print Feb/Mar 2019

Gods and Monsters

LIKE MUCH OF THE READING WORLD, I rejoiced when Marlon James published his third novel in 2014. A Brief History of Seven Killings told, in part, the story of the events surrounding the attempted murder of Bob Marley in 1976. Of course, if you’ve read the novel you know that a one-line summary of the book is impossible. (And if you haven’t read it yet, well, unfuck that in 2019.) Still, there’s a natural human instinct to narrow the world, to make it intelligible by streamlining the design. Thus my one-line summary. It doesn’t work, though, not for life and not for art. Not for the good stuff,

culture June 19, 2017

The Changeling

The basement felt warmer than the garage. Down the Kagwa boys went. The basement sat as one grand open plane. In the far corner stood the boiler—a large white cylinder with a blue control panel, copper pipes running up into the ceiling and a silver tube running outside through the wall. It looked like something from the set of James Whale’s Frankenstein. The boiler rumbled now as if reanimating life.

The basement felt warmer than the garage. Down the Kagwa boys went. The basement sat as one grand open plane. In the far corner stood the boiler—a large white cylinder with a blue control panel, copper pipes running up into the ceiling and a silver tube running outside through the wall. It looked like something from the set of James Whale’s Frankenstein. The boiler rumbled now as if reanimating life.

In the opposite corner sat the washing machine and the dryer, and beside the two machines lay cleaning materials, shovels and rakes, and paint cans showing rust. The third corner of the basement

print June/July/Aug 2015

It Takes More than a Village

KENZABURŌ ŌE GREW UP in a village on the Japanese island of Shikoku. He lost his father during World War II, and lived through the defeat of imperial Japan and the surrender of Emperor Hirohito. One of Ōe’s earliest, and greatest, works—a novella called Prize Stock (1958)—describes what happens when a group of men in a small island village during the war capture an American soldier after his plane is shot down. They detain this soldier, a black man, in a basement, while the village leaders contact the elders in a nearby town to ask what should be done with him. While they await word, the village

politics Feb/Mar 2014

Continental Drift

These days the island of Más Afuera—five hundred miles west of Santiago, Chile—may be known only as the place Jonathan Franzen went to spread the ashes of David Foster Wallace, as recounted in a 2011 essay in the New Yorker. But in March 1800, Amasa Delano, a ship’s captain from New England, arrived there hoping to fill his holds with sealskins. Sealing, like whaling, was a profitable new industry in the early nineteenth century, and Delano had already failed at whaling. He wasn’t the only one with such dreams. When Delano arrived at Más Afuera, there were fourteen other ships anchored around

print June/July/Aug 2013

Polar Extremes

WE FLEW FROM NEW YORK to Buenos Aires and from Buenos Aires to Ushuaia, capital of Tierra del Fuego, said to be the southernmost city on earth, but spent only one night there because we had farther south to go. In Ushuaia we boarded the Clipper Adventurer, bound for the Antarctic Peninsula. My girlfriend and I were on a mission. Had asked ourselves to imagine the unlikeliest place we could visit. Antarctica came up quick. We’d planned the journey together, every detail except one. I kept the engagement ring in my coat a secret.

We’d booked ourselves into a lower-deck twin cabin, the only

print Sept/Oct/Nov 2012

Continental Drift

IN 1956, CHINUA ACHEBE, then twenty-six years old, worked as director of external broadcasting at the Nigerian Broadcasting Corporation. He was a TV exec by day, but at night he worked furiously on the manuscript for his first novel. He’d been scribbling this thing out by hand, but when he was done he wanted to have a “good-looking manuscript,” so he sent it off to a company in England that advertised its “ability to transform a manuscript through typing into an attractive document.” The naive kid then sent the only copy of his manuscript to the agency. In a few weeks he received a letter from

print Sept/Oct/Nov 2010

Been A Long Time

The first Led Zeppelin song I ever loved was “D’yer Mak’er,” one of the cheesiest tunes the band ever recorded. To make things worse, I used to pronounce the title “Die-er Make-er” instead of “Jamaica.” Obviously, I wasn’t a Led Zeppelin fanatic. I grew up a metalhead in Queens, New York, in the 1980s and worshipped bands like Anthrax and Slayer. The only time I really noticed Zeppelin was when 92.3 (K-Rock!) would run some ridiculous commercial where a dude with a deep voice would shout, “Get the Led Out Weekend!” I’d quickly turn that oldies bullshit off.

Stephen Davis, the author of LZ-’75

culture Apr/May 2009

Beyond the Skin Trade

When I was a boy, I prayed for straight hair. You have to understand, I grew up on heavy metal. Iron Maiden and Judas Priest to start. Then Anthrax and Exodus, Megadeth and Metallica. My friends and I gathered in living rooms and basements and empty lots and banged our heads to “Damage, Inc.” and “I Am the Law.” If you nearly snapped your neck, you were doing something right. We were a pretty wild mix: a Persian kid, a Korean, a couple of white guys, and me—the only one with a tight, curly Afro. The rest had straight hair, grown long, and when they thrashed to the music, their hair bounced and

Victor LaValle