In the Current Issue
Love, Death, & Trousers
By Laura Francis and Alexander Masters
Returning Home
By Jeffrey YangKazumi Tanaka works with wood, bone, sound, and her own hair. She works with plaster, glass, paint, and light. She’s remade the furniture of her mother’s only “tiny corner of … comfort space” in miniature—every drawer and door perfectly f…
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Inside the Issue
At the Salon d' Auto
By Alberto GiacomettiIn the fall of 1957 Giacometti was asked by the editors of the French magazine Arts to visit the great auto show which is held annually at Paris’s Grand Palais and to comment afterwards on the relation of the car to sculpture. Could the “beauty” of a car be compared, he was asked, to that of a statue? His essay in reply follows.
From the Archive, Issue 18
Letters & Essays
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Voyage in the Dark
By Brian CullmanI was in London in November of 1978, staying at the Portobello Hotel, famous for having a twenty-four-hour bar in its basement. I came back late, two or two thirty in the morning, and there was Van Morrison in the lobby, sitting on a low stool a…
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First Person
Voices from Chernobyl
By Svetlana AlexievichOn April 26, 1986, at 1:23:58 a. m., a series of explosions destroyed the reactor in the building that housed Energy Block #4 of the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Station. The catastrophe at Chernobyl became the largest technical disaster of the twentieth century. . . . For tiny Belarus (population: ten million), it was a national disaster. . . . Today, one out of every five Belarussians lives on contaminated land. This amounts to 2.1 million people, of whom seven hundred thousand are children. In the Gomel and Mogilev regions, which suffered the most from Chernobyl, mortality rates exceed birthrates by twenty percent.
From the Archive, Issue 172
Letters & Essays
Notebooks
By Elizabeth BishopElizabeth bishop was born in 1911. Her mother was institutionalized in 1916, and after a brief, miserable stay in her paternal grandparents’ home in Worcester, Massachusetts, Bishop went to live with her mother’s oldest sister, Maud, and her husband, George Shepherdson, in Revere, a town north of Boston.
From the Archive, Issue 174
Poetry
“Very simple love that believes in words,…”
By Patrizia CavalliVery simple love that believes in words, / since I cannot do what I want to do, / can neither hug nor kiss you, / my pleasure lies in my words / and when I can I speak to you of love. / So, sitting with a drink in front of me, / the place filled with people,
