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. . . .
Timothy, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul. Tim-o-thy: the tip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palate to lisp, at three, against the teeth. Tim. O. Thee. He was . . .
The pass is dated June 3, 1896, a Wednesday. It gives permission for my great-great-grandfather, Joe Seesequasis, to visit his children, Jean, a girl, and John, who were hundreds of miles away in Regina attending the Indian Industrial Boarding School. . . .
A version of this essay originally appeared on TheWire.in in July 2016. It is reprinted in Brick 98 with their kind permission.
It takes a long time to tell the story to friends: to say that I have a . . .
I had to leave—to save your babies. Thanks for making it all almost come true.
— Jennifer North’s suicide note
Jacqueline Susann’s masterpiece, Valley of the Dolls, cannot be improved on, but one wonders, had the author lived in . . .
We was all as glad as we could be, but Tom was the gladdest of all, because he had a bullet in the calf of his leg.
— Mark Twain
Everyone I know hates the last fifty pages of Huck . . .
The novels in William Faulkner’s Snopes trilogy are mainly comedies, uneasily as they may sit in that category. The Mansion begins with Mink Snopes, on trial for murder, waiting for his successful cousin Flem to show up and use his . . .
As we age, each little grunt at a time,
The relic of faith kept crossing the Black
Atlantic, the vined bodies that come with this
Crossing, weigh as anchor, immutable
Suns, and their last shadows, setting behind
Us. And . . .
Recently, a friend loaned me two of Janet Lewis’s novels, The Wife of Martin Guerre and The Trial of Sören Qvist, published in 1941 and 1947 respectively. The Ghost of Monsieur Scarron, published in 1959, completes a trilogy . . .
A photograph of Margaret Gibson taken by John Reeves appears in her story collection Desert Thirst, published in 1997. It is an arresting image for many reasons. The photograph is an extreme close-up, sharply focused, of a mature, unsmiling . . .
When she died in 2004, Lucia Berlin had published seventy-seven short stories, survived years of domestic abuse and alcoholism, travelled extensively throughout both American continents, and worked as a high school teacher, switchboard operator, hospital ward clerk, cleaning woman, and . . .
I had been living in Scotland for more than five years before I found The Living Mountain through two recommendations that came in quick succession: one was from Robert Macfarlane, speaking in St. Andrews, where I live, about nature writing, . . .