Literature

On Thursday, April 18th the nomadic sojourns creative collective (nscc) held an event at WORD Brooklyn with readings by its 2012 annual journal contributors, Shaun Randol and Eric Anthamatten.

An insightful animated short put together by PBS Studios built around an interview given by the late DavidFoster Wallace. Here Wallace, who passed away in 2008, speaks on his early days a budding tennis player and the limitations of having too much ambition for perfection.

Follow Anthony on Twitter: @antbrent

‘An elemental narrative’ is the description we should use for a story that transcends genre. Our understanding of ‘elemental’ relates to what is ‘essential’ or ‘a basic part.’ It means that our elemental narratives always bear the premise that we are writing a ‘basic’ story that touches at the heart of who we are and what we have become. The goal of the writer will be to write a story that is as elemental as a shared humanity, those recognizable qualities that makes us human, and sometimes inhuman.

In the opening scene of Children in Reindeer Woods, Rafael and some fellow soldiers come across a farm. The soldiers murder its civilian occupants (men, women, and children) in cold blood. We learn nothing more of the newly deceased. Rafael then turns on his cohorts, dispatching them with ease and without remorse. This is the last killing he will do, he hopes. Rafael is tired of war.

The short-run production of The Builder Association's "House / Divided," directed by Marianne Weems, opens with a narrator reading the captivating introduction to John Steinbeck's masterpiece, the Grapes of Wrath:

I will argue for a new Nigerian literary order.

Suppose we call this ‘neo-literariness’, for want of a better word, and because in hyphenation a word acquires two identities. So, neo-literariness is the word to use for a generation of writers and enthusiasts who function despite institutional lapses, and whose artistic engagement thrives of new ways of being, especially web-technology.

I will explain with a few examples.

by Natasha Yarotskaya

Russia by mind comprehended cannot be


Nor by wide arshins measured:


Its uniqueness be that—


Ayodele is one of the most consistent Nigerian writers of the last half-decade. She’s the oldest writer in the Gambit series, although I wouldn’t want to ask her if she’s comfortable being grouped with younger colleagues. I figure that question would be answered with a wave of her hand; Ayodele gives the impression that even the most obvious of borders doesn’t exist. Meeting her in person, I was drawn to her infinite knowledge about everyone and everything in the literary world.

Kei Miller’s second novel, The Last Warner Woman (published in 2010 but released in the United States earlier this year) seems to strike up a dialogue with his first novel The Same Earth (2008), while dismantling the earlier novel’s assump