Things Green | By Shara Lessley I saw the usual spray of buildings, streetlamps buzzing. As the plane descended, I also saw pinpricks of green. Tucked into peaks and hills, into flatter stretches I guessed were desert. Lodged in the Middle Eastern capital itself: green and green and green. Like fish scales. Or small sequins. Green that seemed to say, welcome. […]
Year: 2012
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Hear that sound?
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Daily Dickinson
On Devotional Reading | By Traci Brimhall A few months ago, one of my friends and I decided to enter into a five-year relationship with Emily Dickinson. The rules were broad: read an Emily Dickinson poem each day (starting with number one in the volume of Dickinson’s poetry edited by Thomas H. Johnson), and write […]
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The Square Root of 6400
Genius | By Jeff Friedman When Jeremy Wiggins announced he was a genius, Bobby Miller said, “a genius at what?” and Ronnie Rappaport raised his baseball bat and threatened to bonk him on the head, if he didn’t “stop it with that genius stuff.” It wasn’t the first time Wiggins had claimed to be a genius, […]
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The Rivalry
Faulkner vs. Hemingway | By Joseph Fruscione It took me until 1998, when I went to graduate school, to begin to appreciate Hemingway. In my junior year of high school, I couldn’t finish The Old Man and the Sea soon enough. In my senior year of college, I couldn’t finish The Nick Adams Stories soon enough. […]
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A single year
Brook Lane | By Leslie Bazzett On a still day, you can see the greater stillness of the homes reflected on the surface of the lake. Houses of stucco and brick, with rows of silent blue-black windows. Some have Spanish tile roofs, and limestone terraces that are leaf-swept and beautifully worn like ancient marble. In […]
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Failure to Disappear
On Dennis Oppenheim | By Scott Nadelson Not long ago, on the first anniversary of a close friend’s death, I pulled a disc from my wife’s collection of film and video art. She’s a video artist herself, and her collection is extensive, but when I went to her shelf I didn’t know what I was […]
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There is no ordinary
Messenger | By Megan Staffel Once, on a cold and snowy morning, there was a sharp, aggressive knocking on the glass door in our kitchen. It was a chicken. “What’s that chicken doing?” Graham asked. The chickens lived in the shed behind our house and when the snow was deep, they rarely went outside of […]
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Avenues of the mind
In Lily City | By David Roderick I went, I saw, I was conquered—by its stony cold shadows, by the sheep-like tourists flocking along the Via Ricasoli between Michelangelo’s David and Brunelleschi’s Dome. Florence: the Lily City. Firenze: that greatly-aged place that neutralized anyone (Galileo, Machiavelli, Dante), who tried to foist greatness upon it. Dante’s […]
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About real love
Wilderness | By Amy Glynn Greacen I went to a prep school in Oakland, California, where I’d earned instant Bumpkin status for the misdemeanor of living in a far-flung suburb at the foot of the Las Trampas Regional Wilderness. Its downtown had a poisonous-looking old bar, Elliott’s, which my mother often pointed out had been the […]
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Someone else’s mail
Koch’s Postcards | By Kate Petersen I suspect I’m not the only writer who has found herself stuck indoors on a nice day, not writing, but in some musty corner of an antique shop, thumbing through a little tray of old postcards, the free-with-purchase flotsam of estate sales, obsessively reading messages which seem by turns […]