March 25, 2020 Whiting Awards 2020 Will Arbery, Drama By Will Arbery Will Arbery. Photo: Victor Llorente. Will Arbery is a playwright from Texas and Wyoming. His plays include Heroes of the Fourth Turning (Playwrights Horizons), Plano (Clubbed Thumb), Evanston Salt Costs Climbing (New Neighborhood), and Wheelchair (3 Hole). He’s a member of New Dramatists and an alum of The Working Farm at SPACE on Ryder Farm, P73’s Interstate 73, Colt Coeur, Youngblood, and Clubbed Thumb’s Early Career Writers Group. He’s currently the Tow Foundation Playwright-in-Residence at Playwrights Horizons, where he is also under commission. His plays have received additional support from NYTW, The Vineyard, Ojai Playwrights Conference, Cape Cod Theater Project, The New Group, The Bushwick Starr, Alliance/Kendeda, and Tofte Lake Center. He received his M.F.A. from Northwestern and his B.A. from Kenyon College. * An excerpt from Heroes of the Fourth Turning: JUSTIN I wanted to say something about the liberal… The nice young liberal people. And the system. TERESA Okay what. JUSTIN So these nice young liberal people are blinded by a system that distracts them from true moral questions and refocuses their attention onto fashionable and facile questions of identity and choice, which gender do you want to be today?, how much sex can you have today?, how many babies do you want? and how do you want them to look?, which is really all part of a larger ideological system that is rooted in an evil, early-twentieth-century quote-unquote progressive trend towards quote-unquote perfection, eugenics, and crypto-racism, endorsed by Margaret Sanger, an American eugenics system which persists, which wants to eliminate anything unclean or imperfect, including black babies and Down syndrome babies, and create a sterilized world based around state-mandated pleasure and narcissism. These are just facts, look it up y’all. Read More
March 25, 2020 Whiting Awards 2020 Diannely Antigua, Poetry By Diannely Antigua Diannely Antigua. Photo: Savuth Thor. Diannely Antigua is a Dominican American poet, born and raised in Massachusetts. Her debut collection, Ugly Music (YesYes, 2019), was the winner of the Pamet River Prize. She received her B.A. in English from the University of Massachusetts Lowell and received her M.F.A. at New York University. She is the recipient of fellowships from CantoMundo, Community of Writers, and the Fine Arts Work Center Summer Program. Her work has been nominated for both the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net. Her poems can be found in Washington Square Review, Bennington Review, The Adroit Journal, Cosmonauts Avenue, Sixth Finch, and elsewhere. * “Praise to the Boys” ………….On Thursdays the boys played basketball in the church parking lot ………….while Sister Priscilla taught the girls to sew on buttons, stitch hems, iron collars. ………….She’d lean her rigid body to guide my hands at the machine, her cabbage breath ………….lingering as she walked to the next girl. Read More
March 25, 2020 Whiting Awards 2020 Aria Aber, Poetry By Aria Aber Aria Aber. Photo: Nadine Aber. Aria Aber was raised in Germany. Her debut book Hard Damage (University of Nebraska, 2019) won the 2018 Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Poetry. Her poems are forthcoming or have appeared in The New Yorker, Kenyon Review, The Yale Review, The New Republic, and elsewhere. She was the 2018–2019 Ron Wallace Fellow at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. * “Afghan Funeral in Paris” The aunts here clink Malbec glasses and parade their grief with musky, expensive scents that whisper in elevators and hallways. Each natural passing articulates the unnatural: every aunt has a son who fell, or a daughter who hid in rubble for two years, until that knock of officers holding a bin bag filled with a dress and bones. But what do I know? Read More
March 25, 2020 Quarantine Reads Quarantine Reads: The Unconsoled By Emma Garman In our new series Quarantine Reads, writers present the books they’re finally making time for and consider what it’s like to read them in these strange times. Many conversations I’m having at the moment—you, too, probably—include a preamble that tries to acknowledge the current situation: “It feels, I don’t know, unreal? Like a dream, or a nightmare. I can’t quite grasp the enormity of it. I keep expecting to wake up and find that normality has resumed.” Meanwhile my actual sleep tends to feature classic anxiety dreams—of being lost, delayed, imperiled, accidentally in the wrong place or at the wrong time, dropped into a context both familiar and alien—that cause an abrupt awakening in the small hours. Displacing the bewilderment of the dream with waking reality is, obviously, not much of a relief. Especially if attempted via my usual method of scrolling Twitter. Instead, I’ve been rereading a novel that captures the peculiar landscape of dreams with an accuracy few other authors have come close to: Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Unconsoled. When I first read it, soon after it came out in 1995, I was at first intimidated (not least by its 500+ pages), then progressively awed but also perplexed by Ishiguro’s flagrant jettisoning of fiction’s rules. Isn’t it cheating, for instance, to let your first person narrator access the inner life of whomever he meets? Now, though, with a further quarter-century of anxiety dreams behind me, and with life as we know it splintering and dislocating before our eyes, I found myself submitting utterly to the novel’s uncanny, déjà vu–steeped spell. Read More
