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Game Theory

November 25, 2020 - By Jim Hicks

(Photo: Bengt Ekeroth and Max von Sydow in The Seventh Seal, 1957. © Svensk Filmindustri. Ingmar Bergman, director)

So, is it just a game for them, with us? If you think it through, that simple idea would make their every move not simply justifiable, but impeccable. Even in the endgame, a true master sees room for maneuver, an occasion for thumbing his nose, macho display for the masses or for the record books. In that most martial—and most US—of sports, when your team can’t move forward, they still bury the ball deep in enemy territory, trusting their defense, waiting, expecting to strike again. The only goal is to crush the opposition, and anyone who thinks otherwise is a fool. That’s how the game is played...

Autumn Journal on Autumn Journal: 14

November 24, 2020 - By Michael Thurston

(Photo: Michael Thurston, The Underworld in Twentieth-Century Poetry. From Pound and Eliot to Heaney and Walcott. Palgrave, 2009)

Read Parts 12-13 here

“the triumphant cheers of the lost souls”

Circles and cycles, accidents and underworlds, elections and mandates and slight tardiness. All of these shape the fourteenth section of Autumn Journal, as MacNeice reports on an electorally driven descent into the Oxonian inferno, a descent that, in epic...

What's the News in Trumpworld?

November 23, 2020 - By Marya Zilberberg

It’s so fitting that the Trump era has ushered in toilet paper shortages in the US. Should the current coup attempt somehow still succeed, and we find ourselves in an endless loop of rule-by-tweet-from-the-gilded-toilet known as Trumpworld, fear not, my fellow Americans—we Soviet refugees can teach you a lot about how to get along without.

When my family came to the US from Odessa in 1977, we had never seen saran wrap, sandwich baggies, or paper towels. We survived just fine. And you’ll be fine too, or at least you’ll be forced to pretend to be fine. Let me tell you how to manage, while at the same time leveraging that reviled organ of propaganda, the purveyor of fake news, the newspaper.

In the USSR, newspapers were revered, not reviled. They, or...

10 Questions for Annie Lampman

November 20, 2020 - By Edward Clifford

Evanthe held still, her limbs pulled into awkward angles—one elbow cocked out to the side, the other braced against a root serving as tripod, both hands grippin the binocular's rubber houseing hard enough she was afraid she wouldn't be able to unbend them again. She didn't dare readjust. Didn't dare move her left knee off whatever sharp thing she'd planted it on. She'd been waiting her whole life to see this: a male paradise tanager...
—from "Birds of the Land," Volume 61, Issue 3 (Fall 2020)

Tell us about one of the first pieces you wrote.
When I was a creative-writing undergrad in a fiction workshop class somewhere around 2003, the professor assigned a two-page writing exercise where two...

The Offending Classic

November 19, 2020 - By Deborah Jowitt

Sex and Death

Photo: Arthur Mitchell and Diana Adams in Agon (1957) by George Balanchine. Photo by Martha Swope ©The New York Public Library for the Performing Arts

Several nineteenth-century story ballets that have survived the passage of time have similar scenarios. In Giselle (1841), a nobleman groomed to marry a woman he doesn’t much care for falls in love with a peasant girl with a weak heart. When death transforms her into a Wili, he becomes in thrall to her. This frail spirit, against her wishes, has been commanded by the Queen of the Wilis to dance him to death. Instead, she saves him and returns to her grave; he is overcome with grief.

In La Bayadère (1877), Solor’s bride-to-be, Gamzatti, sees to it...