Probes
Mikhail Iossel is having black tea and an almond croissant in a downtown shopping mall when a middle-aged man plunks himself down directly opposite Iossel at the otherwise empty long table. A life story in a sentence.
Read More
Brian Fawcett on the importance of clear instructions, the use of “hogwash,” and the art of playing ping pong in Ch. 9 of “The Sussex Variations, or Two Boars.”
Read More
More passages from Vian Andrews’ journals of living in Italy’s Umbrian countryside, a world of mountain hamlets, memories of dancing around the fire pit, old knife-grinders, and burnng the cuttings.
Read More
Seven-year-old Mikhail Iossel is writing out the alphabet in a Soviet communal apartment. Clean writing in a sentence.
Read More
“Painting isn’t dead. The novel isn’t dead. They just aren’t as central to the culture as they once were,” says David Shields in “Reality Hunger: A Manifesto.” In an era where we need books for people who find television too slow, where does writing go from here?
Read More
An 18-year-old Canadian with writerly ambitions, working on his uncle and aunt’s Sussex pig farm, gets to meet the butler of famed English literary critic, Cyril Connelly. Ch. 8 of “The Sussex Variations, or Two Boars.”
Read More
In 1983 Leningrad, at an underground art exhibition, Mikhail Iossel meets a German man who tells Iossel how he survived the Nazi era. A story in a burning sentence.
Read More
Brian Fawcett gets to a pig farm in Sussex, England the long way around. He goes through a brain glitch, the Visigoths’ sack of Rome, the Cuban Missile Crisis, and the British Museum Reading Room. Ch. 7 of The Sussex Variations traverses the History of the Knowable World.
Read More
More passages from Vian Andrews’ journals about life in Italy’s Umbrian countryside. He’s thinking about books, silence, pruning tools, theatres, Bob Dylan, and the fall of Afghanistan to the Taliban.
Read More
Mikhail Iossel pauses in a Montreal metro underpass to listen to a busking middle-aged violinist playing Shostakovich’s “Waltz No. 2.” It’s a melody that can fit into a sentence.
Read More