April 22, 2025 On Poetry Nights and Days By Henri Cole Henri Cole and James Merrill. Photograph by Dorothy Alexander, courtesy of Henri Cole. ARRIVAL IN KEY WEST I arrive in the afternoon. My baggage is lost in Orlando. It’s Epiphany. The airplane’s wings made A crucifix in the clouds; I let things happen. I spend the first night in my room with a head cold and fever. I sit in the jacuzzi. I phone James Merrill, as instructed. It is 1993. Rudolf Nureyev is dead from AIDS. I need a job and receive a phone message from Lucie Brock-Broido about an interview at Harvard. A cat meows on her tape machine in the background. My room feels warm. A ceiling fan hums overhead. There is sweat on my brow. The crow of roosters reminds me of my youth in the South and the unruly men in whose company I was reared. I think of Elizabeth Bishop’s long poem “Roosters” (set in Key West) and how she disdains their virile presence. It appeared in The New Republic in 1941 and is her war poem, with roosters standing in for a military presence. In a letter to her mentor Marianne Moore, she wrote that she wanted “to emphasize the essential baseness of militarism.” In my military family, there was really only one version of masculinity, and I wanted something different. Perhaps writing poems was my own rebellious, antimasculine act, since gender is of no consequence, only our humanity and being alert to the secret vibrations of the universe. Still, Drawing with words, I Feel fearful, diligent, raw, Abject, and needy. Read More
April 18, 2025 The Review’s Review Time Travel By Cynthia Zarin Old cherry orchard, 1994, via Wikimedia Commons. Licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0. What do we hold fast, what do we let go? The question, like a living being, hovers onstage in The Cherry Orchard by Anton Chekhov. It hovers, whirls, mutters, speaks aloud, corrects itself, mutters, as Firs—an elderly butler who has faithfully served the Ranevskaya estate for so many years, his chest covered in medals from forgotten skirmishes—is left behind when everyone departs for the train station. In the beautiful rendition of the play now at St. Ann’s Warehouse, even Firs’s voice, with its House of Lords vowels, is a murmur of an annihilated past, gone now to the carapace of lost things. Thwack! is the sound of the ax in the cherry orchard where Lyubov Ranevskaya sees her dead mother walking in the evening among the white blossoms, the trees like angels of heaven that the gods have not neglected. My grandmother loved the theater, and when my grandfather’s hearing began to fail, she began to take me with her. I was then probably seven. About the theater she used to say, “You could get me up in the middle of the night.” When she was young, she’d been an actress in the Yiddish Theatre—somewhere there is a photograph of her playing Ophelia at the Henry Street Settlement, with her hair down to her knees. She lived for Chekhov. How many productions of The Cherry Orchard, of The Seagull, did we see together? “Shh,” she would say. I wasn’t allowed to whisper, ever, after we took our seats. “Shh,” she said, “you’ll wake the actors from their dream.” What is the story of The Cherry Orchard? Lyubov Ranevskaya returns to her family’s estate, which has within its precinct a famous cherry orchard. The estate is inhabited by characters who filter in and out: her brother, Gaev; her adopted daughter, Varya; the old servant, Firs; her drowned son’s tutor, Trofimov, who is a perpetual student, waving his rhetorical fists. The estate is heavily mortgaged, and there’s no money to pay it off; Lopakhin, a rich businessman whose father was a serf on the estate, offers to buy it and subdivide the land for holiday houses. The orchard is untended; there are no longer any serfs to turn the cherries into jam. A frenzy of regret and magical thinking ensues—the old question, wearing its fools cap: What do we let go? Read More
April 17, 2025 First Person The Marriage Dividend By Laurie Stone New York, November 9, 1965. Courtesy of AP Photo/Robert Goldberg. Something has changed since Richard and I got married in December. I’m not sure what. Have you ever looked in the mirror and noticed you are able to cock one eyebrow higher than ever before? I’m happier. I didn’t imagine I would feel this way when I went downstairs to his studio and said, “I think we should get married.” He looked up from his book and said, “Okay.” Was he bemused, half smiling? I can’t remember. It’s been three and a half months since we met with a judge in the courthouse in Hudson, where we live, and he pronounced us “married people.” Afterward, Richard and I had happy hour drinks on Warren Street with a friend. For the first few weeks, we imagined the marriage dividend was we wouldn’t get on each other’s nerves as much as before. This has proved untrue. Read More
