Blog

Meandering presences

Slate on Sebald’s A Place in the Country.

Whenever I read the work of the late German writer W.G. Sebald, I get distracted here and there by a preoccupation with the fact that he worked for most of his life as an academic. Probably this is because I’ve spent many of my years in a similar environment, and I often wonder about the formative pressures this has exerted, over time, on my own writing and thinking. His relationship with the academy was not that of the standard contemporary writer, who is typically housed within the disciplinary annex of “creative writing” and who does not concern himself with the business of academia per se. Sebald, although he did also teach creative writing, was a full-blown scholar, a company man of long standing who lectured in the department of German literature at the University of East Anglia from 1970 until his death in 2001. In ways that are both subtle and pronounced, this shows through in his writing — in his essays and novels (which he preferred to call his “prose narratives”).

Introducing: Matthew Jakubowski

Matthew Jakubowski is an American short story writer, literary critic, and Asymptote editor. He has collaborated with sculptor Geoff Thompson on a piece for the group show, Impossible Books, which opens in Philadelphia this weekend. He is also the author of one of our favourite essays from last year, ‘Honest Work: an Experimental Review of an Experimental Translation’. For gorse, Matt contributes the story ‘Killing Off Ray Apada.’

Radio, live transmission

Rorschach Audio on the radio transmissions in Jean Cocteau‘s Orphée.

Come on in

“To write is to write is to write is to write is to write is to write is to write is to write.”

If you don’t follow us on Twitter or Facebook, you may have missed our announcement that we’ve opened submissions for issue two. The guidelines are here. To summarise: we’re looking for your best work, for writing that resists definition for stories and poems that strain against classification. We’re not looking for book reviews per se (we do consider them for our online arm) but we will consider essays related to books. We’re also looking for interview proposals: we’re open to suggestions, though we do have a list of people we’d love to talk to, but don’t have the time ourselves. And we’re especially looking for submissions from women; we don’t get enough, frankly.

Language drug

Ben Marcus in The Rumpus:

Sometimes I worry, for myself, that I’ve stopped being amazed at certain things, or I’ve taken for granted a set of ideas about how the world works, what people are doing with each other or alone, all the fundamental relationships in the world. I worry that I start taking it for granted and stop feeling the intensity of it because of language. Language starts to shut down the strength and power and strangeness of what it means to be a person in the world.