In her recent essay “On Pandering,” published on Tin House’s website, Claire Vaye Watkins quotes a conversation with Elissa Schappell, where Schappell says to Watkins: “You keep using that word. Trend. It’s not a trend. We are here now. We’re not going anywhere. We are here now.” Watkins’s essay is a response to the underrepresentation …
This is the second installation of a two-part interview with poet Christopher DeWeese; read part one here. STORY: Can you talk about Alternative Music a bit more? How you are remixing the songs? DEWEESE: It’s hard, because the premise is I can only do this with songs that I remember well enough that I can …
This is the first of a two-part interview with the poet Christopher DeWeese; read part two here. Something brilliant happens when a poet tangles with philosophy; he plunges into questions he knows are unanswerable, with a hypersensitive awareness of perspective. I have been lucky enough to witness this entanglement twice recently. The first time was while reading the …
In Story‘s home base in York, Pennsylvania, we are still recovering Blizzard Jonas—the storm that buried nearly half of eastern America under snow mounds the size of overgrown adolescents. Thankfully, here has landed a warmhearted book for the snow days gracing us out east. Good on Paper by Rachel Cantor describes Shira Greene’s effort to find work as …
Around 8 P.M., I sat down in the neurosurgery office, next to a radiology viewing station. I turned it on, looked at my patients’ scans for the next day—two simple spine cases—and, finally, typed in my own name. I zipped through the images as if they were a kid’s flip-book, comparing the new scan to the …
Everyone cares about something. Some people care for human life—children, parents, lovers. Some are also very passionate about inanimate objects—cell phones, computers, make up. Above all else, there is always one thing that we care about, one thing that we would push ourselves to the most challenging limits for, would defy all odds, something that …
Look again at that cover image: a milky skin background and two hands, tapestry-stitched patterns in non-matching colors, one hand splintering apart. See the gold rings on the index fingers in contrast, one band unable to hold together its shattering appendage. Tahar Ben Jelloun’s new novel The Happy Marriage tells the story of a painter who grows gradually exhausted with his wife …
Artist Paul Klee said, “The father of the arrow is the thought: How do I expand my reach? Over this river? This lake? That mountain?” Let’s analyze that, the metaphor, the metatheory, the meta—or, let’s not. Instead, let’s look at the work of Christopher DeWeese, a poet from Ohio whose recent collection reflects the same theories that …
For the first New Day of the new year, we chose the novel that “promises to be the year’s most unusual ghost story,” according to The Millions. Samantha Hunt’s new novel, Mr. Splitfoot, entangles orphans who talk to the dead, with a mute woman and her pregnant niece. Their stories swim through different seas to arrive at the …
I. Many movies today still do not pass the Bechdel Test, which asks that two, named female characters speak to each other during a film about something other than a man. Created by American cartoonist, Alison Bechdel, the initial idea for the test came from her 1985 cartoon strip called Dykes to Watch Out For. Because …