News from the Division of Languages and Literature

Dina Ramadan, assistant professor of Arabic, reviews Yara El-Sherbini's Forms of Regulation and Control at the Cue Art Foundation in New York for Art-agenda. “The first US solo exhibition for British-born, Santa Barbara–based El-Sherbini, curated by Naeem Mohaiemen, is an elegant rejoinder to the din of recent months,” Ramadan writes. “Deftly weaponizing humor through a series of discreet interventions, it challenges the so-called ‘unconscious’ bias that permeates even the most seemingly benign forms of knowledge and their production.”

We know the Roman conquest of Masada only through the account of the enigmatic Jewish historian Josephus, whose shifting allegiances make his motives hard to discern. James Romm, James H. Ottaway Jr. Professor of Classics, writes for the New York Review of Books, reviewing A History of the Jewish War, AD 66–74 by Steve Mason (Cambridge University Press, 2016) and Masada: From Jewish Revolt to Modern Myth by Jodi Magness (Princeton University Press, 2019).
 

“In this world of tasers, special-forces troops, manufactured criminal prosecutions, and teams of assassins, Navalny’s incantation of ‘Do not be afraid!’ does not mean ‘There is nothing to fear,’” writes Gessen. “A young man in Moscow, asked by a TV Rain journalist why he hadn’t been scared to join the protests, answered, ‘I was scared. I am still scared. But what’s happening in the country now—it’s bigger than the fear. What else is there to do?’”

Rogers, a visiting associate professor of writing at Bard College, “assembles an exquisite array of diverse voices united by a shared love of birding” (Publishers Weekly). Each essay explores birding “as an art of wanderlust and extreme patience while highlighting varied species, in habitats from the shoreline of the Sargasso Sea in Bermuda (where Jenn Dean describes how the cahow, a species thought extinct since the 17th century, was rediscovered in the 20th) to the North Dakota prairie (where Richard Bohannon considers the Baird’s sparrow and the Sprague’s pipit, both small, unremarkable-looking species known in the birding world as LBJs, or ‘little brown jobs’).”

Bard faculty members Omar Encarnación and Masha Gessen spoke as part of PEN America’s Town Hall on “Reckoning and Reconciliation in Biden’s America," held as the centerpiece of the organization’s virtual annual general meeting on January 26, 2021. Encarnación and Gessen joined PEN America President Ayad Akhtar, historian Jill Lepore, and columnists Charles Blow and Peggy Noonan for this timely and wide-ranging discussion moderated by PEN America CEO Suzanne Nossel. Omar G. Encarnación is professor of political studies at Bard. Masha Gessen is distinguished writer in residence at the College.

“The trauma imposed by these land seizures is still felt, even as nearly nine million people depend daily on the water system,” the series introduction states. “New York’s reservoirs exemplify the social compact that undergirds ambitious public infrastructures, while the stories of their making emphasize divisions between city and country, wealth and poverty, the potentials and risks inherent in large-scale environmental intervention.”

“Navalny’s superpower has been his ability to show people what they had always known about the Putin regime but had the option of pretending away,” writes Distinguished Writer in Residence Masha Gessen. “He has shown the depth of the regime’s corruption. He has shown that Putin’s secret police carries out murders. With his return to Russia, he has shown the regime’s utter lack of imagination and inability to plan ahead. He has also shown that, contrary to the Kremlin’s assertions and to conventional wisdom among Western Russia-watchers, there is an alternative to Putin.”

“I think (Celan’s work) is the work that came out of the mid-20th century that most directly addresses the disaster . . . of Western culture,” Joris says. “I think of the incredible clear-sightedness this man had in relation to the political situation of his time. He had the same clear-sightedness in terms of writing after events such as Khurbn [the Holocaust] . . . and knew that language needed to be transformed, that you could not use the old German, because the Nazi years had contaminated it.”

“Our ability to fear something and, at the same time, assume it will never occur is one aspect of human nature that seems particularly ill-suited to our continued wellbeing and survival,” writes Distinguished Writer in Residence Francine Prose in the Guardian. “During the assault on the Capitol, as I listened to the panic and horror in the voices of the journalists who, until now, had reported on Donald Trump with something closer to detached disapproval, I wondered: is this what it takes to finally make them understand who this man is—and what he wants for our country? What did they think he meant when he tweeted about the gathering planned for 6 January: ‘Be there. It will be wild.’” Francine Prose is distinguished writer in residence at Bard College.

