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52 WEEKS, HEADS,
AND QUOTES



CHARLES BURNS
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BELIEVER
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TATTOOS



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“Laramie: a city awry, shredded like a prayer flag by the constant gusting wind.”
ALYSON HAGY’S GHOSTS OF WYOMING,
reviewed in the current issue by Don Waters
In the Current Issue
Illustrations by Tony Millionaire
A ROUNDTABLE DISCUSSION WITH
DANIEL ALARCÓN,
EDUARDO HALFON, AND
SANTIAGO VAQUERA-VÁSQUEZ

[WRITERS]

EDUARDO HALFON: With all its treacheries, with all its hardships and apparent contradictions (my mind immediately flashes back to my two sparring mothers), writing in two languages, or writing from two languages, is also like having two distinct treasure chests from where to grab gold and silver and diamonds. If at mid-sentence, for example, I reach for one chest and can’t find in there anything I like or anything that fits, I simply reach for the other one. And for some reason, the constant searching and the relentless tugging of these two languages seems to produce, through that same grammatical and syntactical tugging, a new language, a sort of hybrid or blended language. A self-language, really.

READ THE ARTICLE »

Notes on middle style

BY ROBERT COHEN

Illustration by Tony Millionaire

One day back in graduate school my advisor, a savvy and successful novelist whose books meant a lot to me and whom I had just traveled three thousand miles to come work with, called me into his office and sat me down sternly. “Look, no offense,” he said, holding up a page of my manuscript, a page so capillaried with red marks it looked like the face of a stroke victim, “but you’ve got to cut it out with these frigging F. Scott Fitzgerald sentences.”

READ THE ARTICLE »

Also in This Issue

García Márquez Goes to the Dentist by Julio Villanueva Chang

The Bountiful Continent by Casey Walker

What You Can’t Learn Collecting Esoteric Books by Andrea Richards

Becoming a Lady by Amelie Gillette

Trent Reznor interviewed by Brandon Bussolini

Stanley Crawford in correspondence with Noy Holland

Sarah Waters micro-interviewed by Peter Terzian

Musin’s and Thinkin’s by Jack Pendarvis

Sedaratives by guest columnist Bob Saget

Real Life Rock Top Ten by Greil Marcus

... and more.

COMPLETE TABLE OF CONTENTS »

From the Archives

FEBRUARY 2007

Illustration by Charles Burns
[AUTHOR]

INTERVIEWED BY ALEC MICHOD

THE BELIEVER: The first thing that struck me reading The Echo Maker was that it’s filled with a lot of high-level neuroscience, yet the sentences never feel overburdened by the science behind the story. How did you resist the urge to cram the book with all your research?

RICHARD POWERS: The hardest part about doing the research for this book was hitting on an appropriate way to bury it. It takes one hundred billion interconnected cells to conjure up a coherent story of the world. But if neuroscience concludes anything, it’s that sensing and feeling and thinking and perceiving and hundreds of other seemingly separate processes are all conjoined in a huge, dynamic, and continuously revised narrative network. The brain is the ultimate storytelling machine, and consciousness is the ultimate story.

READ THE INTERVIEW »

Previously
January 2010 November/December 2009 October 2009 September 2009 July/August 2009
 
MORE BACK ISSUES »
Announcements
12 NOV 2009 — We were saddened to hear of the passing last week of novelist Donald Harington. Harington’s novels, set in the fictional Arkansas town of Stay More, were the subject of Izzy Grinspan’s essay “A Dream of a Small But Unlost Town” from our February 2006 issue. You can read the full piece here. “Stay More might be small, isolated, and doomed to ruin, but it’s still teeming with wild life.”

3 NOV 2009 — We are pleased to announce the publication of Tamler Sommers’s A Very Bad Wizard. The book is a collection of interviews that Sommers conducted with ten acclaimed researchers in the burgeoning field of moral psychology. Steven Pinker called it “a thought-provoking and entertaining tour of one of the frontiers of human knowledge—the roots of our moral sense.”

Buy your copy online at the McSweeney’s Store, or at independent booksellers nationwide.

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