United States
Rebecca Brill holds an MFA in creative nonfiction from the University of Minnesota. She is the recipient of the 2020 AWP Intro Journals Award, the 2019 Gesell Award, and a 2019 Tent fellowship at the Yiddish Book Center, among others.
12 print (US addresses only); $5 digital Buy Book About the Book Author: Stephanie G'Schwind, EditorGenre: Literary JournalPublished: 2020Pages: 160Book Dimensions: 6 x 9.25 inches It surely comes as no surprise that the content of each issue of Colorado Review is selected months, sometimes a year or more, before publication.
"One of the main (social) functions of a journal or diary is precisely to be read furtively by other people," Susan Sontag once wrote, appropriately, in her journal. But it's hard to imagine that she could have predicted a future in which almost 15,000 people read her journal daily.
Last November, when you Googled the phrase "ugly Black woman," Vanessa Rochelle Lewis's photograph was the second to come up. "Which I'm offended by," says Lewis, a Bay Area-based artist and writer, "since I'm an Aries and I like to be number one in everything."
In order to become a member of the World Association of Ugly People, you need to be assessed. In the clubhouse of the Association, known by locals as Club dei Brutti, the president, a stocky man named Gianni with a lopsided goatee, produces a card featuring the official Club dei Brutti ugliness rating system: non definita (undefined), insufficiente (insufficient), mediocre, buona (good), ottima (great), straordinaria (extraordinary).
Competitive Consequential Taboo Julie Klausner and Natasha Lyonne are mere seconds into their podcast "How Was Your Week?" interview and already they're on the Holocaust. It starts when Klausner, a comedian and the podcast's host, compliments Lyonne on her ring. "I am transfixed," Klausner gushes. "Is there an eye?
Summer evenings when no one is home, I make a point of eating pungent things. Sprawled on my bed, I eat stinky cheese, garlicky crackers, spicy mustard, and anchovies off a paper plate. I drink wine out of a plastic cup. Hannah Arendt has just been widowed.
The dog corpse on the sidewalk is a discarded mink stole. The regal butch drinking an egg-cream is a stoned teenage boy. The yellow corduroy jacket you purchase online for a song is intended for toddlers ages two to three.
The Atlantic recently pronounced Hanya Yanagihara's A Little Life, which was released in March, the Great Gay Novel. Writer Garth Greenwell called the book, which follows four men (three of them not straight) over three decades of friendship, "the most ambitious chronicle of the social and emotional lives of gay men to have emerged for many years."
In the summer of 1948, Vladimir Nabokov started writing during one of his annual butterfly collecting trips (yes, really). 60 years later, Katy Perry belted the lyric, "I studied Lolita religiously," in the eponymous song of her second album, One of the Boys, the cover of which features Perry sprawled out on a lawn in a sunhat and retro bikini top-a reference to a scene in Stanley Kubrick's 1962 film adaptation of the novel.