If you want to see a fairy, says Andrew Warburton, all you have to do is find a four-leaf clover and place it on your forehead. He’s never found a […]
Books & Poetry
BOOK FESTIVAL
The Way We Teach Ourselves to See
Vinson Cunningham’s novel is set in Obama’s campaign for president
While New Yorker theater critic Vinson Cunningham’s Great Expectations is an autobiographical novel based on his experiences as a young staffer on Barack Obama’s first presidential run, it is not […]
BOOKS
Indie Reads: Back to School Edition
Nonfiction selections that will expand your horizons
For this installment of Indie Reads, we asked members of the Independent staff to offer some book recommendations now that summer is over and the transition from frothy beach reads […]
BOOK TALK
Muppets and Murder in Moscow
Natasha Lance Rogoff tells the strange story of a post-Cold War cultural exchange
In 1992, a year after the collapse of the Soviet Union, American television producer and reporter Natasha Lance Rogoff accepted the role of executive producer for a new project: Ulitsa […]
POETRY
Two Poems by Kary Wayson
Sweet Spring Summer in the Morning Afternoon Room-warm tea in the chipped blue cup. My husband — how I love him! — has gone off across the water we can […]
BOOKS
Henri Bendel’s Passion for Beauty
A new biography about a gay Jewish boy from Louisiana
Henri Bendel, the store, was synonymous in the American imagination with good taste, astronomical price tags, and a certain uptown vision of the good life. To shop at Henri Bendel […]
BOOKS
Object Permanence and What Remains in Absence
In The History of Sound, Ben Shattuck traces the meaning of objects across time
August is a poet with a fellowship in the White Mountains of New Hampshire. He’s lonely. The intoxication of procrastination and the cold fingers of autumn poking into his cabin […]
BOOKS
Michael Andor Brodeur Asks the Big Questions
A classical music critic and self-proclaimed ‘meathead’ writes about men, muscle, and mortality
In his powerlifting prime, Washington Post classical music critic Michael Andor Brodeur was able to lift 1,200 pounds of iron: the combined weight of his best deadlift, bench, and squat. […]
POETRY
Three Poems
Night-Blooming Cereus It wakes us to say to bloom once is not nothing. Night Once in a while –– sparks between people –– so stars can see everything they’re missing. […]
POETRY
Compensation
I think I understand. Without sufficient love, they compensate with hatred, not seeing how bountiful (how bountiful) it all really is… Rob Taylor’s Ads for Simplicity was published in 2013. He […]
BOOKS
The Long Shadows of a Dictatorship
Lily Meyer’s fictional Short War makes real the lasting trauma of the 1973 Chilean coup
Last September the people of Chile commemorated the 50th anniversary of the bloody, U.S.-backed coup d’état that changed the fate of their country and their lives on Sept. 11, 1973. […]
POETRY
Cape Window
Tonight the west wind is blowing through Aaron’s small window over his half-size bed, his toddler’s body. Where does wind come from? he asks. The sky, the weather, the whole […]
POETRY
Unpin That Red Pin Icon
The car slowly passed, back and forth, then at last crept up our half-washed-out driveway. An electric window slid down. “We’re looking for Moses Hinkley,” the driver said. I took […]
POETRY
The Swing
The light leads down the long white ropes it fills the swing, it swings the seat Each night each night the moon is full the long white ropes, the sucked-in cheeks […]
BOOKS
The Compromised Power of Being Young and Beautiful
Thomas Grattan’s In Tongues follows Gordon, a gay man who wants nothing more than to be looked at
Gordon, the 24-year-old antihero of Thomas Grattan’s queer coming-of-age novel In Tongues, craves attention the way Wall Street traders crave cocaine: with a slick kind of desperation and the certainty […]