April 16, 2025 At Work Out of Step with the Rest of the World: A Conversation with Zheng Zhi By Owen Park All stills from The Hedgehog (2024). Photographs courtesy of Zheng Zhi. The writer Zheng Zhi’s first novel, Floating, was published in China in 2007, when he was nineteen years old. Since then, he has published three more—a fifth will come out this year—as well as numerous volumes of short fiction, all while writing prolifically for film and television. His literary career has placed him at the vanguard of what is now known as the Dongbei renaissance, a group of writers hailing from the northeastern provinces of Heilongjiang, Jilin, and Zheng’s native Liaoning, all of whose upbringings were marked by the recession that occurred there in the eighties and nineties. Given Zheng’s stature in his home country, it feels surprising that “The Hedgehog,” which appears in the Review’s new Spring issue, is his first work of fiction to be published in English. With help from the novelist Jeremy Tiang, who translated the story, we spoke to Zheng about the turns of fate and the funding issues that have, over the years, led him away from and back to serious writing, as well as about his childhood fear, which makes its way into the story, that his sanity would hold out for only so long. —Owen Park INTERVIEWER “The Hedgehog” was first published anonymously with the title Xiānzhèng (Immortal syndrome), as part of a competition in the literary magazine Lǐ (Newriting). The story caused a bit of a stir among readers in the Chinese literary world as they struggled to guess the identity of its author. Up to that point, you’d been more successful in the realm of commercial fiction. What was it like to participate in this anonymous contest? ZHENG ZHI The entries were a mixture of open submissions and solicited manuscripts. One of the editors, Zhou Jianing, approached me to ask if I’d be interested, and of course I accepted the challenge, in part to force myself to try something new. Six months later, with the deadline fast approaching, Jianing checked in to see how I was doing—and as I’d completely forgotten that I’d agreed to do it, I ended up writing the whole story in the final three days. The word limit was twenty thousand characters, and my story was nineteen thousand. If not for this restriction, I’d probably have kept going and turned it into a novella or even a short novel. All the short-listed stories appeared in the magazine—I remember they were spread across three issues over three or four months—and also on the magazine’s WeChat page. Readers had the choice of buying the magazine or simply reading them online. As promised, the stories were credited only by a serial number—I was no. 11—and people were speculating about who each author might be. I was surprised by how many young writers got involved in these discussions, which became quite animated. The organizers did a good job keeping things confidential—or at least I didn’t know who any of the other authors were. The whole competition felt fair, and very exciting. I’d previously seen this sort of “anonymous” competition only in the world of variety shows, where singers wear masks and the audience has to guess who they are based on their voices. The way I see it, an author’s style is equivalent to a singer’s voice. Being identifiable is very important. Read More
April 15, 2025 First Person The Ghost of Reem Island By Mo Ogrodnik All images courtesy of the author. For the past decade, the “Ghost of Reem Island,” as she was referred to in the press, has haunted me. On December 1, 2014, Ala’a al-Hashemi, a Yemeni-born Emirati woman, murdered a Hungarian American schoolteacher in a public restroom in Abu Dhabi. The media cited the incident as a “lone act of terror.” I too was an American teaching in Abu Dhabi and, by a bizarre coincidence, had been spending an inordinate amount of time in public restrooms, photographing female bathroom attendants for a creative research project. More than ten years after the murder, I still find myself sifting through the little that was left behind—the government search-and-arrest video that went viral, news articles chronicling the political landscape of the time, and my own photographs of bathrooms and their attendants. Read More
April 11, 2025 The Review’s Review Snow White Is Tired By Alec Mapes-Frances Stanley Schtinter as Robert Walser. “I know the story well,” says the Snow White of Robert Walser’s Schneewittchen, “about the apple, the coffin. Be so kind as to tell me more. Why does nothing else come to mind? Must you hang on to these details? Must you forever draw on them?” In Stanley Schtinter’s 2024 adaptation of Walser’s 1901 dramolette, characters from the Grimm fairy tale exhaust themselves and their images in a recounting of the story in which they are inscribed. The film is a complete performance of the English translation of Walser’s text, which picks up where the Grimm tale leaves off. The queen, who has tried to kill Snow White twice, wants her daughter to forget everything. Under her orders, the hunter, her lover and Snow White’s would-be assassin, reenacts the attempt on Snow White’s life. There is discussion of the desire for death, springtime, fresh garden air, kisses, snow, and sleep. The characters chastise each other for telling fairy tales, rehearsing scripts, making use of “gesture and technique.” Read More