March 21, 2018 Whiting Awards 2018 Nathan Alan Davis, Drama By Nathan Alan Davis Nathan Alan Davis, who has an “uncanny gift for allegory and language, boiling down the large narratives of the African-American past to the scale of individuals wrestling to express themselves,” is a playwright from Rockford, Illinois, now based in New York. His plays include Nat Turner in Jerusalem; Dontrell, Who Kissed the Sea; and The Wind and the Breeze. His work has recently been commissioned or developed by The Public Theater, Arena Stage, Williamstown Theatre Festival, McCarter Theatre, NYTW and The Lark. Davis received his M.F.A. from Indiana University and B.F.A. from the University of Illinois. * An excerpt from Dontrell, Who Kissed the Sea: DONTRELL wakes from a vivid dream. He picks up a minicassette recorder, turns it on and speaks into it. In doing so, he addresses the audience. DONTRELL Captain’s log: Future generations, whoever finds this: I hope it finds you well. This Dontrell Jones the Third, of Baltimore. Spittin’ to you live through space and time. As your advanced technologies and mental-intuitive capacities may or may not allow you to decipher, I’m in my PJs right now. T-shirt and mesh. That’s how I rest. But If I had known last night what I would dream!? … Read More
March 21, 2018 Whiting Awards 2018 Patrick Cottrell, Fiction By Patrick Cottrell Patrick Cottrell, who “opens up fresh lines of questioning in the old interrogations of identity, the politics of belonging, and the problem of other minds,” was born in Korea and raised in Pittsburgh, Chicago, and Milwaukee. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in Guernica, BOMB, Gulf Coast, Black Warrior Review, and other places. His debut novel, Sorry to Disrupt the Peace, was published by McSweeney’s last year. He lives and works in Los Angeles. * An excerpt from Sorry to Disrupt the Peace: At the time of his death I was a thirty-two-year-old woman, single, childless, irregularly menstruating, college educated, and partially employed. If I looked in the mirror, I saw something upright and plain. Or perhaps hunched over and plain, it depended. Long, long ago I made peace with my plainness. I made peace with piano lessons that went nowhere because I had no natural talent or aptitude for music. I made peace with the coarse black hair that grows out of my head and hangs down stiffly to my shoulders. One day I even made peace with my uterus. Living in New York City for five years, I had discovered the easiest way to distinguish oneself was to have a conscience or a sense of morality, since most people in Manhattan were extraordinary thieves of various standing, some of them multi-billionaires. Over time, I became a genius at being ethical, I discovered that it was my true calling. I made little to no money as a part-time after-school supervisor of troubled young people, with the side work of ordering paper products for the toilets. After my first week, the troubled people gave me a nickname. Read More
March 21, 2018 Whiting Awards 2018 Anne Boyer, Poetry and Nonfiction By Anne Boyer Anne Boyer, whose work “unsettles all the familiar shapes of memoir and poetry to build a new city, one where worn ideas of labor and creativity are a monument toppled in the square,” is a U.S. poet and essayist and the inaugural winner of the 2018 Cy Twombly Award for Poetry from the Foundation for Contemporary Art. She is the author of four books: A Handbook of Disappointed Fate, The Romance of Happy Workers, My Common Heart, and Garments Against Women. * An excerpt from Garments Against Women: It was a time of many car troubles, so I waited for tow trucks and saw a squirrel with a marble in her mouth. It was a time of many money troubles, so I wrote about money or wanted to. I thought I would write about money and then those who did not yet write about money would soon write about money. What was I, poor? I spent seventy-three cents on a cookie for my daughter. I got a fifty-dollar Wal-Mart gift card in the mail. I sold a painting of a lamb for three hundred and eighty-five dollars. Read More
