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Welcome: Issue Eight
(from Issue Eight)
A POET, A LAWYER, an editor, a gambler. When four unlikely misfits from two coasts joined forces to invent Canteen, we spent one dreamy night in our publisher’s Brooklyn apartment shamelessly feeling up paper samples. read more
Rachel Howard: Lorraine Standing
(from Issue Eight)
This is an excerpt from Rachel’s essay, available in full in our latest issue.
2.
I SUPPOSE MY serious fascination with Lorraine began a year and a half ago, during Frank St. Vincent’s drawing group in his Oakland studio. Sometimes she models for the group; mostly she draws there. On this particular night, they were all drawing a thirtysomething woman—me—and I had draped my pale body belly-down in an odd pose, one leg bent and one straight behind. My head lay at the front of the moldy divan, cheek resting against hand, other arm trailing to touch the floor. The intention was to look pensive.
read more
Porochista Khakpour: 11 Snapshots of a Literary Life
(from Issue Three)
1. JUVENILIA
When I was about 11, I wrote my first novel, an epic about “a Victorian girl.” Translation: a girl from a faraway time and place, where human women wore big fancy dresses and sat around sulking. That lifestyle was so appealing to me. I was a sad kid, and the only excuse I could come up with was that I had been born in the wrong place at the wrong time.
My heroine happened to be 11, with hair “the color of stallions” (translation: black) and skin of “pale wheat” (white or brown, depending on which Iranian you asked), and her name was knotty and yet “magnificent”: Contessa Van Prgkhjiollzshdiyyiani. read more
Andrew Sean Greer: The Museum of My Beginnings
(from Issue One)
I WROTE MY first novel when I was 10 years old. This is not particularly impressive. Writing a novel at 10 is actually a little late to begin things, if you’re going to be a genius child. Mozart, as my parents often pointed out to me during games of Candy Land, had already written an opera, and there I was trying to lick the board. So, when Mrs. Poppy assigned us each to write a “novel,” I took to it immediately. Here was something even Mozart hadn’t done. read more
Megan Foley: Interviews with Writers in Bed
THREE DAYS BEFORE I met my idol, I stopped sleeping well. I jolted awake after a handful of hours, a rush in my stomach. The clock glowed yellow in the pre-dawn dark. I was wired, miles from sleep, one thought running like a news scroll: I’m going to meet him. I’m going to meet him. read more
Po Bronson: Knowing Your Audience
(from Issue One)
LET’S SAY YOU’RE writing a true story about a man who tried to kill himself after reading a book.
You face a crucial decision immediately. If the book he read is a catalyst for his suicide attempt, then what do we need to know about this book to believe it changed a life? And how do you make the story of that life feel real, even while it is real? read more
Joyce Maynard: A Storytelling Life
(from Issue Two)
BECAUSE THIS IS about living one’s life as a storyteller, I’ll begin with a story. It’s about the person who taught me how to tell a story: my mother. She was a difficult woman in many ways—a difficult person to have as a mother, anyway—demanding, guilt-inspiring, largely oblivious to the concept of a child’s privacy, sometimes overinvolved to the point of inducing claustrophobia. What saved our relationship was the expansiveness of her spirit, her incorrigible sense of humor, and—this most of all—her tireless need to explore life and seek out the story of everyone she met. read more
Matthew Specktor: Why Don’t They Drop the Bomb on L.A.?
(from Issue Seven)
SOME YEARS AGO, I was interviewed by the BBC in New York. The topic was “Books Abroad,” focusing on the fractious relationship between literary publishing and Hollywood. At the time, I was a senior studio executive stationed in Manhattan. I was supposed to know something about how and why certain books became movies, what motivated a producer to pay three million dollars for an unwritten novel, why other adaptations got stuck inside development hell—in short, why Angelenos were so stupid, or at least why the movie business was so venal and corrupt as to treat publishing (or, more specifically, writers) like chattel. read more
William Giraldi: Say Unto This Mountain
(from Issue Seven)
1. The Arrival
DRIVING FROM NEW JERSEY to Colorado in 2000, I realized that Jack Kerouac’s ecstatic romance of speeding cross-country belonged to another time. Neal Cassady was just a quick spark of his Byronic imagination. I didn’t think that today’s American highway held much promise of delivery, of rapture, of grace. Manifest Destiny, like the American Dream, has always been misleading. read more
Benjamin Kunkel: Still Ill
(from Issue Three)
Rosalind: They say you are a melancholy fellow.
Jaques: I am so. I do love it better than laughing.
—As You Like It
IN 1986 I WAS living with my family in the humdrum town of Eagle, Colorado. I had just become a teenager and was applying to prep schools in New England. I considered myself a rather tragic, intelligent, and solitary figure, and was accordingly full of fantasies of escape from the baffled cows and squinting hicks who swelled my middle-school class. At the same time there was obviously something wrong with me, a basic temperamental deficiency that prevented me from taking life with that casualness, amounting almost to grace, displayed by normal people. Suicide or fame seemed likely destinies.