In Memory of Mahmoud Darwish
Fady Joudah
First published in The Kenyon Review, New Series, Vol. 27, No. 3, (Summer, 2005), pp. 1-4. Translated from Arabic by Fady Joudah On a day like today, in the hidden corner Of the church, in full feminine adornment, In a…
A Brief History of Hungarian Food
Vivian Wagner
In the Nagycsarnok, or Central Market, in Pest, vendors sell mounds of plump cherries and apricots, asparagus and lettuce. Stacked jars of pinewood, aster, and milkweed honey. Small plastic bags of yellow Hungarian saffron, bright red cans and jars of…
James Wood and the Pitfalls of Writing on Writing: Review of James Wood’s How Fiction Works
Daniel Torday
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, $24.00 (hardcover) While going back and forth with Maxwell Perkins on some final edits of The Great Gatsby, Fitzgerald sent a smattering of awful choices for new titles to his legendary editor at Scribner. The High-bouncing…
Yet Not Consumed
Mary Szybist
But give me the frost of your name in my mouth, give me spiny fruits and scaly husks — give me breath to say aloud to the breathless clouds your name, to say I am, let me need to say…
Before This No Longer Feels Like a Crime:” Mark Yakich’s The Importance of Peeling Potatoes in Ukraine
Zach Savich
Penguin, $18.00 (paperback) Here is the entirety of “A Source of Style,” a poem in Mark Yakich’s superb and disturbing third collection, The Importance of Peeling Potatoes in Ukraine: “Hart Crane vaulted from a ship’s railing in purple pajamas. /…
Doppelgangers
Anney E. J. Ryan
I’m standing in line for the bathroom at the Silhouette Cocktail Lounge. After about five minutes, the guy standing behind me taps my shoulder. I look him over. He’s stocky, red-faced, shiny as a peeled onion and smiling wider than…
On Louise Glück and the Yale Series of Younger Poets
Meghan O'Rourke
Editor’s Note: This essay was originally published in the Fall of 2008; Carl Phillips is the current judge of the Yale Series of Younger Poets. Ten years ago, Yale University Press prepared an anthology of poems selected from its Yale…
Our Town, His: Paul Newman’s Curtain Call
Rebecca McClanahan
This thoughtful tribute to Paul Newman is part of a larger essay by Rebecca McClanahan, one of the nation’s finest practitioners of the literary essay and a long-time contributer to The Kenyon Review. For many years she has also been…
Zozo-ji
Dana Levin
Buddhist temple, Tokyo One cry from a lone bird over a misted river is the expression of grief, in Japanese. Let women do what they need. And afterward knit a red cap, pray for their water-child . . . In…
How Criticism Serves: Review of James Wood’s How Fiction Works
James Guida
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, $24.00 (hardcover) As a number of people have pointed out, the title of James Wood’s new book may at first seem preposterous: How Fiction Works. Even an accomplished novelist should ideally be more modest, at least…
Review of Margot Singer’s The Pale of Settlement
Erika Dreifus
University of Georgia Press, $24.95 (hardcover) I should confess at the outset that some of my enthusiasm for Margot Singer’s Flannery O’Connor-prizewinning collection of linked stories, The Pale of Settlement, stems from a deep sense of connection: I identify with…
Catskill Mountain House (1824-1962)
Paula Bohince
In this rich and privileged light, in true American light, where hung chandeliers, diamond dew- drop earrings, stoles of perfume plundered from the sex of animals, one antique urge dovetails into another: how to reconcile earth with progress; poverty with…
Farewell
Alexei Bayer
“I like Los Angeles or New York City,” said Misha. “Chicago, if worst came to worst.” “Oh, is it so?” reacted Sergei Antonovich swiftly. “You do, don’t you? Well then, listen to what my brother has to say.” Sergei Antonovich…
Beautiful War
Maggie Anderson
March-September 2003 Photographs painted, cropped, rearranged into smoke soldier tank desert sky red on red horizon line of dreamed landscape so that it does not look like war— wounded Marines, no blood— no detonations, conflagrations only the white onion tops of minarets, billowing black…
