Online Exclusives

11.28.98
Tangier Days: Conversations with Paul Bowles, 1984–1988
I don’t know why, for example, one should strive to invent new language. You’re attempting to get across certain ideas. Experimentation should not become a hindrance. [...]
10.14.98
Paul and Peter
Christmas Night lies bitter cold and silent over the capital, and all life seems frozen. Even the wind is still, and the stars flicker like minuscule fires that strive to keep life going.  [...]
10.03.98
White Mouth
Who does not judge each heart by halving it from the top instead of scoring delicately around the girth? [...]
09.23.98
Clerestory
When he bent his right arm up and around his head like a piece of drainpipe, he discovered he could focus on the fraction of a second between the green and white lights of each plane. [...]
09.01.98
Song of the Little Road
 Bamboo birds and girls in gardens

Oil, salt, chilies stolen from the kitchen


like a fork in the road
[...]
08.22.98
Box
by Tan Lin
Nota:   number refer to discrete sheets 
            sheets are numerical, housed in three volumetrically equal boxes  [...]
08.12.98
Woof
I was born covered with hair. My father joked he would have to save up for electrolosis. After a few weeks, the hair fell off, and the wolf went inside.  [...]
08.10.98
From Nineteen Italian Days: An Essay
Cellini was the Norman Mailer of the Italian Renaissance. He punches Michelangelo in the nose. He jumps out a window to attack a rival with a dinner knife. He admits to the assassination of at least three innocent men. [...]
08.02.98
From A Tomb for Anatole
an infant dies to
us both—de
monstrates our
ideal, child-man [...]
08.01.98
Two Stories
by Peter Handke
translated by Scott Abbott
A possible minor epic: of the various head coverings of the passersby in large cities, as, for example, in Skopje in Macedonia/Yugoslavia on December 10, 1987 [...]
07.15.98
Two Portraits
This is the same archaic vista as the next with the inside and outside of the city reversed. A draft on the wall shows houses floating on water: “Water,” he says, “makes it comprehensible to us.”  [...]
07.09.98
Statuary
All that remains is a lamp with green
at its steepled crown,

a room in which she did not belong
and knew it. [...]
06.09.98
Hole
My father and my father’s father were coal miners. Their father’s fathers were coal miners back to Adam, who was a dug lump of clay. [...]
05.18.98
Two Poems
 Down your river of arm, a torrent. Blood, bone
            muscle, skin, nerve, nail, 
                        tendon, marrow, cartilage, 
ligament, fate. [...]
05.11.98
Nose 
Noses give the father in the girl away. [...]
05.03.98
The Thirty Days
In fury—haggard—flailing—weary. Thus were his energies depleted. There was confusion of a bipolar nature. He could not choose an extreme, and both claimed him. [...]
04.26.98
Demons: A Story in Nineteen Volumes
Of course as soon as the word got out that there were demons, real demons, closer to the Earth than the Earth is to the moon, all the demon-worshippers were very happy. [...]
03.31.98
Shadow, Tin, Shadow 
I married my husband because I was afraid of sleep’s eclipse: the eye’s planet rolling to oblivion behind its shadow of lid; I left him because I had a dream his mouth tasted of tin: All our reasons, if they are pure, move us like heavy animals being led in sleep. [...]
03.16.98
Herisau: Four Poems
by Jean Frémon
translated by Cole Swensen
The passion to serve. To be another. To disrespect the first-comer. To reach no conclusion.To dig up the garden. To sort peas, spin thread, put together paper bags. [...]
01.21.98
Charley Horse Nagasaki Palatine
Charley horse    pretension slip    mutton chop und-unbekanntë-Méer
advocate proceed forbidden    áufgebaut    substantive-necéssity [...]
01.16.98
Opium Traffic 
by Antonin Artaud
translated by Richard Grossman
It is my intention to respond with sincerity, so that once and for all we shall no longer be assaulted with warnings about the so-called danger of drugs. [...]

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In Print

Vol. 83
Revenants, The Ghost Issue
Fall 2024
Coedited by Joyce Carol Oates and Bradford Morrow

Online

December 4, 2024
I was educated in an old Sisters of Mercy convent school, where rumors of ghost nuns were ten a penny and were never especially convincing. However, when I was fourteen, I was in a math class and the teacher walked past me to the back of the room—I heard the movement of her long skirts and felt the displacement of air. A moment later, I put up my hand and looked behind me for help, but the teacher was still sitting ahead of me at her desk in front of the class.
November 27, 2024
Rae Armantrout   EXPRESSION   Give me your spurt   of verbs, [...]
November 20, 2024
As a big surprise for her birthday, I gave in and bought the dog she’d been wanting for a long time. A frisky little caramel-colored dachshund she immediately named Fredo after the weak Corleone brother in The Godfather, her favorite movie. I thought it an odd name but it was her choice and her dog.