My love, suddenly
your hip
is the curve of the wineglass
filled to the brim,
your breast is the cluster,
your hair the light of alcohol,
your nipples, the grapes
your navel pure seal
stamped on your barrel of a belly,
and your love the cascade
of unquenchable wine,
the brightness that falls on my senses,
the earthen splendor of life.
Jon Fosse profile
In The Guardian Chris Power profiles Nobel prize winner in Jon Fosse: ‘It took years before I dared to write again’.
Among the quotes:
of his novel Trilogy winning the Nordic Council’s prize for literature he clarifies, “That’s the most important prize, except for the Nobel, you can get.”
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New Books
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“A perfect photograph is a lyric poem. It gestures towards narrative, but does not spell it out”... more »
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New Books
Seamus Heaney and the art of translation. “You get the high of finishing something you don’t have to start”... more »
Essays & Opinions
Jeanette Winterson on the upsurge of women writing about their experience: “I find it quite boring”... more »
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Secular humanist definitions of morality face a dilemma: Choose a culture-centered ethics or return to a God-centered one... more »
New Books
Not just genre fiction. The pulp magazine Weird Tales published the work of H.P. Lovecraft, Tennessee Williams, and Ray Bradbury... more »
Essays & Opinions
Art in a time of war. In a bid to do something, anything, artists and intellectuals are signing open letters... more »
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Unherd prides itself on ideological eclecticism. But just how heterodox is the ascendant publication?... more »
New Books
Books are big business, and trends in fiction are tied to marketing strategies. Yet these objects of art also resist the market... more »
Essays & Opinions
Tom Wolfe’s eye for the jugular. If you worry about people’s feelings, he said, “you’re no longer writing, you’re involved in public relations”... more »
Articles of Note
The quality of a whisper, the stress of a syllable, the pitch of a voice: Alexander John Ellis’s life as a word nerd... more »
New Books
Is indeterminacy the goal of the humanities? Or are actual political goals — organizing, coalition-building — within its remit?... more »... more »
Essays & Opinions
Both literary style and gender are “imitation games we play with pre-existing forms and norms.” Namwali Serpell explains... more »
Articles of Note
“Stinking fish,” “abominable wine,” “dirty taverns.” In 1783, the Continental Congress spent a rotten summer in New Jersey... more »
New Books
The thoughts and the career of Don DeLillo, an old soul from another era, prefigures our own, even now... more »
Essays & Opinions
“How did a heartfelt writer like Elizabeth Gilbert come to adopt the neutered rhetoric of brand management?”... more »