Via the 92nd Street Y, the only known recorded performance of Dylan Thomas’s Under Milk Wood, which Thomas premiered at the Y in 1953.
For "the good writers and good poets, the non-drumbeaters and non-axe grinders. So long as they're good." We are a quarterly literary magazine that was founded in 1953.
Curated by Justin Alvarez.
Current Issue
Facebook
Twitter
Google+
Subscribe • Ask us anything
Curated by Justin Alvarez.
Current Issue
Google+
Subscribe • Ask us anything
A manuscript page from Wallace Stegner’s novel Crossing to Safety. Stegner apologized that his markings are not more revealing: “My methods are prelapsarian and prewordprocessarian. It takes me many rewritings to get a first draft, and all the chapters that went into it have been thrown away successively until I get something that will read consecutively. I go through that with an editing pencil and retype it to make a relatively clear second draft.”
“I will tell you something in that area, if you like a theory, which I may have come up with after I wrote the book—I’m not sure. It is the notion that the reader is brought in almost as a collaborator in creating the picture that emerges of the characters, of the situation, of what they look like—everything. So this authorial absence, which everyone from Flaubert to Barthes talks about, is the sense that the book is a collaboration between the reader and what is on the pages.”
Charles-Pierre Baudelaire (1821-1867) The cenotaph of Charles-Pierre Baudelaire by Jose de Charmoy depicts the poet brooding over a gauze-encased body. In the year before his death, Baudelaire, resting in a nursing home and left all but mute from advanced syphilis, nevertheless enjoyed some respite from his deepening depression. He took special pleasure in his many visitors, in Berthe Morisot’s playing Wagner on the piano, and in the numerous flowers which grew in the yard outside the home. His condition also allowed his mother, Caroline, one last chance to play a maternal role and thereby attempt a long overdue reconciliation. According to his mother, Baudelaire died with a smile on his lips.
From the portfolio “Permanent Parisians” in issue 99, Spring 1986.
Where were you, nymphs,
when I was learning to apply
the proper plaster of Paris and papier-mâché
to fledgling cheekbones?
Where a Nereid when I needed
advice on unguents?
A dryad to calm my riotous nerves
and dye my dulling locks?
An oread to teach the ablutions of adoration?
Sylph, you never paid the parson of insecurity—
where were you when these petty hips
toppled the girlhood world?
Put on your face, little goddess.
You’ll need it.
Whittle yourself into shape
before Pygmalion gets here
and raises high the pedestal. He’s not the kind we need.
No thanks to you, it all turned out quite well.
No more violin buying.
My cardsharping days are through.
I exfoliated all layers of despair
and replaced them with voluble dew.
At this age, I rely on my looks, exclusively.
Don’t think I’ll send you my daughter.
—Patty Seyburn, “Where Were You, Nymphs?”
Art Credit Iñigo Aragón
“Of course, [baseball]’s both: a sport and a pastime, to borrow from James Salter. The autograph hounds in Ivan Weiss’s trailer, the voyeurism that unsettles our photographer Kate Joyce, and that peculiar alone-in-the-crowd feeling that haunts [photographer Alec] Soth—none of that arises without the ballgames themselves. There’s a reason A Sport and a Pastime is so full of sex, described in elaborate, ritual detail: Salter understood that the strenuous, disciplined, daily exertions of love—the physical sport—enabled and ennobled the pastime of the life around it. The sex had to be closely observed and recorded.”
In the latest installment of the Bull City Summer series, Adam Sobsey on when baseball isn’t baseball.
“A novel should be an experience and convey an emotional truth rather than arguments.”
Flavorwire rounds up handwritten outlines. (That’s William Faulkner’s outline for A Fable, written on the wall.)
For more of this morning’s roundup, click here.
We are honored to guest edit Electric Literature’s Recommended Reading today.
The winner of this year’s Plimpton Prize for Fiction, Ottessa Moshfegh’s “Bettering Myself” is a story, as editor Lorin Stein notes, that “improves (and makes me laugh) each time I read it.”
A look at the chained library of Zutphen, one of three such libraries still in existence in Europe.
