I felt the punch of its meaning in reaction to my writing.
Read MoreA Conversation with Leslie Jamison
By Interview Issue 101
You can read something spoken or written by somebody from a very different place or time or background or state of being—and it can feel true anyway.
Read MoreBurn
By Short Story Issue 100
Doesn’t a fire, good and hot, burn back into a wound until there’s nothing left for it to do but heal?
Read MoreA Conversation with Charles Wright
By Interview Issue 89
Charles Wright is the author of nearly thirty collections of poetry, most recently Sestets, Bye-and-Bye, and Caribou (all from Farrar, Straus and Giroux), as well as two books of criticism and a collection of translations of the Italian poet Eugenio Montale. Born in 1935 in Pickwick Dam, Tennessee, Wright attended Davidson College and the Iowa…
Read MoreMeditation on Soteriology
By Poetry Issue 89
__________The poet is in labor. ______________—Denise Levertov _______I confess the obvious, my inadequacy to translate famine to bread to feed all the hungry children on earth. Wish I could invent a happiness machine or dollar tree blossoming with nontaxable revenue for small businesses. Wish for a thousand bitcoins, wild doves of aqueous tongues,…
Read MoreYankee Immigrants Convert
By Essay Issue 24
IN its December 1977 issue, when Jimmy Carter’s presidency made national media rediscover the South, Esquire magazine published Walker Percy’s non-interview with himself, entitled “Questions They Never Asked Me So He Asked Them Himself.” Chiefly, he grumbled about pesky interviewers who kept asking him over and over again what he thought of the South, of…
Read More