March 25, 2020 Arts & Culture W. H. Auden Was a Messy Roommate By Seamus Perry W. H. Auden. W. H. Auden had rented variously inadequate apartments since arriving back in New York at the end of the summer of 1945, and had most recently been living with Chester Kallman in a warehouse building on Seventh Avenue, an especially unsatisfactory place that lacked both hot water and a functional front door. So when he and Kallman moved to 77 Saint Mark’s Place on the Lower East Side, in February 1954, it promised to be a significant improvement; and he was certainly very pleased with the place from the start—“my N.Y. nest,” he called it. Auden would stay there until his ill-fated departure for Oxford in 1972, making it his longest single habitation. From 1949 he summered in Europe—in Ischia until 1957, when he bought a small farmhouse in Kirchstetten in Austria, which delighted him: he devoted a sequence, “Thanksgiving for a Habitat,” in his collection About the House (1965), to a celebration of his domestic existence there. It was in these summerhouses that he tended to write poems: New York was largely for his distinct life as a “man of letters,” a label he applied to himself. “It is a sad fact about our culture,” he once wrote, “that a poet can earn much more money writing or talking about his art than he can by practicing it”; but at the same time he prided himself on his professionalism as a reviewer, essayist, anthologist, and commentator, work that in turn often suggested subjects for poems; and that work principally happened on Saint Mark’s. Freshly installed, he excitedly invited round his young friend Charles Miller (“Come! I’ll take you on a tour”): The large first (entry) room with high ceiling had a green marbled fireplace flanked by built-in bookshelves, which also incorporated Wystan’s battered turntable with speaker equipment and his much-used collection of records and albums. A big shabby sofa and a swamped antique coffee table centered the cluttered room. I followed Wystan through an arch into a similar room at the front with another green marbled fireplace. This room was hardly furnished, except for built-in bookcases and Wystan’s small work table just touched by sunlight from the generous nineteenth-century windows. To the right of this room, as we faced Saint Mark’s Place, was a small room with its door to the stair hall nailed shut; the room had only a cot bed, on which Wystan slept, he said. Just touched by sunlight, one imagines: as an undergraduate at Oxford, Auden had preferred to keep his curtains drawn at all times, and he seems to have adopted the same policy in America. When Stephen Spender had visited him in the forties he unwisely attempted to open the curtains and brought them crashing to the ground: “You idiot!” Auden scolded him, “why did you draw them? No one ever draws them. In any case there’s no daylight in New York.” Wystan’s succession of rooms gave his friend Margaret Gardiner “the sensation of brownish caverns, a brown that seemed to pervade everything, even the air itself.” Read More
March 24, 2020 Redux Redux: I Struggle to Stay inside Sleep By The Paris Review Every week, the editors of The Paris Review lift the paywall on a selection of interviews, stories, poems, and more from the magazine’s archive. You can have these unlocked pieces delivered straight to your inbox every Sunday by signing up for the Redux newsletter. James Laughlin. Photo courtesy of New Directions. This week at The Paris Review, we’re reading long, multipart selections—all the better with which to stay indoors. Read on for James Laughlin’s Art of Publishing interview (part one and part two), Roberto Bolaño’s complete The Third Reich (in parts one, two, three, and four) and Frank Bidart’s poem “The Fifth Hour of the Night.” If you enjoy these free interviews, stories, and poems, why not subscribe to The Paris Review and read the entire archive? You’ll also get four new issues of the quarterly delivered straight to your door. And for even more reading material, check out the Art of Distance, The Paris Review’s new weekly dispatch from indoors. James Laughlin, The Art of Publishing No. 1, Part 1 Issue no. 89 (Fall 1983) There were so many different things I had to do. I had to keep in touch with the authors and read the manuscripts, and I had to copyedit manuscripts, and I had to find printers and binders. Then I had to get up ads and do the catalogs. I had to try to sell the books. Publishing, when it’s a one-man operation, is an extremely varied occupation. It isn’t like a big firm where each person does a different job. I don’t know that I looked at it very objectively; I just did it. Part 2 Read More