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Short Forms: When Social Media and Short Fiction Intersect
Listen to the author read this piece: [audio: issue3/syms.mp3] When my short story “Jenna on Twitter” was published by Joyland Magazine last year, I was pretty pleased with myself. It’s a story about a woman with a crush on a gay male singer who fantasizes while watching his YouTube videos. She uses her iPhone to…
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Old Codes for Modern Woes: The 2012 Old Farmer’s Almanac
Reviewed in this essay: Robert Thomas, 2012 Old Farmer’s Almanac, Thomas Allen, 2011. Listen to the author read this piece: [audio: issue3/vanmeermass.mp3] Every fall in supermarkets across North America The Old Farmer’s Almanac appears at checkout stands, sitting incongruously amid tabloids and recipe magazines. The Almanac’s antiquated woodcut cover is the first indication that this cheaply bound…
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Species Counterpoint: Reverberations of Jenny Sampirisi’s Croak
Reviewed in this Sight-Reading: Croak, by Jenny Sampirisi. Coach House Press, 2011. Why did I introduce into the text all those extraordinary frogs and legs and things, all that fermenting matter, isolating them on the page only by the style, the cold and disciplined tone, and demonstrating to the reader how completely I dominated the…
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On the Real Way to Eat like a Caveman
Hear this piece read by its author, Dylan Gordon: [audio: issuetwo/dylan.mp3] Reviewed in this essay: Ancestral Appetites: Food in Prehistory by Kristen J. Gremillion. Cambridge University Press, 2011. We humans have learned to eat a great number of foods, prepared in an ever more astounding variety of ways. And as Ancestral Appetites demonstrates, this range…
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Need-to-Know: On Area 51
Hear this piece read by its author, Matthew Farish: [audio: issuetwo/matt.mp3] Reviewed in this essay: Annie Jacobsen, Area 51: An Uncensored History of America’s Top Secret Military Base Little, Brown and Co., 2011. Trevor Paglen, Blank Spots on the Map: The Dark Geography of the Pentagon’s Secret World. New American Library, 2010. For two days…
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Everyone and I Stopped Breathing: William Basinski at the Met
Reviewed in this essay: “Remembering September 11,” a concert by the Wordless Music Orchestra at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, September 11, 2011. William Basinski’s epic four-disc masterwork The Disintegration Loops emerged in 2002 with two backstories. First, Basinski, a little-known classically trained composer, was digitizing analog tape loops of twenty-year-old recordings when…
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On Learning How to Share: A Review of the Seven Billion
Hear this piece read by its author, Mary Albino: [audio: issuetwo/mary.mp3] With baby Danica’s Halloween arrival, the planet’s population officially reached seven billion. It’s an estimate of course—the margin of error is six months in either direction—but the point is humanity has reached a milestone: there are twice as many people alive as there were…
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Beautiful Agony: The Online Amateur’s Authentic Orgasm
A woman’s head appears as she lies down directly below the camera, filling the frame with her face and shoulders. She stares into the lens as she adjusts herself, and we hear the sound of her unbuckling and unzipping her pants. We see her shoulders and upper body tense up as she begins to touch…
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Donna-Michelle St. Bernard’s Gas Girls
For this piece, Will Goldbloom, a theatre historian, and Zack Russell, a theatre artist, read Donna-Michelle St. Bernard’s Gas Girls, published in 2011 by Playwrights Canada Press. They wrote up their thoughts separately, then the TRB recorded their first conversation about the play. Listen to their discussion: [audio: issuetwo/willzack.mp3] WILL: “Love for gas, gas for…
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“No Family Life”: Claire Fontaine at Air de Paris
A review of Claire Fontaine’s “No Family Life,” at the Parisian gallery Air de Paris from February 11th to March 19th, 2011.
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Anna Karenina, her Android, the Aliens and the Train
A review of Android Karenina by Leo Tolstoy and Ben H. Winters. Quirk Books, 2010.
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You Ask Me Whether I Approve of Violence?
A review of three new documentaries, Better this World, If a Tree Falls: A Story of the Earth Liberation Front, and The Black Power Mixtape 1967-1975.