“We do not fear those whom we see as being like us; we fear the other. Black Lives Matter protesters are other to the Capitol Police. So are survivors of sexual assault or women who protest for the right to choose,” writes Distinguished Writer in Residence Masha Gessen. “But an armed mob storming the Capitol, and their Instigator-in-Chief, are, apparently, familiar enough to be dismissed as clowns. The invaders may be full of contempt for a system that they think doesn’t represent them, but on Wednesday they managed to prove that it does.”

“I wanted to look at what it was like to live in a pre-apocalyptic moment,” says Offill, visiting writer in residence, about writing Weather. “You have real existential threats that will impact you, your kids, your neighbours, but you also have everyday life—you’re not just running around picking up tin cans and dodging cannibals like in most apocalyptic novels. You still have to take your kids to school, you still have to avoid that neighbour you can’t stand, there are still money worries.” 

“In Weather, a librarian named Lizzie is weighed down by the torrent of information she keeps encountering about our doomed planet,” writes Hillary Kelly. “Slipping into what Offill calls ‘a kind of twilight knowing,’ she confronts the fact that flooded New York streets and barren apple trees aren’t a possibility but a certainty. Weather isn’t a comfort or a little packet of wishes for a healthy planet—it’s a meticulously constructed (often hilarious, sometimes disconsolate) lament for our old modes of thinking.”

Jenny Offill's Weather received end-of-year accolades from several publications. For further reading:
The Washington Post, “50 Notable Works of Fiction in 2020”
The Observer, “Books That Made 2020 Bearable: A Reading List for an Unusual Year”
The Guardian, “Best Fiction of 2020”

“A person doesn’t just live for themselves but has responsibility for the decisions the state makes. And the person has to be aware of this,” says Tsikhanouskaya when asked how she defines democracy. “Democracy has to be inside every person. Imagine how difficult it is to make the transition from a state of obedience to thinking, I’m responsible for my country. This requires a lot of personal growth. It may take an entire generation.” Masha Gessen, distinguished writer in residence at Bard, interviews Tsikhanouskaya for the New Yorker.

Bard College announces the appointment of esteemed writer Dinaw Mengestu as John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Professor in the Humanities, effective spring 2021. Mengestu, a recipient of the 2012 MacArthur Foundation Award, is director of the Written Arts Program at Bard. He is the author of three novels: The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears (2008), How to Read the Air (2010), and All Our Names (2014). For more information about Bard’s Written Arts Program, please visit writtenarts.bard.edu.

“A writer of extraordinary accomplishment and humanity, Dinaw Mengestu has brought signal openness, growth, and energy to the Written Arts Program at Bard since his arrival in 2016,” said Bard’s Dean of the College, Deirdre D’Albertis.

Dinaw Mengestu, a recipient of the 2012 MacArthur Foundation Award, was born in Ethiopia and raised in Illinois. His fiction and journalism have been published in the New Yorker, Granta, Harper’s, Rolling Stone, and New York Times. Mengestu was chosen for the 5 under 35 Award by the National Book Foundation and was named on the New Yorker’s “20 under 40” list in 2010. He is also the recipient of a Lannan Fiction Fellowship, The Guardian First Book Award, the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, among other awards. He is the author of three novels: The Beautiful Things, That Heaven Bears (2008), How to Read the Air (2010), and All Our Names (2014). His work has been translated into more than fifteen languages. Mengestu has a BA from Georgetown University and an MFA from Columbia University. He has been at Bard since 2016.

About Bard College
Founded in 1860, Bard College is a four-year residential college of the liberal arts and sciences located 90 miles north of New York City. With the addition of the Montgomery Place estate, Bard’s campus consists of nearly 1,000 parklike acres in the Hudson River Valley. It offers bachelor of arts, bachelor of science, and bachelor of music degrees, with majors in nearly 40 academic programs; graduate degrees in 11 programs; eight early colleges; and numerous dual-degree programs nationally and internationally. Building on its 160-year history as a competitive and innovative undergraduate institution, Bard College has expanded its mission as a private institution acting in the public interest across the country and around the world to meet broader student needs and increase access to liberal arts education. The undergraduate program at our main campus in upstate New York has a reputation for scholarly excellence, a focus on the arts, and civic engagement. Bard is committed to enriching culture, public life, and democratic discourse by training tomorrow’s thought leaders. For more information about Bard College, visit bard.edu.12/17/20
 

“It’s not that Russians believe that the virus is a hoax; it’s that they lack common ground with one another. . . . There is no public sphere,” Gessen writes in the New Yorker. “If my English-language social-media feed doesn’t make me feel as if I’m going crazy in the same way that the Russian one does, it’s because I’m virtually situated in a little corner of this country that still has a shared, fact-based reality—and, within it, the flickering possibility of coöperation and mutual responsibility.”

