na Paula Maia’s slim, newly translated novel, On Earth as It Is Beneath (trans. Padma Viswanathan, Charco Press, 2025), set inside a failed Brazilian penal colony at the edge of the known, is a saga of nihilistic minimalism with the rarest of qualities…
An affectionate biography of the polymath includes details of never-produced gems such as Monty Python’s Third World War
elease the Horse by Matthew Mitchell’s got me thinking about the Ozarks. Specifically, Dogpatch USA. We went there when I was a kid, before the place went belly-up for the final time. It had been on the skids forever—money problems, weather problems, l…
’ve been amused by recent reports of the deciphering of the fourth message embedded in the artist Jim Sanborn’s encrypted sculpture Kryptos, which has been on display at the CIA headquarters since 1990. Three of its messages have already been solved us…
pon finishing Caren Beilin’s new novel, Sea, Poison (New Directions, 2025), I immediately went back to page 1 and dove back in. Not because I like to reread books, but because I was in a state of bafflement. This is not an uncommon feeling when reading…
t the beginning of Loop, Annie McDermott’s 2019 English-language translation of Cuaderno ideal (2014), by Mexican author Brenda Lozano, the narrator relates an anecdote about a friend who kicks the pavement after discovering his car got double-parked w…
