“For Lowell, just saying ‘I’ was enough. For Baraka, saying ‘I’ as a black man meant even more.” —Claudia Rankine
“A writer needs his poisons. The antidote to his poisons is often a book.” —Philip Roth buff.ly/yf6nKFV
“Her spirit felt fat and suddenly very thin, like passing one’s reflection in polished silverware.”
From “Lorelei and Athens” by (@zanscoin) in our new Spring issue.
“ ‘What’s that?’ Sun Dongming asked.
‘Artificial intelligence,’ Lin Wang replied.
‘When did you get it?’
‘This afternoon. About four hours after leaving prison.’ ”
From “Sleeper Bus” by Yu Hua in our new Spring issue.
“Reading is a pleasure, but to finish reading, to come to the blank space at the end, is also a pleasure.” —John Ashbery
“I don’t think poems have to have easy translation. I believe strongly in emotional and psychological narratives.” —Carl Phillips
“ ‘Curtis is definitely a murderer,’ he said. ‘No question about it.’ ”
From “Curtis” by Patrick Cottrell in our new Spring issue.
“I hadn’t felt the absence of African American literature in school in Indiana the way they say they do now. It was worse—I never expected it to be there.”
From our Art of Nonfiction interview with Darryl Pinckney.
“I got a parallel Black cultural education … What this countereducation said at a very basic level was, You have value. Black people around the world are the center, they’re not the margin, and the cultural artifacts you create matter.” —John Keene
“The man read and read, moving his lips; now and then his whole body started moving and then the words entered him like spirits, and began to work their mischief.”
From “The Welder” by Ingeborg Bachmann in our new Spring issue.
“All my early stories are like that, documents of women’s lives. Mostly conveyed to me over the phone by my female friends. Whenever something bad happens, a woman picks up the phone.” —Ludmilla Petrushevskaya
“Anytime I’m not actively composing a little bit every day, I’m afraid that I will stop writing, and I don’t feel good if I don’t write.” —Alice Notley
“A thought is not some object that exists on its own but is always a response to a situation. The question for me became, In what way is literature that?” —Fredric Jameson
“There, I was Esperath Wraithling, a dark elf wizard with black eyes and black hair.”
From “GemStone” by @tao_lin in our new Spring issue.
“Writing fiction is for me a fraught business … You have to sit down every day and make it up.” —Joan Didion
“As long as you can start, you are all right. The juice will come.” —Ernest Hemingway
“I feel just worthless today. I have to drive myself. I have used every physical excuse not to work except fake illness. I have dawdled, gone to the toilet innumerable times, had many glasses of water. Really childish.” —John Steinbeck
“I don’t think I’m looking for dramatic transformation as much as the acknowledgment that there is a dramatic feeling.” —Hilton Als
View ART 149: Music for Visual Thinking by Cauleen Smith in our new Spring issue.
“After I won the Pulitzer … My parents were stunned, and extremely proud, but I remember my father said, ‘You should always have a backup plan. You’re like a politician now, and you will go in and out of favor.’” —Jhumpa Lahiri
“I live every once in a while, mostly I hope
that the trolley passes,
that May turns into July”
From “Epilogue” by Enrique Lihn, translated by Jonathan Cohen, in our new Spring issue.
“Get the big truth first. If you get the big truth the small truths accumulate around it.” —Ray Bradbury
“I don’t write because there’s an audience. I write because there is literature.” —Susan Sontag
“highest gold leaf at
the periphery, the ache
of the pool
the whole aberration of
family, taking the back stairs”
From “1981” by Asiya Wadud in our new Spring issue.
“ ‘You do nothing but read, you’ll do yourself in with all that reading. It’s the books that are doing you in!‘ ”
From “The Welder” by Ingeborg Bachmann, translated by Philip Boehm & Tess Lewis, in our new Spring issue.
“They were not fancy girls, but they did love the absolute best of things, and also appreciated the simple pleasures the earth had to offer: good red dirt, full-fat Coca-Cola.”
From “Lorelei and Athens” by Zans Brady Krohn in our new Spring issue.
“There are moments when you run up against a white wall—there’s a white man, white man, white man, white man—and the story somehow has to be uncovered.”
From our Art of Nonfiction interview with Darryl Pinckney. buff.ly/0C7aGMC
“I like to have my say, obviously. And if people would have just let me talk, some of these books wouldn’t have had to be written.”
From our Art of Nonfiction interview with Sarah Schulman. buff.ly/CugUQ7B
Our Spring issue is here—featuring interviews with Sarah Schulman and Darryl Pinckney, prose by Tao Lin and Yu Hua, poetry by Inger Christensen and Joyelle McSweeney, art by Cauleen Smith, a cover by Cecily Brown, and more. buff.ly/fGxnHCT