The Washington Post says, “Conjunctions offers a showplace for some of the most exciting and demanding writers now at work.”

Edited by Bradford Morrow and published twice yearly by Bard College, Conjunctions publishes innovative fiction, poetry, and creative nonfiction by emerging voices and contemporary masters. For nearly four decades, Conjunctions has challenged accepted forms and styles, with equal emphasis on groundbreaking experimentation and rigorous execution. In 2020, Conjunctions received the prestigious Whiting Literary Magazine Prize. The judges noted, “Every issue of Conjunctions is a feat of curatorial invention, continuing the Modernist project of dense, economical writing, formal innovation, and an openness to history and the world.” Named a “Top Literary Magazine 2019” by Reedsy, the journal was a finalist for both the 2018 and 2019 ASME Award for Fiction and the 2018 CLMP Firecracker Award for General Excellence. In addition, contributions to recent issues have been selected for The Best American Essays (2018, 2019), The Pushcart Prize XLIV: Best of the Small Presses, Best American Experimental Writing 2020, Best Small Fictions 2019, and The Year’s Best Dark Fantasy & Horror: 2019.

For more information on the latest issue, please visit conjunctions.com/print/archive/conjunctions75. To order a copy, go to annandaleonline.org/conjunctions, call the Conjunctions office at 845-758-7054, e-mail [email protected], or write to Conjunctions, Bard College, PO Box 5000, Annandale-on-Hudson, NY 12504-5000. Visit the Conjunctions website at conjunctions.com.

[Note to editors: To obtain review copies, please call Mark Primoff at 845-758-7412 or e-mail [email protected]](12.1.20)
 

Author Akil Kumarasamy has received the Bard Fiction Prize for her debut story collection, Half Gods, (Farrar, Straus and Giroux 2018). Kumarasamy’s one-semester residency at Bard College is scheduled for the 2021–22 academic year, during which time she will continue her writing and meet informally with students. Kumarasamy will give a public reading at Bard during her residency.

“Akil Kumarasamy’s Half-Gods is a breathtaking debut by one of those rare writers whose compassionate understanding—in this case, a multigenerational family with a frayed, crazy-quilt history—is matched by the narrative gifts necessary to bring her tales to life,” writes the Bard Fiction Prize committee. “While each individual story in this inventive collection is told in vivid, lusciously worded, image-rich prose, the overarching symphonic whole has—much like Jamaica Kincaid’s first book, At the Bottom of the River—the sweep and scope of a novel. What Kumarasamy has given us with Half-Gods is ultimately a meditation, as most great stories are, on time, memory, and hope for the future.”

“I’m very excited to receive the Bard Fiction Prize and to be part of the Bard community,” said Kumarasamy. “This has been such a whirlwind of a year, and, during these very uncertain times, I’m grateful for the support and the committee’s belief in my work. Really thrilled by the opportunity.”

Akil Kumarasamy is a writer from New Jersey and the author of the story collection, Half Gods, published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux in 2018, which was named a New York Times Editors’ Choice, and was the recipient of the Story Prize Spotlight Award and a finalist for the PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize for Debut Short Story Collection. Her work has appeared in Harper’s Magazine, American Short Fiction, Boston Review, among others. She has received fellowships from the University of East Anglia, the Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center, Yaddo, and the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture. She is an assistant professor at the Rutgers-Newark MFA program and her debut novel, Better Humans, is forthcoming with Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

The creation of the Bard Fiction Prize, presented each October since 2001, continues Bard’s longstanding position as a center for creative, groundbreaking literary work by both faculty and students. From Saul Bellow, William Gaddis, Mary McCarthy, and Ralph Ellison to John Ashbery, Philip Roth, William Weaver, and Chinua Achebe, Bard’s literature faculty, past and present, represents some of the most important writers of our time. The prize is intended to encourage and support young writers of fiction, and provide them with an opportunity to work in a fertile intellectual environment. Last year’s Bard Fiction Prize was awarded to Author Clare Beams for her debut collection of short stories, We Show What We Have Learned (Lookout Books, 2016).

