A version of this conversation was broadcast on Writers & Company on CBC Radio One in 2021, produced by Sandra Rabinovitch.
I remember when Sigrid Nunez’s eighth title, The Friend, came out and three very different people— friends—told me . . .
Sweep up your shadow
But you can’t turn back.
There is no other way
Through the black glens
Or the lens of an eye.
A keeping, a stride,
Into episodes that arise.
Equidistant:
The interior egg
Until cracked open
To . . .
Alice Walker is the author of numerous books including The Colour Purple, In Search of Our Mother’s Gardens, and most recently The Same River Twice: Honouring the Difficult. Howard Zinn is the author of A Peoples’ History of the United . . .
“Variations on Silence: Reading the Tractatus” is a version of Jan Zwicky’s introduction to Alexander Booth’s new translation of Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, recently published by Penguin Classics. It was published in Brick 112, the Winter 2024 issue, . . .
Throughout his career, Paul Holdengräber has chronicled the times we live in by interviewing artists, writers, and thinkers, and he remained a curator of public curiosity when the pandemic hit. With The Quarantine Tapes, which ran for two years, . . .
In memoriam Stan Dragland, 1942–2022
Life is language, I wanted to say. Only problem:
it isn’t. Not language exactly, not language
as such. Not a particular language either, though
it has a lot to say—in fact, no end of things . . .
No, this wasn’t a frown. It wasn’t even an expression. This was simply the usual position of Umm Kevork’s eyebrows, agreeing with everything she might say. The same was true of her head, nose, and upper lip; each rose up . . .
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 . . .
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 . . .
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 . . .
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 . . .
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, . . .
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 . . .
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 . . .
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. . . .
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 . . .
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 . . .
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, . . .
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 . . .
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 . . .
