News

Whenever I visit Kolkata, India, the city of my birth, nostalgia follows me through the streets. I notice which of the older buildings have become new malls, which of the sweet shops known for their condensed milk squares have now been replaced by modern confectionaries or worse, a Baskin-Robbins, which of the old cow-claimed roads have been cleared to make room for apartments. My travel journals are full of these observations and the memories that come with them.

July 7, 2015 by Jai Chakrabarti

Throughout the summer and into the fall, we will be distributing postcards at various bookstores, performance venues, and cultural institutions around Brooklyn asking people to document a public space in the borough on a 4" x 6" canvas. Here is what we've received so far.

June 15, 2015

Translation may be the invisible art, but the translator's mission is precisely to bring visibility to a work of literature, and at times to rescue an author from obscurity. This is especially true when translating Italian women writers of the past who struggled for visibility even within their own culture.

April 23, 2015 by Olivia E. Sears

Belinda McKeon on Colin Barrett's "Stand Your Skin."

March 31, 2015 by Belinda McKeon

We are thrilled to announce our 2015 Emerging Writer Fellows: Jai Chakrabarti, Cornelius FitzPatrick, and Arinze Ifeakandu. We would also like to thank all of the writers who submitted manuscripts, the readers who spent the past eight weeks evaluating, debating, and championing applications, and the National Endowment for the Arts for its generous support of the program.

Supporting new writers has been an essential part of A Public Space since our debut issue—Leslie Jamison, Nam Le, and Jesmyn Ward published their first stories in the magazine—and with the Emerging Writer Fellowships, which are now in their second year, we look to continue this tradition by seeking out writers who have not yet published a book-length work but whose writing shows exceptional talent.

February 10, 2015

Leslie Jamison on Charles D'Ambrosio's "The Dead Fish Museum."

November 12, 2014 by Leslie Jamison

Hello Readers,

I’m sitting in Slottsparken, in Oslo—on the stone steps in front of the Royal Palace, in the shadow of a looming bronze king on his looming bronze horse—and I’m thinking about public spaces, how they summon an inadvertent gathering stripped of intention or annotation: a young artist in Converse high-tops holds a baguette in one hand and a splattered canvas in the other; an elderly couple strides by in matching sunglasses, still holding hands after however-many years; a group of children convulses collectively around the fact of a tiny toffee-colored dog; a woman bends over to reach her arm down into a garbage can.

October 23, 2014 by Leslie Jamison

To read a Dorthe Nors story is to enter a dream and become subject to its logic.

October 22, 2014 by Daniel Woodrell

I'll read any poem about a machine.

September 15, 2014 by Patricia Lockwood

September 15, 2014

Deborah Pease was a dear friend, devoted reader, and founding benefactor of A Public Space. She was the author of the novel Real Life (W. W. Norton), and several books of poems, collected in Another Ghost in the Doorway (Moyer Bell). Her poems also appeared in AGNI, The New Yorker, The Paris Review, Parnassus, and other journals; as well as in the chapbook The Crows at Appleton (Monogram Editions) and Opposed to Indifference: Poems of Memory and Conscience (Haybarn Press).

August 18, 2014

We are absolutely thrilled to be publishing a story from Kelly Link’s forthcoming collection in our fall issue. Part Philip K. Dick, part Pygmalion, “The New Boyfriend” is a twisted send-up of Twilight-era teenage love. APS Readers, we’re giving you the chance to illustrate it for us.

July 31, 2014

We are thrilled to announce our inaugural Emerging Writer Fellows: Vanessa Hutchinson, Mahreen Sohail, and April Wolfe. We would also like to thank all of the writers who submitted manuscripts, and the readers who spent the past eight weeks evaluating, debating and championing applications.

June 20, 2014

All through my twenties I sat immersed in Kerstin Ekman’s novels. I believe she taught me to write.

May 2, 2014 by The Work of Kerstin Ekman | Selected and Introduced by Dorthe Nors

I have a memory of my father. It is suspended in time and space, as memories tend to be.

May 2, 2014 by Kerstin Ekman | Selected and Introduced by Dorthe Nors

The snow melted, exposing the dead body of a man on a hillside just behind Tubby Kalle’s tavern.

May 2, 2014 by Kerstin Ekman | Selected and Introduced by Dorthe Nors

Lie down. / You must have trust. / Still more trust. / Lie down. / Bare yourself to the knives.

May 2, 2014 by Kerstin Ekman | Selected and Introduced by Dorthe Nors

They all sit silently after Oda has spoken. The hissing of the radiators can be heard. A slushy liquid, neither snow nor rain, splatters the windowpanes.

May 2, 2014 by Kerstin Ekman | Selected and Introduced by Dorthe Nors

I do not have much confidence in medical science. That was a subject on which Harms and I were, for once, of the same opinion. He alleged that the human body is largely self-healing. Not entirely of course. We do all die in the end.

May 2, 2014 by Kerstin Ekman | Selected and Introduced by Dorthe Nors

At first Elis thought a Norwegian had driven up. But it was a Swede in a Norwegian rental car.

May 2, 2014 by Kerstin Ekman | Selected and Introduced by Dorthe Nors