About the Bard Fiction Prize
The Bard Fiction Prize is awarded to a promising emerging writer who is an American citizen aged 39 years or younger at the time of application. In addition to a $30,000 cash award, the winner receives an appointment as writer in residence at Bard College for one semester, without the expectation that he or she teach traditional courses. The recipient gives at least one public lecture and meets informally with students. To apply, candidates should write a cover letter explaining the project they plan to work on while at Bard and submit a CV, along with three copies of the published book they feel best represents their work. No manuscripts will be accepted. Applications for the 2022 prize must be received by June 15, 2021. For information about the Bard Fiction Prize, call 845-758-7087, send an e-mail to [email protected], or visit bard.edu/bfp. Applicants may also request information by writing to: Bard Fiction Prize, Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson, NY 12504-5000.

About Bard College
Founded in 1860, Bard College is a four-year residential college of the liberal arts and sciences located 90 miles north of New York City. With the addition of the Montgomery Place estate, Bard’s campus consists of nearly 1,000 parklike acres in the Hudson River Valley. It offers bachelor of arts, bachelor of science, and bachelor of music degrees, with majors in nearly 40 academic programs; graduate degrees in 11 programs; eight early colleges; and numerous dual-degree programs nationally and internationally. Building on its 160-year history as a competitive and innovative undergraduate institution, Bard College has expanded its mission as a private institution acting in the public interest across the country and around the world to meet broader student needs and increase access to liberal arts education. The undergraduate program at our main campus in upstate New York has a reputation for scholarly excellence, a focus on the arts, and civic engagement. Bard is committed to enriching culture, public life, and democratic discourse by training tomorrow’s thought leaders. For more information about Bard College, visit bard.edu.12/1/20
 

“In an expansive and revealing new biography, Sometimes You Have to Lie, Leslie Brody assembles the clues to the personal history that shaped Fitzhugh’s conscience and creative convictions,” writes Liesl Schillinger in the New York Times. “Brody, a biographer and playwright who adapted Harriet the Spy for the stage in 1988, has pored through correspondence, memoirs and court documents, and conducted dozens of interviews to reveal the trail that Fitzhugh left unmarked.”

Read More
New York Times
Boston Globe
Wall Street Journal

“We don’t know how to give and receive,” Seneca writes in the opening statement of De Beneficiis, newly edited and translated by Professor James Romm as How to Give: An Ancient Guide to Giving and Receiving (Princeton University Press, 2020). Seneca counsels givers to be anonymous and forget they’ve given, and urges recipients to be grateful and remember. How to Give is the latest entry in a series from Princeton University Press called Ancient Wisdom for Modern Readers. James Romm is the James H. Ottaway Jr. Professor of Classics and director of the Classical Studies Program at Bard. 

“The Women’s Strike organizers are thinking well beyond abortion restrictions. They have called together a Consultative Council of experts,” writes Gessen. “[Organizers have] conducted a survey of protesters, identified thirteen topics of greatest concern to them, and created working groups of experts for every one, including abortion rights, education, work and the pandemic, health care, climate change, and the separation of church and state; there is also a group called No Pasarán, which focuses on the ‘defascization of Poland.’”

“When we first heard the news, I couldn’t imagine getting through one day in the house, stuck and anxious without the energy to entertain. Like all of you—all of us—and yet, some of you will come out still married,” writes Sherman, who teaches in the MFA Program at Columbia University. “People say that when the virus ends there will be many divorces. Not yet, as the courts are still closed. All the couples are waiting for the doors to open, and then the numbers will go up. I can’t get my wedding ring off of my finger.”

“I want people always to be thinking that every story that you enjoy, you need to stop and think, why am I enjoying this? What’s happening? What is the writer doing? What is the writer forcing me to look at?” Mendelsohn tells Donahue. “In this book I really want people to think about it, not least by pointing to the fact that amazing coincidences and sort of too-good-to-be-true narratives happen in history, in real life, as well as in stories.”

“When I imagine life without Donald Trump, what I’m picturing is something like the final scene of the disaster film: the zombies have been beaten back, the Martians have returned to their planet, the dinosaurs are extinct once again, the floods have receded, the wildfires safely extinguished. The sun is shining, the sky is clear, the birds—those birds that are left—are sweetly singing. The last living humans find one another, and we know what they are thinking even if they don’t speak. They are thinking: it’s over. We’ve survived. Our country has been restored to us. We can breathe again.”

