“The Ellipse Maker,” a new short story of mine, is in the spring 2023 issue n+1magazine. Check it out! Subscribe! If you’re within striking distance of Brooklyn, there’s a reading/party for the issue at the n+1 office on Tuesday, May 16, 7pm.
Also, I sort of did a free-standing handstand for Insta.
More entries in an online commonplace book
“The difference between the artists’ work is like the difference between a grand aristocratic portrait and a psychologically nuanced character sketch. Audubon gets the dress and regalia right, and his birds project a powerful, self-fashioning sense of their own presence and importance. Brasher’s birds live contentedly in their own world and don’t need to perform or impress the viewer.” —Philip Kennicott on Rex Brasher in WaPo
“Writing had always been slow and agonising—she called it ‘the most loathsome of all activities’—but that was before the decline in her health made it all but impossible. Perhaps she also disliked the implied finality of ‘collected works.’ She took her friend’s copy of the book, picked up a pencil and added a word to the cover. It was now The Collected Works of Dead Jane Bowles.” —Joe Dunthorne on Jane Bowles in the LRB
“Where the mainsail should have been, four rigid sails stuck straight up into the air, like window blinds turned vertically; each one had the shape of an airfoil and generated forward thrust. They also allowed him to carve the wind with more control than a cloth sail would allow: instead of turning the entire boat at an angle to catch the wind, by either tacking or jibing, Walker could simply spin a crank, and the wings above his head would swivel into a configuration that would drive the boat forward, sideways, or even in reverse.” —Pagan Kennedy in the New Yorker on the possible return of the Age of Sail
“As a writer, while his recurring subject is himself—he continues to probe his self-doubts and proclivities, always finding some new angle from which to contemplate the vagaries of his own thought process—he somehow keeps himself at a distance, an object of detached contemplation in a world of other objects, other bodies. His self-disclosure provides a relief from the burden of self.” —Geoffrey O’Brien on Joe Brainard in the NYRB