Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun
Noon ictus cooling the veranda’s fretwork the child sits after his harp boning burlesque in the bower, his slit of gulls nerves silenced into hydrangea. Violet and roan, the bridal sun is opening and closing a window, filling a clay pot of coins with coins; candle jars, a crystal globe, cut milk boxes with horn petals snapping their iceberg-Golgotha crackle. The loneliness is terrible, the ice is near, says the hasp-lipped devil, casting beatitudes at the castor-oiled pimps in Parliament, Pray for them, joyfully, their amazing death! Light seethes bulging like pipes blown with napalm from his big golden eyes turning the afternoon ten degrees backwards, then through palm fronds’ teething the bridled air, sprigs of goat hair fall.
Nov 11, 2014 / Books & the Arts / Ishion Hutchinson
No Fate but Entropy No Fate but Entropy
Swagger and survival in Foxcatcher and Red Army
Nov 11, 2014 / Books & the Arts / Stuart Klawans
A Minor Complaint A Minor Complaint
Akhil Sharma’s Family Life is not a model minority story.
Nov 5, 2014 / Books & the Arts / Toral Gajarawala
Apostles of Growth Apostles of Growth
Capitalism’s newest critics offer a groundbreaking account of slavery, but does their economic history add up?
Nov 5, 2014 / Books & the Arts / Timothy Shenk
Some Like It Hot Some Like It Hot
So regret her divined blemishes, smoking, drinking, having dated the wrong men, the wrong sex: Sugar’s top-lit in the spotlight (breasts, breasts) and what could be more innocent than someone begging to be loved?
Nov 5, 2014 / Books & the Arts / Sarah Trudgeon
Puerto Rico: Land of the Noble/Valiant Lord! Puerto Rico: Land of the Noble/Valiant Lord!
We’re a fleshy circle of beached bachelorettes, tramp-stamps fading, bent over mini Boursins and Bordeaux brought down from the room on top of a resort on top of a reef: the garlic-breathed fruit of four thousand years of human habitation, from the good old Aceramics, the Taíno, fluorescing, and tireless reincarnations of colonizers to the new ground-sloths, the new giant island shrew: you, sunburnt, evolved, sipping rum and corn syrup from a purple plastic penis straw— barbasco to sacred vomit sticksv to Tylenol factories to this sludge-filled veiny verisimilitude— wondering how you landed yourself here: bridesmaid, la isla, Borinquen, a fortified interrobang trimmed in a Whore-Glo faux-feather boa as Russian businessmen offer you their warm Coronas, when all your life you’ve just been trying to make some progress.
Nov 5, 2014 / Books & the Arts / Sarah Trudgeon
Haterz Gonna Hate? Haterz Gonna Hate?
There are limits to what the law can do to police cyberabuse.
Nov 5, 2014 / Books & the Arts / Martha C. Nussbaum
Calculators and Butterflies Calculators and Butterflies
Italo Calvino’s Complete Cosmicomics thrives on the tension between ideas and art.
Nov 5, 2014 / Books & the Arts / Aaron Thier
Billboards Billboards
Florida I-95 America Needs a Faith Lift; a pregnant woman with a stem rose and a pointing, bearded God quoting Jeremiah quoting God; a gray, washed-out steak: What Vegetarians Eat When They Cheat— or was it what the Vegetables ate? You could see where the grease once shone on the old meat. Inside, the silence. —Tell me something.v —No, you! We unbutton our pants. Arms jiggling over fifty-five, thighs spread out on the seat and as far as the eye can see: thousands of carfulls of spreading thighs, the feel and smell of the seatbelt nylon, cricked trapezii. V a s e c t o m y. Oh, to feel your hand on my knee! A lone willow in the field: textbook, and the toxic cows, the steak itself gnawing beside the flesh-filled cars, the rootless wombs that drive themselves.
Nov 5, 2014 / Books & the Arts / Sarah Trudgeon
Shelf Life Shelf Life
Insurrections of the Mind thinks insurrections ought to happen only in the mind.
Nov 5, 2014 / Books & the Arts / Richard Kreitner