For all the apparent flailing and incompetence of his administration, Trump’s authoritarian aspirations have largely succeeded, says Gessen. “In four years, Trump has created a ‘vertical of vassalage’ that runs from him to Barr to the Senate Majority Leader, Mitch McConnell, and to the courts. Its extension is Fox News, which has served as the fourth branch of Trump’s government. (Fox News has been notably noncompliant with Trump’s election narrative, starting with its early call of Arizona for Joe Biden, which incited the President’s rage.) Trump is trying to use his vertical of vassalage to thwart the electoral system. If he succeeds, his autocratic breakthrough will be complete. If he fails, Trump will leave—reluctantly, petulantly, perhaps after a litigious delay—but much of the vertical that he has put in place will remain.”

“Four days of hearings contained not a single substantive exchange. . . . Barrett surely doesn’t think that her future position on the Supreme Court is a bullshit job; Senate Republicans don’t think that packing the courts with conservatives is bullshit work, either,” writes Gessen. “But, like the people who are rushing her onto the bench, Barrett does seem to believe that the nomination and confirmation process are bullshit—she shares the Trump Republican Party’s contempt for the norms and processes of the government in which she has risen so far, so fast.”

“Mr. Mendelsohn’s eighth full-length work is itself a book that springs from other books, including his own. It is a brief but bountiful mashup of criticism, literary biography, craft essay and personal history. As always, the author’s voice blends authority with considerable warmth and charm, luring readers into his complex intellectual enthusiasms. Mr. Mendelsohn has honed a prose style that is nuanced yet clear, without a hint of pedantry, and one is always glad to learn what he has to teach. Grandeur and intimacy are the poles between which all ambitious writers suspend their work. There is a sense in both the “Odyssey” and in “Mimesis” that their authors are capable of reaching through time to speak companionably to every reader. Mr. Mendelsohn’s books are distinguished by this kind of approachability as well. ... Three Rings, a short but profoundly moving work, clings with tenacity to a belief in the regenerative power of literature.”

“Those who succeeded in screening out Trump’s cacophonous noise and listening to Joe Biden may have noticed a moment that was, to me, a high point of the debate. … It was the moment when Joe Biden (yes, looking directly into the camera) said, “When I hear 200,000 deaths, I think of the empty chairs at dining room tables all across the country, which just months ago were filled by loved ones. It didn’t have to be this bad.” It’s the sort of statement that many of us have been waiting to hear, some genuine acknowledgment of the human costs, the pain of all the death. … How have we learned to settle for being led by a man who would never say this, who has no conception of (or pity for) human grief, loss or love? Or perhaps Trump honestly believes that the mourners at the table will be consoled by the great job that Donald Trump is doing on healthcare.”

“Urban Legends is a parabolic dish microphone pointed at history, collecting the waves that outsiders have bounced off the South Bronx,” writes Sasha Frere-Jones. “The triumph of the book is the first half, where L’Official corrals visual depictions of the South Bronx and builds a lattice of history and shadows. … L’Official examines the work of visual artist Gordon Matta-Clark and photographer Ray Mortenson alongside a huge stash of tax photos taken in the 1980s, and the book blooms. Having synthesized this cohort, L’Official offers us an understanding of ‘the elasticity of both the archive and fine art to represent subjects with occasionally remarkable intricacy.’” 

“Whether paying tribute to the young Patti Smith or imagining the subsequent lives of the original owners of 45s in his collection or recalling the long-gone businesses and denizens of the Lower East Side, he puts the reader right there, seeing what he saw, thinking what he thought,” writes Dmitry Samarov in Vol. 1 Brooklyn. “This new collection, which follows the equally essential Kill All Your Darlings, is a must for anyone curious about art and culture made in this country during the last era when what’s new was gleaned firsthand, in the flesh, rather than passively received by screen.” Read an excerpt from Sante’s new collection in the Paris Review.

“We’d like to believe that suffering instructs and ennobles; that our grief, fear and pain increases our sympathy for the grief, fear and pain of others,” writes Distinguished Writer in Residence Francine Prose. “But again, Donald Trump seems to be ineducable, impervious to shame, guilt or any sense of personal responsibility, unaffected by anything except vanity, selfishness and reckless self-regard. Certainly, the experience of having his blood oxygen level drop so low that supplemental oxygen was required must have been alarming, and yet the president continues to believe that bluster is the best medicine.”

