BRICK LITERARY JOURNAL (AUTUMN 2023)
Fiction
“Thinking Ahead” by Joan Silber:
“How does a person behave when he knows he’s dying? There’s a myth that people go off and do what they’ve always wanted to do—sail to Spain, buy a horse, eat at the world’s most famous restaurant. ‘They never do that,’ my mother said, ‘that I’ve seen. They don’t even remember why they wanted to do it.”
“Seabreeze” by Korey Lewis:
Jojo and Jaz wait for The Defendant to pick them up from their mother’s place and take them to Seabreeze. “If Disney is where dreams come true, then Seabreeze is where they give up.”
“Eau de Nil” by Chloe Wilson:
“It was a website called Geriatrix. On it were women my age, in various states of undress. I saw breasts droopier and flatter than mine, necks that were crêpier, bellies that bulged and hung. But what really struck me was how happy they looked.”
“Country Furnishings” by Earle McCartney:
The equilibrium in a tetchy blue-collar workshop gets jostled with the arrival of Frank Wonderwood—future son-in-law of the business’s new co-owner and future woodworking graduate from Del Tech.
Poetry
Karen Leona Anderson, Stuart Dybek, Johanna Carissa Fernandez, Mike Good, Cleo Qian, Sarah Lynn Rogers, Joel M. Toledo
Nonfiction
Laura M. Furlan her birth parents, identity, and butterflies. Adam Foulds on the home-turned-museum of one of England’s greatest architects, Sir John Soane. Sam McPhee on the singular fascination hands have on his attention. Jessica Francis Kane on her lifelong affinity with the fascinating James Boswell. And Devon Brody’s “Beth”: “I’m glad to be with only Beth and her long hair that meets the hair on my arms, and the hair on her arms that meets the hair on my arms.”
In Conversation:
Ricardo Frasso Jaramillo delves with Justin Torres into Torres’s career and his new novel, Blackouts, a finalist for the National Book Award.
Art
Wangari Mathenge
BRICK LITERARY JOURNAL (SUMMER 2023)
I recently returned to the Metropolitan Opera to see The Hours, based on Michael Cunningham’s novel. It was wonderful to be back in the glittering hall, after three long pandemic years, listening to Renee Fleming, Joyce DiDonato, and Kelli O’Hara bring Virginia Woolf and Cunningham’s other characters to life. That experience sent me looking for novels about music, and I was thrilled to see that Brendan Slocumb has a new one coming out only a year after his bestselling debut,
In the fourth annual Indie Issue, we let the books speak for themselves in these excerpts from a trio of starred Indieland picks: a memoir by two sisters who survived the Holocaust; another memoir about a teen’s coming-of-age on a sailing-school ship; and a collection of short stories from a renowned Bengali author.
In Daniel Seymour’s From Auschwitz With Love, sisters Manci Grunberger Beran and Ruth Grunberger Mermelstein describe their arrival at the concentration camp:
Father realized that we didn’t have much time together. So, he said to us, “No matter what happens, I want you to remember three things.”
The New York Times Book Review – January 29, 2023:
“Master Slave Husband Wife,” by Ilyon Woo, relates the daring escape from bondage in Georgia to freedom in the North by an enslaved couple disguised as a wealthy planter and his property.
In “The Wandering Mind,” the historian Jamie Kreiner shows that the struggle to focus is not just a digital-age blight but afflicted even those who spent their lives in seclusion and prayer.
In Deepti Kapoor’s cinematic novel, a young man from the provinces falls in with a powerful crime syndicate.
“The whole lesson of this pandemic, and the whole lesson of 9/11, is we can’t ignore the world, or if we do ignore the world, it’s at our peril,” Haass says. “These oceans that surround us are not moats. We’ve got to pay attention to the world and we’ve got to fix things here at home.”
The ambition of Richard Haass’s new book is clear from its title: “The World: A Brief Introduction.” In just 400 pages, Haass, who has been the president of the nonpartisan Council on Foreign Relations since 2003, offers a primer on world affairs. On this week’s podcast, Haass talks about why he wrote it. (Read more)
Richard Nathan Haass is an American diplomat. He has been president of the Council on Foreign Relations since July 2003, prior to which he was Director of Policy Planning for the United States Department of State and a close advisor to Secretary of State Colin Powell.
From a Princeton University Press online release:
America’s most storied urban underdog, Brooklyn has become an internationally recognized brand in recent decades—celebrated and scorned as one of the hippest destinations in the world. In Brooklyn: The Once and Future City, Thomas J. Campanella unearths long-lost threads of the urban past, telling the rich history of the rise, fall, and reinvention of one of the world’s most resurgent cities.
Spanning centuries and neighborhoods, Brooklyn-born Campanella recounts the creation of places familiar and long forgotten, both built and never realized, bringing to life the individuals whose dreams, visions, rackets, and schemes forged the city we know today. He takes us through Brooklyn’s history as homeland of the Leni Lenape and its transformation by Dutch colonists into a dense slaveholding region. We learn about English émigré Deborah Moody, whose town of Gravesend was the first founded by a woman in America. We see how wanderlusting Yale dropout Frederick Law Olmsted used Prospect Park to anchor an open space system that was to reach back to Manhattan. And we witness Brooklyn’s emergence as a playland of racetracks and amusement parks celebrated around the world.
To read more: https://press.princeton.edu/titles/13671.html
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