by Yoojin Na
Lara Vapnyar discusses the “mysterious Russian soul”, childhood, and how she learned she is a powerful writer.
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INTERVIEWS WRITERS WE PUBLISH
All in The Epiphanic
by Yoojin Na
Lara Vapnyar discusses the “mysterious Russian soul”, childhood, and how she learned she is a powerful writer.
by Gracie Bialecki
Futuristic sexual encounters aside, we’re constantly betraying our partners and friends with technology. In any interaction, a phone is liable to appear with or without explanation—shifting a dual-sided conversation into a regrettable love triangle.
by Hawa Allan
As a card-carrying member of the horde, I have never had the privilege of having only one voice echoing in my head. I have always had multiple voices singing in mine. The call, and the response.
by Michael Barron
What would happen if all works in all languages were universally readable? New forms of thinking, new colors for the literary palette, and ultimately, the possibility of atypical influences. To put an old trope on its head, everything has been invented, but not every invention has been discovered.
by Yoojin Na
Levy, who cries on escalators, doesn’t hate her children. She doesn’t hate her soon-to-be-ex-husband. Rather, she hates that a woman must extend herself to assume a domestic role and become a stranger to the person she once was.
by Gracie Bialecki
The more the French view me as part of their country, the more I see myself as belonging here with them. With my blonde hair and daily scarves, I look the part. It’s easier to accept superficial validation such as compliments on my accent and cultural ease from the French than it is to reconcile my fading American patriotism.
by Siena Oristaglio
Two performers, Asun Noales and Sebastian Rowisnki,
stand in a circle of small jaguar heads.
The heads are sculpted from pearl-white plastic
by an artist named Susana Guerrero.
The heads are perfectly identical.
Their mouths stretch agape, as if caught mid-roar.
Beyond rows of jagged teeth,
each throat swells with inky black.
by Tess Crain
Having read, last year, with a certain stringent intensity, I tried to be more omnivorous and relaxed about my choices in 2019. Perhaps because of this, I’m not sure which books were the best. Here are five, however, ranging from the second to the twenty-first century in origin and including both fiction and nonfiction, that made a singular impression—all also share a probing interest in the human relationship to scale.
by Robb Todd
"I loved that, no matter where the characters went underground, they came out into the same space," said Mack, who might be best known for his two-decade run in the Village Voice with the comic strip “Stan Mack’s Real Life Funnies." "I could see a double-paged spread showing a huge old fashioned attic — full of the different entry points. To me, the story said, whatever you think you know about the rules of life, forget it, ain’t necessarily true."
by Zack Graham
It’s that time of year again. The late capitalist clusterfuck some call the holiday season. Or, as literary folks know it, “Best Of” Hell.
by Tess Crain
I began reading Thomas Mann’s Doctor Faustus: The Life of the German Composer Adrian Leverkühn, as Told by a Friend (1947), in mid-2016, casually. I’d bought the book by mistake several years prior, thinking it was Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s version—that is, the seminal German Faust. I am not the first to have confused the two authors.
by Zack Graham
There are few if any American writers who can vocalize the crushing despair of late capitalist malaise in a mere five sentences.
by Siena Oristaglio
As the only mammals that can fly, they are often
imagined as something not-quite-mammal,
a species dancing in the liminal space
between bird and rodent.
by Tess Crain
Spanning 1929 to 1936, Walter Benjamin’s The Storyteller Essays, out this year from NYRB Classics, circles the question: Why is the art of storytelling dying out? The collection comprises thirteen pieces of diverse form and audience that nonetheless share a thematic lineage. Just as the salient features of grandparents (a curved nose, full lips) may suddenly manifest in the faces of a younger generation, here, concepts and even whole passages from an earlier meditation will resurface, slightly altered or not at all, a few essays later. At the end of the book, short writings by contemporaries (Bloch, Lukács) and inspirations (the playful Hebel, Herodotus) are appended. From an ardent cross-pollination of ideas, traits of these authors, too, crop up in Benjamin’s work.
by Robb Todd
Please take a moment to consider and appreciate how the Department of Motor Vehicles has influenced contemporary poetry.
by Zack Graham
You don’t read Ben Lerner’s writing. You read Ben Lerner’s mind. His immense, contorted, self-effacing, hilarious intellect propels his narratives. Sure, his novels have characters, plots, themes. But those elements aren’t why Lerner is one of America’s best young fiction writers. Lerner is brilliant, and his novels resemble doctored and polished transcripts of his mind’s inner workings.
by Siena Oristalgio
As I watched small flitting creatures
appear again and again in the poems,
I was struck with a sudden desire to witness
some such small creatures in person.
by Tess Crain
Certain writers assault you with their intelligence, not as, or only as, a performance, but rather out of necessity: they simply cannot stop thinking. Humor has long been the balm of metacognition, laughter a scaffolding over the abyss.
