This is America, I thought, it isn’t right to deny an adult—a paying customer—a beer.” ...

César Aira coined the term “the flight forward” (huirhacia adelante) to describe his deceptively simple writing process. Every morning he writes for one hour at a local Buenos Aires café and then in ...

Sharon Olds published her first book, Satan Says, in 1980, at the age of thirty-seven. The book is organized into four sections, “Daughter,” “Woman,” “Mother,” and “Journey,” and it begins with its ...

Sometimes I feel myself possessed by great mysterious emotions. Strong feelings of rage, joy, or sadness possess me for no reason I can understand. I have been going about as usually do when, suddenly ...

October 12, 2012 – In honor of “Daddy”’s fiftieth birthday, listen to the author herself read.

February 19, 2015 – André Breton’s poem “The Verb to Be” originally appeared in our Spring 1985 issue. I know the general outline of despair. Despair has no wings, it doesn’t ...

In 1934, Columbia University moved its twenty-two miles of books to the newly built Butler Library. By means of a really long slide. Which actually looks less fun than it sounds, and was much too ...

There is a pivotal early scene in David Lean’s film Lawrence of Arabia in which T. E. Lawrence and his superior, Colonel Brighton, visit the desert encampment of Prince Faisal, a leader of the Arab ...

“All of us have to learn how to invent our lives, make them up, imagine them. We need to be taught these skills; we need guides to show us how. If we don’t, our lives get made up for us by other ...

Ambrose Bierce’s old house in St. Helena, California, surrounded by the vineyards of Napa Valley, is in good repair. Eight stout sequoia trunks flare outward from a fused base in the front yard. An ...

It all began one night in 1976, when the poet Lucille Clifton was lightheartedly using a Ouija board with two of her daughters. The board began to spell out the name of Clifton’s mother, Thelma. At ...

Not only are there hoards of Eeny Meenies, there are just as many counting-out schemes that share the same DNA. “Hinty, minty, cuty, corn, wire, briar, limber lock” (United States). “Eenty, teenty, ...