My Ass
It’s like precious china. A fresh white, virtually blue. Touch it, and it appears almost to melt, softly giving way. The spot touched turns the slightest pink, as if bashful, and surely, if bitten into, it would taste sweet, with . . .
Category Archives: Issues
A Cricket Ball
Last night was a bad one. A bit of a standoff at one thirty in the morning with a nurse. I wanted more sleeping pills, and he insisted I had had enough already.
Of course, I have my own stash . . .
“And it touched me”: Poetry, Empire, and the Death of Pablo Neruda
1.
All of these tribes, and all of these street signs
None of them will be yours or mine
But I’ll be your empire
Just stay alive, stay alive, stay alive
— Mustafa the Poet, “Stay Alive”
It’s a gold . . .
Rash Undertakings
I discovered Cormac McCarthy in 1970 in Victoria when I stumbled into a bookshop, Poor Richard’s this was, began browsing among the rear shelves and pulled down a hardback called The Orchard Keeper. It was a first novel, I . . .
An Interview with Percival Everett
A version of this conversation was broadcast on CBC Radio One’s Writers & Company on February 27, 2022, produced by Sandra Rabinovitch.
Percival Everett is not exactly a cult taste, but for a man who’s published more than thirty books, . . .
Birds of Prey
What is a person but an animal? Women, especially mothers, are raptors. I come from people who could fly. From above, one hundred feet in the air, approximately ten storeys high, the red-tailed hawk perceives its prey—a grey-haired mouse. A . . .
5 a.m.
for Stan Dragland and for Kris Coleman
The wilderness of our youth, an empty barn,dancing with friends into the small hours,then daylight and the cars swerving awaywordless into the dawn
It arrives all at once tonight,not as memory, but as . . .
Brick Writers on the Best of 2022
We asked our issue 110 contributors to let us know what’s captured their attention over the past year. Here’s what they shared:
The best painting I saw this year was by Ben Reeves at Nicholas Metivier Gallery in Toronto. . . .
Constellation
Three months after Steven Heighton’s passing, I keep returning to the opening lines of Tomas Tranströmer’s “After a Death”: “Once there was a shock / that left behind a long, shimmering comet tail.” The residue of the shock hasn’t settled . . .
From Rehearsals for Living
Dear Leanne,
About five years ago now, I sat down with a copy of your book, As We Have Always Done. I’d planned to flip through the first few pages over my morning coffee. In the end, though, I . . .
Getting Out of the House: Library
The way I remember it, I’ve stopped reading, but I spend an awful lot of time unemotionally looking at my books without really grasping their contents, as if they’ve become hollow things, emptied of their words, simple sheets, papers, pigments, . . .
Zaatar
I am mixing zaatar and olive oil in a small bowl. Zaatar is a particular blend of herbs and spices—thyme, sumac, marjoram, oregano, sesame seeds—and the trick to making a paste from it to spread on bread is getting just . . .
A Conversation with Tomás González
Juan Gabriel Vásquez: Tomás, we’re having this conversation by email, not only due to the pandemic, but because several years ago you decided to move far away from Bogotá. Where do you live now? What made you decide to . . .
The Tropicana
i. The Shrine
He was eleven the first time he snuck downtown to visit the Tropicana, accompanied by some older boys from Bishop Pinkham Junior High. He no longer recalls what season it was, but he feels that it had . . .
A Correspondence with Elena Ferrante
I interviewed Elena Ferrante by email over the summer of 2016. She read my questions (which were written in English) and wrote her responses in Italian. Her replies were translated by Ann Goldstein, the English translator of Ferrante’s many books. . . .
Murmuring in a Dream of Freedom
We are masked. Mine is black with white elephants parading across it, the fabric from my local Nigerian seamstress, who now sells them in the front window of her shop. His is simple black, warrior-like and fitting for this October . . .
On 28 Weeks Later (Juan Carlos Fresnadillo, 2007)
It’s a measure of how underrated Juan Carlos Fresnadillo’s 28 Weeks Later is that when I recommend it to people, they’re often startled. There are probably a couple of good reasons for that. First, horror as a genre still seems . . .
On Aguirre, the Wrath of God (Werner Herzog, 1972)
First the steep mountain and clouds, then a red line of movement, and closer still, a cannon and a priest, a statue of the Virgin Mary, two Spanish women awkwardly carried in covered litters, the chained and enslaved Inca men . . .
On Underground (Emir Kusturica, 1995)
In April of 2020, a friend called me from Los Angeles to tell me that Chris had killed himself. Someone had found him in his Venice apartment. We had all gone to film school together in the late 1990s—I somewhat . . .
On Ali: Fear Eats the Soul (Rainer Werner Fassbinder, 1974) and My Name is Not Ali (Viola Shafik, 2011)
I consider Ali: Fear Eats the Soul to be the masterpiece of the iconic German filmmaker, Rainer Werner Fassbinder. In the movie, Fassbinder confronts the taboos of a conservative German society with a story of race, migration, class, and intergenerational . . .