Bard alumna Emily Schmall ’05 is the newest New York Times staff correspondent, and she will be based in New Delhi. She studied Spanish and literature at Bard College, where she cofounded La Voz with Mariel Fiori ’05 as a student project. Emily went on to receive a master’s from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism’s business and economics reporting program. She gained experience as a stringer for the Times in Argentina, notably covering the historic selection of Pope Francis, after which she worked with the Associated Press in Fort Worth and later New Delhi.

Phuc Tran’s first book, Sigh, Gone: A Misfit’s Memoir of Great Books, Punk Rock, and the Fight to Fit In, was published by Flatiron Books in April 2020. It is, in Tran’s words, “a memoir about growing up in a rural Pennsylvania town as a nerdy, Asian punk rocker who would eventually become a Latin-teaching tattooer.”

Conjunctions, the celebrated literary magazine published by Bard College, has been awarded a 2020 Whiting Literary Magazine Prize. Since 2018, a total of 13 literary magazines have won this prize for excellence in publishing, advocacy for writers, and a unique contribution to the strength of the overall literary community. Conjunctions has propelled literature forward for four decades by publishing groundbreaking fiction, poetry, plays, and creative nonfiction that marry visionary imagination with formally innovative execution. Each issue illuminates a complex theme—such as exile, desire, the body, or climate change—in a book-length format that gives space to long-form work and a multitude of perspectives. From its home in Bard College, Conjunctions and its founding editor, Bradford Morrow, have earned recognition for uplifting both new writers and contemporary masters who challenge convention.

“Every issue of Conjunctions is a feat of curatorial invention, continuing the Modernist project of dense, economical writing, formal innovation, and an openness to history and the world,” the Whiting judges commented. “Its longevity is a testament to its cultural staying power. Organized around a unifying idea, each issue stitches together work by storytellers and scholars to create a fluid and expansive survey of our most pressing human concerns.”

“The 2020 Whiting Literary Magazine Prize could not have come at a more significant time for Conjunctions, which will be celebrating its fortieth anniversary in the coming year,” said Bradford Morrow, Editor of Conjunctions and professor of literature at Bard. “The pandemic has inflicted unprecedented challenges on all of us, including literary journals and writers, and thanks to the Whiting Foundation, Conjunctions will be able to continue publishing both our print and online journals without interruption. This grant will enable us to broaden and deepen our ongoing search for innovative poetry, fiction, essays, and multi-genre works by those who write fearlessly, and greatly strengthen our outreach to those who, as we at Conjunctions like to say, read dangerously.”

Morrow gave special thanks to those who supported Conjunctions’ Whiting application. “I want to take the opportunity also to express my gratitude to our former managing editor, Nicole Nyhan, for all her hard work on the application to the Whiting Foundation,” he said. “And to the three writers who shall remain unnamed, my thanks for graciously writing letters of support on our behalf.”

The Whiting Literary Magazine Prizes were launched in 2018 to acknowledge, reward, and encourage the publications that are actively nurturing the writers who tell us, through their art, what is important. The purpose of the prizes is first and foremost to recognize excellence, and also to help outstanding magazines reach new audiences, find new sources of revenue, and travel the path to sustainability and growth. The matching grants in years two and three are intended to give these publications enough runway to make serious progress toward achieving these goals. For more information about the Whiting Foundation, visit whiting.org.

Edited by Bradford Morrow and published twice yearly by Bard College, Conjunctions publishes innovative fiction, poetry, and creative nonfiction by emerging voices and contemporary masters. For nearly four decades, Conjunctions has challenged accepted forms and styles, with equal emphasis on groundbreaking experimentation and rigorous execution. The Washington Post says, “Conjunctions offers a showplace for some of the most exciting and demanding writers now at work.” Named a “Top Literary Magazine 2019” by Reedsy, the journal was a finalist for both the 2018 and 2019 ASME Award for Fiction and the 2018 CLMP Firecracker Award for General Excellence. In addition, contributions to recent issues have been selected for The Best American Essays (2018, 2019), The Pushcart Prize XLIV: Best of the Small Presses, Best American Experimental Writing 2020, Best Small Fictions 2019, and The Year’s Best Dark Fantasy & Horror: 2019.

