By Art Beck
Pierre Michon, born 1945, won the Prix France Culture award in 1984 for his first book, a memoir of sorts, Vies Minuscules. In 2008, an English version, under the title Small Lives, was published by Archipelago Books with partial sponsorship of the French Ministry of Culture. Its translators, Jody Gladding and Elizabeth Deshays, were awarded the prestigious French American Foundation translation prize in 2009.
Video
Latest Reviews
Featured Interview
Newest Essay
Review: Hank Forest’s Party by Ascher/Straus
By Mary Burger
Hank Forest’s Party is the latest volume of a collaborative project, part novel, part memoir, part philosophy, written by Sheila Ascher and Dennis Straus and published under the name Ascher/Straus. The ongoing project Monica’s Chronicle, begun in the 1970s, is a narrative of the process of narration. Narrator Monica records experiences of everyday life in a neighborhood in Rockaway Park, Queens, and weaves her notes through reflections and reinterpretations about the connections between experience, memory, and writing.
Contributor News: Maureen Alsop
Maureen Alsop (“Papery Bewick Swans/1956 Buick Super,” Issue 3) has new poetry forthcoming in the journals DIAGRAM, burnt district, Superstition Review, Glint, Thirteen Mynah Birds, and in the anthology Songs for a Passbook Torch. She has also reviewed Brian Teare's...
Review: Trances of the Blast by Mary Ruefle
By Emily May Anderson Trances of the Blast’s title and its epigraph from the Book of Revelation conjure apocalypse, the blast from which we can hardly expect to recover. The book seldom deals with literal blasts, however, instead focusing on small everyday explosions...
Review: Severina by Rodrigo Rey Rosa
By Heather Mackey
Short enough to be read in one sitting, Severina by Guatemalan master Rodrigo Rey Rosa lingers disproportionately long in the imagination.
Review: Definitely Maybe by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky
By Ho Lin
“Suddenly the front door swung open, and in walked…” This incomplete sentence, which occurs a third of the way into Arkady and Boris Strugatsky’s delightful Definitely Maybe, is a tease, a taunt, and a mission statement.
Review: Soul in Space by Noelle Kocot
By Emily May Anderson
The poems in Soul in Space, Noelle Kocot’s sixth collection, spark across its pages like synapses firing in the brain.
Review: The Mongolian Conspiracy by Rafael Bernal
By Ho Lin
The word “fuck” is deployed fast and furious by Filiberto García in Rafael Bernal’s The Mongolian Conspiracy — easily hundreds of times — and given that Filiberto is a public dick whose Christian name also means “dick,” this all might seem excessive to certain discerning readers.
Jaclyn Watterson reads A Landlord Is an Act
Jaclyn Watterson's recent work appears in places like Birkensnake, The Collagist, Western Humanities Review, and elsewhere. She currently lives with one cat in Salt Lake City.
Jaclyn Watterson reads All of Them Comely
Jaclyn Watterson's recent work appears in places like Birkensnake, The Collagist, Western Humanities Review, and elsewhere. She currently lives with one cat in Salt Lake City.
Geraldine Connolly reads Aileron
Geraldine Connolly is the author of three poetry collections, Food for the Winter, Province of Fire, and Hand of the Wind. Her poems and articles have appeared in Poetry, Shenandoah, The Gettysburg Review, and The Cortland Review. She has been awarded two NEA...
Jon Riccio reads The Kleptomaniac’s Giraffe
Jon Riccio studied viola performance at Oberlin College and the Cleveland Institute of Music. A current MFA student at the University of Arizona, his work has appeared in Bird's Thumb and Bear River Review.
Siamak Vossoughi reads Worth It To Be Wrong
Siamak Vossoughi was born in Tehran, Iran, and grew up in London, Orange County, and Seattle. He attended the University of Washington and then moved to San Francisco because it seemed like a good city to be a writer. He writes short stories and he has written one...
Matt Galletta reads The Doppler
Matt Galletta lives in upstate New York with his wife and daughter. A collection of poems, The Ship is Sinking, is forthcoming from Epic Rites Press. Find more of his work at www.mattgalletta.com.
Kevin Leonard reads When I Get Fat, My Dad’s Gonna Throw a Party
Kevin Leonard is a poet living in Rockaway Beach, NY. He has a writing degree from SUNY Oswego, plays men's league hockey, and has three brothers.
