Articles

IN HIS BOOK The World Beyond Your Head, Matthew Crawford talks about what he calls “ecologies of attention”—the social infrastructure that shapes and channels the way we attend to the world. In an earlier age, quiet spaces cultivated the sort of attention that freed you up to read War and Peace. In the frantic ecology that…

CAROLYN THEODORE BURTANSKI stood in nothing but her socks and underpants and stared at the white smoke spilling its way up the wall of her storage closet. The smoke came out in burps and trickles, liquid-like, rising along a thick gray wire toward an electrical box. At first sight, awe rose in her heart, which…

SOPHIE WAS GETTING MARRIED with flowers in her hair. She had planned for this, and here it was: Carnations. Perfect. Yael was the maid of honor, the best friend. Sophie’s father called Yael “my daughter” so many times the photographer got confused, and everyone laughed. Not the daughter! Not the sister! No. But just beautiful,…

Image issue #98 includes poems by critic, activist, and biblical scholar Alicia Ostriker, winner of the Jewish National Book Award and many others. She has said, “Composing an essay, a review or a piece of literary criticism, I know more or less what I am doing and what I want to say. When I write…

This Is the Ritual: Stories Rob Doyle Bloomsbury, 2017 The Things We Do That Make No Sense: Stories Adam Schuitema Northern Illinois University Press, 2017 ONE OF THE MOST STUBBORN MYTHS of modernity is the notion that religion is something you believe rather than something that you do. Religion as a “belief system” was the…

IN ONE OF HIS MONOLOGUES about the fictional Minnesota town of Lake Wobegon on the Prairie Home Companion radio show, Garrison Keillor relates: It’s a good time, winter, for all of us. It’s a time when all the things that we’ve been postponing for months can now be put off for a good while longer.…

ONE RADIANT FALL MORNING about eight years ago, I needed to revise some poems before I sent them to editors. I approached my desk armed with questions I ask my students: Is the language alive? Check out the metaphor. Does the poem make an argument or take the reader on a journey? I am a…

Amit Majmudar, a poet and novelist, once called himself “the servant of two masters,” and indeed, he has published both verse and fiction to critical acclaim. The Poetry Society of America selected his collection 0˚, 0˚, published in 2009, as a finalist for the Norma Faber First Book Award, and A.E. Stallings awarded his second…