For more information on the latest issue, please visit conjunctions.com/print/archive/conjunctions74. To order a copy, go to annandaleonline.org/conjunctions, call the Conjunctions office at 845-758-7054, e-mail [email protected], or write to Conjunctions, Bard College, PO Box 5000, Annandale-on-Hudson, NY 12504-5000. Visit the Conjunctions website at conjunctions.com.

[Note to editors: To obtain review copies, please call Mark Primoff at 845-758-7412 or e-mail [email protected].]
 

On the occasion of Blueprint’s translation into English, Wilk and Enzensberger talk about “how to write Nazi characters who aren’t clichés; about reviving the legacy of overlooked women artists and architects; about why fiction can be truer than reality—and about how our current political debates and challenges are not so far from those of 100 years ago.” Wilk, whose first novel, Oval, was published in 2019, is a contributing editor at e-flux Journal and a 2020 fellow in the Transformations of the Human program at the Berggruen Institute. Enzensberger, a freelance journalist who lives in Berlin, is the founder of the award-winning BLOCK Magazin.

“At a national level, we’ve been acting for so many years as if what we were doing would never have consequences, in our political lives, in our attitude toward the environment, race, everything, and now it’s exploding all simultaneously, and that is sort of Sophoclean,” Professor Mendelsohn tells the Quarantine Tapes podcast with Paul Holdengraber. “This is what tragedy is interested in. It’s interested the return of everything that you thought you could evade, and, for that reason, I think, so to speak, we’re in a very Greek moment, or one that the Greeks would have understood.”

“I think the whole idea of the special relationship of the Anglo-Saxon peoples was a romantic conceit, cooked up by Churchill, in order to get the Americans to join in the war, without which Germany could not have been defeated,” says Buruma. “I think there is very little of that kind of sentiment left. The war has been over for a long time and Britain’s power has dwindled so much that it’s of low-grade interest to whomever is in power in the U.S.”

Borderlines contributing editor Simon Conrad speaks with Professor Holt about her book Fictitious Capital: Silk, Cotton, and the Rise of the Arabic Novel, which reads early Arabic novels of late 19th- and 20th-century Beirut and Cairo as fictions of global finance in the Eastern Mediterranean. 

“Born and bred in the Bronx, this talented scholar/author (an assistant professor of literature at Bard College) deftly and vividly examines the realities and myths of the Bronx’s extremes: civic neglect, crime, and urban decay, even ruin, versus cultural innovation and an outstanding artistic legacy,” writes Mark Favermann.

“Our profoundly serious problems – racism, income inequality, to name just two – will be hard to fix, but it turns out to be horrifyingly easy to worsen them,” writes Prose in The Guardian. “Americans need to rethink the idea – and the fear – of harming and being harmed by neighbors with differently colored skins and differently colored signs in their yards. Republicans and Democrats alike, it’s our civic duty – our moral duty – to resist the violence and the terrifying vision of our country, an image on which their Republicans are basing their hopes for re-election: a nation that needs an iron hand to protect us from one another.”
 

“Whether on reclaimed ledger paper or vintage picture postcards, the images he constructs are something like found details themselves—singular and mysterious, if occasionally a little on the nose,” writes Will Heinrich.

“In interviews with dozens of Black, Latina, and Asian-American women, many of them said Ms. Harris’s story was also their story,” the Times’s authors write. “In Ms. Harris’s life, they recognized both her triumphs and the challenges that come with living in a country wrestling with its history of discrimination.”

“Government-funded thugs, assaulting citizens, still conjure up repellent images of Hitler’s Brownshirts stomping their fellow Germans, and the street kidnapping of civilians has been the hallmark of authoritarian dictatorships,” writes Prose in the Guardian. “Is all that manpower necessary to protect statues? Who knew [the] White House was so invested in art, culture—or American history? These attacks are about exerting power, bullying dissenters, intimidating Americans into giving up their first amendment protections, their constitutional rights.”

Fierce: Essays by and About Dauntless Women, a memoir project devoted to women excluded from conventional narratives of history, is the winner of the inaugural BookLife Prize for Nonfiction. Conceived and edited by Bard alumna Karyn Kloumann ’92, the collection is “more than a celebration of a diverse group of activists, agitators, and iconoclasts whose lives and accomplishments have largely been ignored by history,” writes Anya Yurchyshyn in her critique of the book. “It’s an examination of the systematic oppression that led to this erasure and continues to exclude women to this day.”