Elise Glassman reads The Junk
Elise Glassman has been a reader since her Grandma Marguerite gave her a subscription to Highlights Magazine and a writer since she began penning teen-aged angst into a blue flowered notebook. She’s studied fiction with Laura Kalpakian and others at the University of...
Maureen Alsop reads Sweepspear
Maureen Alsop, PhD is the author of two full collections of poetry, Mantic (Augury Books) and Apparition Wren. Her most recent poems have appeared at Watershed Review, Citron Review, and ditch poetry.
Susan Carlson reads Death, Life, And Everything Else
Susan Carlson lives and works in southeastern Michigan. After years of solitary writing, she has recently begun working intently with other poets, bringing her own work into the open. This is her first publication.
Midori Chen reads A Growing Up Interlude
Midori Chen is a senior at San Francisco Ruth Asawa School of the Arts. She is a fiction writer and a poet, and has been published in online and print magazines such as Weirdyear, Off the Coast, and Umläut.
Carlos Labbé and Will Vanderhyden read an excerpt from The Fortress
Carlos Labbé was born in Chile and is the author of six novels and a collection of short stories. This year, Open Letter published the English translation of his novel Navidad & Matanza, to be followed in 2015 by Loquela (both translated by Will Vanderhyden). He...
Review: Stand Our Ground: Poems for Trayvon Martin & Marissa Alexander
By Daniel Shank Cruz
As its subtitle indicates, Ewuare X. Osayande’s anthology Stand Our Ground: Poems for Trayvon Martin & Marissa Alexander attempts to make space for poetry within the fractious public discourse surrounding two recent examples of race-related legal injustice.
Alvin Lu reads an excerpt from Early Spring
Alvin Lu was born and lives in San Francisco. He attended Brown University, where he received an MFA in writing, and has worked as a journalist, a salaryman in Tokyo, and a publisher of manga. He is the author of a novel The Hell Screens, and has been at work on a...
Review: Somewhere Near Defiance by Jeff Gundy
By Daniel Shank CruzIn Somewhere Near Defiance, his sixth full-length collection of poems, Jeff Gundy is at the top of his game. The book revisits Gundy’s usual catalog of subjects — small-town life in the Midwest, nature, Mennonites, being on the road, and so on —...
Review: The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt
By Diego BáezDonna Tartt has turned out a single novel every decade, starting with her bestselling debut, The Secret History (1992), a semi-autobiographical “murder mystery in reverse” about students at a small private school in Vermont. The Little Friend (2002)...
Katy Masuga reads Biking at Night
Katy Masuga writes fiction and nonfiction, blurring the lines of distinction. She holds a PhD in Comparative Literature from the University of Washington, Seattle, and a Joint-PhD in Literary Theory and Criticism. Her publications include two monographs on Henry...
Review: It’s Not Love, It’s Just Paris by Patricia Engel
Review by Caitlin Callaghan
“He just wanted to live his dream of dying in Paris.” So says one of the new housemates of Leticia “Lita” del Cielo on her first morning as a new tenant in the House of Stars, a run-down mansion on the Left Bank in which well-moneyed—or “green-blooded”—young women board year by year.
Review: The Poetry of Jack Spicer By Daniel Katz
By Patrick James Dunagan
I first encountered poems by Jack Spicer in Don Allen’s anthology New American Poetry, however, his work didn’t immediately strike my fancy at the time.
Arielle Greenberg reads Afterschool Special
Arielle Greenberg is co-author of Home/Birth: A Poemic, author of My Kafka Century, Given, and co-editor of three anthologies, including Gurlesque. She lives in Maine and teaches out of her home, in the Maine community, and in the Oregon State University-Cascades low...
Review: This Is Between Us by Kevin Sampsell
By Nancy Smith
Only a few paragraphs into This Is Between Us, it becomes clear that this is an intimate portrait of a relationship. A narrator speaks, perhaps confesses, directly to his lover of five years, and we get to peek inside the everyday details of this romance.
Janice Worthen reads Nomenclature
Janice Worthen lives and writes in the Bay Area of California. She's a regular contributor to the online news source The Alamedan. Her poetry has appeared in The Rectangle, Switchback, and her poem "Fire Closest Kept" won University of Idaho's Banks Award. When Janice...