March 21, 2018 Arts & Culture The Jumpsuit That Will Replace All Clothes Forever By Heather Radke Photo: Lara Kastner. It’s fifty degrees in January, and the air in the Garment District smells strangely of pea soup. The building I’ve been directed to is supposed to be an art gallery, but all I can find is an office-supply showroom. I wait outside on a street dotted with FedEx trucks, Pret A Mangers, and fabric stores selling colorful sequined silks and heavy white brocades—the expensive material of saris and wedding dresses. In the early twentieth century, when New York City was still the center of the American garment industry, this neighborhood housed sewing factories where Eastern European immigrants made the petticoats and shirtwaists sold on Fifth Avenue. Most multinational fashion brands have since moved their operations overseas, and the sewing work that is still done in the Garment District is usually completed by newly graduated FIT students working as interns, not by members of the International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union. I’m here to meet Abigail Glaum-Lathbury, who will give me a jumpsuit she made just for me that I will wear as my only article of clothing for the next three weeks. Abigail is one of two artists who comprise the Rational Dress Society, a collective committed to what the group calls “counter-fashion”—a critique of fashion and capitalism through political dress. Abigail and her partner in counter-fashion, Maura Brewer, have been wearing only jumpsuits for the past three years—to weddings, to job interviews, to teach their classes at art school, and to visit their families over Thanksgiving. Their closets are nearly empty: they each have three jumpsuits, a few jumpsuit-compatible sweaters, workout clothes, pajamas, and underthings—that’s it. They don’t have to buy new clothes or wonder how they’ll look in the culottes that have recently come into fashion. They never have to choose a new outfit because they’ve already picked the one they’ll wear forever. Read More
March 21, 2018 Arts & Culture Frankenstein in Mary Shelley’s Own Hand By The Paris Review Mary Shelley In 1816, Lord Byron challenged his fellow vacationers to a contest. Among the competitors were Mary Shelley (née Mary Godwin), her soon-to-be husband Percy Bysshe Shelley, her stepsister Claire Clairmont, and Byron’s doctor, John William Polidori. Each was expected to write the best horror story she or he could manage. Over the next few days, Mary’s dreams became strange—in her sleep she imagined a man who created new life, only to be haunted by the creature he willed into being. This dream became the basis of her horror story, which in turn became the basis of her now canonical novel Frankenstein. In honor of the two hundredth anniversary of its publication, SP Books has put together a facsimile of Shelley’s original manuscript. The pages are in Shelley’s own handwriting, and each is riddled with corrections, annotations, and messages for her husband, who also served as her reader. The first five pages of the manuscript are presented below. Read More
March 21, 2018 Out of Print When Crack Was Wack: Ray Shell’s Lost Drug Novel By Michael A. Gonzales In my Harlem household back in the seventies, cigarettes were smoked and liquor was consumed, but drugs were considered the worst thing in the world. When I was in eighth grade and becoming curious about marijuana, my mom found a couple of High Times magazines stashed in my bedroom dresser and nearly lost her mind. Still, as a nerdy teenager who wanted to be a bad boy as long as it didn’t get me into trouble, I often romanticized the get-high life. I was too scared to actually participate in any real drug use, but that didn’t stop me from reading books about pot puffers, pill poppers, and heroin shooters. Some of my friends gained their narcotics knowledge from the Holloway House Publishing writer posse, which included the infamous smack scribe Donald Goines, whose debut, Dopefiend (1971), was written while he was incarcerated. But somehow, I’d taken up Nelson Algren’s gloomy novel The Man with the Golden Arm and the teenage heroin wildlife poetics of Jim Carroll’s brilliant The Basketball Diaries. A few years later, in the pages of Rolling Stone, I discovered the work of the gonzo journalist Hunter S. Thompson, who was the first writer I knew (besides the comedian Richard Pryor) who talked openly about sniffing cocaine. As the decade progressed, I began seeing cocaine referred to more and more often in the pages of Interview, New York, and other fashionable glossies, usually in relation to Studio 54, Truman Capote, the infamous Annie Hall sneeze scene, or the cool rockers such as David Bowie, Mick Jagger, and Rick James. Read More