“As we learn more about what is happening in Portland—as footage of federal troops waging war on protesters floods social media, and as the President threatens to send his foot soldiers to other large cities—we are watching the perfect and perhaps inevitable combination of a domestic-security superagency and a President who rejects all mechanisms of accountability, including the Senate confirmation process,” writes Gessen in the New Yorker.

Rising junior Maxwell Toth ’22, a joint French and American studies major, has been awarded a Benjamin A. Gilman International Scholarship for study abroad. Max was awarded $4,000 toward his studies in Paris with the Institute for Field Education, a program that matches undergraduates with international internships aligning with their academic interests.

“I’m really honored to have received the Gilman Scholarship,” says Max. “As someone who’s barely traveled outside their home region of New England, studying abroad has been a dream of mine for quite some time.”

Max had originally planned to study abroad this fall, but due to the COVID-19 pandemic he chose to defer his plans to the spring and return to Annandale instead. This fall, he’s taking “a nice smorgasbord of courses,” ranging from The Philosophy of Jean-Paul Sartre to Contagion: Rumor, Heresy, Disease, and Financial Panic. Outside the classroom, he’ll continue his work as a Peer Counselor, campus tour guide, and Bard nursery school aide—“You can see I wear many hats on campus!”

“Regardless of how my semester abroad may be altered due to the pandemic, I am very excited,” Max says. “Beyond the City of Light, I really want to hop a train to Salzburg at some point and take the ‘Sound of Music’ tour—provided travel restrictions have loosened up by then!”

This summer, the YIVO Institute for Jewish Learning is making its vast digital collection of food-centric discussions, demonstrations, recipes, interviews and hundreds of archival objects available for free as part of its online course A Seat at the Table: A Journey Into Jewish Food. “Food helps to alleviate some of the anxiety that everyone is feeling in this particularly stressful time we’re in,” says Jonathan Brent, Visiting Alger Hiss Professor of History and Literature at Bard College and YIVO Executive Director and CEO. “Food enables us to have that kind of deep experience of memory, sensory pleasure, imagination and knowledge. There’s a great deal of value in studying the history of food. And it’s especially relevant now, when people are locked indoors and searching for things to do.”
 

“Trump comes along and taps into the deep anxieties of people who are truly anxious because they have been economically and socially unstable for more than a generation,” says Gessen in an interview in The Nation. “He taps into that and says, ‘OK, I’ll take you back to an imaginary past.’ There is very little on the other side to counterweigh this emotional appeal. You can’t counterweigh it by saying, ‘I have a good résumé, and I’ll fix things.’”

Distinguished Writer in Residence Francine Prose looks at the arrest of CNN correspondent Omar Jimenez, who was led away in handcuffs on live television while covering the protests in Minneapolis against the killing of George Floyd. “The mistake was always to think that it can’t happen here, because it can, it has and—unless we remain aware and vocal—it most certainly will again,” writes Prose. Full Story in the Guardian

More from Francine Prose in the Guardian
How Coronavirus Has Infected our Consciousness
“Whether or not we disinfect our money, or the grocery bag, we can’t look at a bill or a paper bag without wondering if we should spray it,” Prose writes. “So the virus has infected our consciousness, regardless of how far we are from a hotspot, how safe or healthy we may feel. It takes time and energy, trying not to think about, or mind how much we have lost.”

“The election of Ronald Reagan in 1980 gave, to my mind, a significant push to the irreversible decline in which we now find ourselves—it marked the apotheosis of a persistent strain of magical thinking in American politics. The 1980 election was a choice between a slick and intellectually inert charmer who spewed happy talk, on the one hand, and an unglamorous peanut farmer who wanted to talk about ‘malaise,’ on the other: we chose the happy talk—surprise, surprise—and have been choosing it ever since. Our current political crisis is the reductio ad absurdum of that choice: the fantasy that government is “the problem” and must be dismantled whenever possible (that’s certainly working out right now!), the contempt for institutions, the elevation of ideological fantasy above science and expertise.”

“Few writers have caught the grotesque nature of war better than Malaparte. There is no question that he felt drawn to human depravity as a subject. But he makes no excuses for it. His is a dark vision of humanity. To look away, to him, would have been a sign of weakness.”