Renfro’s essays are profoundly moving, written in a rich, deeply felt voice touched with wistfulness and melancholy that resists sentimentality and is unafraid of the violence that is a significant characteristic of both life and death.
Listen to our podcast of this essay here. Heading west out of Kalispell, US-2 passes a Smith’s grocery store, some mom and pop casinos, and billboards in the yards of half-built homes before the land opens into wide fields. They are spring flooded: fence posts planted in water, horses and cattle relegated to the […]
Some events are so vast and complicated as to render them ultimately unknowable.
Drawing from the country’s leading literary journals and publications—Crazyhorse, Colorado Review, the Nervous Breakdown, Creative Nonfiction, Georgia Review, Gulf Coast, the Missouri Review, the Normal School, and others—Man in the Moon brings together essays in which sons, daughters, and fathers explore the elusive nature of this intimate relationship and find unique ways to frame and […]
We know the stories, or we think we do. The Sixties.
Als challenges not just conventional views of literature but the very approach.
In a noisy city teahouse due west of the Appalachian Plateau, I sat sipping hot rooibos and spying on a lop-eared man sleeping on the sidewalk.
I had this thought upon learning that my fifth-grade math teacher was applying to be the first teacher in space: The space shuttle will explode.
I didn’t know what to do with this thought because it was so confident and so future tense and so informative. But was it really information? I was an imaginative girl and what the adults would say I already knew. Every time my family flew, I quelled a cousin demon: The plane will crash. Foolish, anxious me, never in a plane crash. So I dismissed the worry and by January 28, 1986, had even forgotten it until my reading teacher was called to the office just past noon.
By definition a great work of art is one that establishes and lives by its own credentials. Until it invents its own category, it resists classification…. now Scheerbart’s little book can be added to this select list.
As an artist and art critic, Patricia Rosoff knows that audiences often feel stymied by contemporary art that seems to them ugly, unskilled, inaccessible, or gimmicky. “I hope by this book,” Rosoff writes, “to loan you my eyes and my empathy, professional and personal, as I bring you with me through the galleries and museums […]