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The woman told me she'd had nightmares about the island for months. She was one of the visitors gathering at a ferry slip on City Island, a neighborhood lying on the northeastern bulge of the Bronx at the confluence of the Long Island Sound and the East River.
In many ways, September 11 was singular: nearly three thousand people, mostly civilians going about their day, killed—incinerated, crushed, vaporized—in the space of two and a half hours. In other ways, the tragedy seems emblematic; the absences and obsessions of how we grieved, instructive. In an era of mass shootings, natural disasters, and terrorist attacks, how to grieve these kinds of death seems just as vital a question as how to prevent them.
When his son called him to say he was being discharged, Dale was working on a wiring project at Ridgeview Middle School. He stayed late to finish, wouldn't get any overtime. The next morning, he got up at 5 a.m. and drove all the way from Gaithersburg to North Carolina.
Nights are hardest. Not the sleeping and not Joy's dreams. Discomfiting, threatening, and incessant-at least Joy's dreams consistently spit out the ticker tape of her refusing him. Worse are the vestiges of something else. Memories which horrify her on cold, sober walks still tick somewhere in her blood.
The books, films, music, and scripture that these authors grapple with do not provide simple consolations. Rather, experiencing and creating art is inseparable from the experiences of aging, mourning, remembrance, and transformation described in these pages. The authors and poets in this issue don’t merely describe art’s power; they enact it through the quality and daring of their own writing.
Peter Matthiessen died the year before last. A slew of unlikely vocations trails after him, rehashed in obituaries—scion of an East Coast whaling family; Paris Review founder; explorer of wild places; incensed chronicler of government abuses against migrant farm workers and Native Americans; devoted Zen practitioner; author of eloquent travelogues to East Africa, New Guinea, and South America, serialized in The New Yorker; author of elliptical novels like Far Tortuga, about Caribbean turtle...
On a summer night, I drove around a particularly desolate stretch of the east side. Charred foundations outnumbered houses. Grasses grew waist-high around them. On Belvidere Street, a brightly colored convenience store came into view.
Hurricanes are part of the rhythm of life on the tropical coastlines of the Caribbean Basin and northwestern Pacific — their ravages part of the collective memory, the preparations for them part of a yearly rhythm. But this acceptance of storms belies the pain their destruction causes, and the particular ways nature defeats a human tendency to assume that what we have today we will have tomorrow.
A year-long celebration of the novella as a form -- from George Eliot and Joseph Conrad to Margaret Atwood and JL Carr -- which ran from 2010 to 2011.
What is shocking and memorable about the stories is not the sudden, supernatural junctures but the utterly bleak and believable details of the character’s lives.