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Watch the film trailer for Queer, a film adaptation of William S. Burroughs’s 1985 novel of the same name. Directed by Luca Guadagnino with a screenplay by Justin Kuritzkes, the film stars Daniel Craig, Drew Starkey, Lesley Manville, and Jason Schwartzman.
“When I began translating, I found myself crying again. I knew then that I had finally found my way back to the womb.” In this event for the Center for the Art of Translation’s annual Day of Translation, cohosted at the Center for Fiction, Don Mee Choi delivers her keynote speech about writing from the “translation womb,” her attempts to comprehend and translate the Korean War, and her definition of what it means to write in the language of translation.
In this video, Lena Khalaf Tuffaha accepts the 2024 National Book Award in poetry for her collection Something About Living (University of Akron Press, 2024). “I’m proud to stand here today, and to accept this honor as a Palestinian American on behalf of all the deeply beautiful Palestinians that this world has lost and in honor of those miraculous ones who endure.”
What happens when language fails? Writers are always in search of the mot juste, the perfect turn of poetic phrase, the best sequence of sentences for a story or essay. But in real life, communicating is not always about the most creative arrangement of words, and saying the wrong thing at the wrong time can hurt someone you love, especially when it’s in writing. This week consider writing a personal essay that reflects on memories of past experiences, situations, or encounters in which something went awry in the process of expressing yourself in words—perhaps due to crossed wires around usage, tone, or context. What forces were underlying the discrepancy or distance between intended and perceived sentiment? How does looking closely at this incident transform your understanding of language and its consequences?
In this event from the 2024 Atlantic Festival on the topic of books bans in the United States and the world, Atlantic staff writer Gal Beckerman moderates a discussion with Cindy Hohl, president of the American Library Association, and Victoria Scott-Miller, owner of Liberation Station Bookstore, as well as a discussion with Iranian American journalist and activist Masih Alinejad and author and activist Rania Mamoun.
Uzumaki: Spiral Into Horror is an animated television miniseries adaptation of the manga horror series created by manga author and artist Junji Ito. The story takes place in the fictional Japanese town of Kurouzo, which is overtaken by a mysterious, and ultimately, deadly obsession with spirals. Spirals begin appearing everywhere: in a stirred-up bath and bowl of soup, in the pattern on a fish cake, in the smoke from a crematorium, in a potter’s wheel, in a head of hair, and the whirl of a snail’s shell. Taking a page from Ito’s unusual premise of a simple shape transforming into a malignant force, write a short story in which an unexpected terror arises from a seemingly innocuous object or image. How does an everyday item become imbued with horrific capabilities to create an atmosphere of foreboding?
“Looking closely at a hero’s mortal parts has always been a risky enterprise. We want our great writers pure of heart.” In The Flexible Lyric, poet and professor Ellen Bryant Voigt compiles nine craft essays examining the art of lyric poetry, beginning with a discussion on the creative process and Voigt’s fascination with Flannery O’Connor and Elizabeth Bishop. Each essay that follows examines different aspects of lyric poems, from tone to image to voice and beyond. Through close readings of an array of poets—such as Sylvia Plath, John Berryman, Denise Levertov, and Shakespeare—Voigt shows us the nuance and attention it takes to write a fantastic lyric poem.
In this Politics and Prose Bookstore event, Patricia Coral reads from her debut memoir, Women Surrounded by Water (Mad Creek Books, 2024), and talks about the experimental nature of her book in a conversation with Susan Coll. Women Surrounded by Water is featured in Page One in the November/December issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.
In the universe of the 2023 French film The Animal Kingdom (Le Règne animal), directed by Thomas Cailley, a wave of mutations have begun to transform some humans into animals. A woman who has begun mutating escapes into a forest while her husband and teenage son search for her. The unpredictable affliction causes chaos, as people adjust to seeing strangers and loved ones with fingers gradually turning into claws, fur growing on their skin, noses turning into beaks, and arms becoming feathered wings—all while fighting over conflicting perspectives of freedom and acceptance. Write a poem that explores your beliefs around these themes, perhaps pulling in fantastic metaphors or flights of fancy to assist you in your exploration.
