LastWords
Half a Day in the Life of Angel Martinez







Contributor
M. Joseph IrwinM. Joseph Irwin is the editor of an alt-weekly, Planet Jackson Hole, and an M.F.A. recipient from San Diego State University.
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Editor’s Note
By Will ChancellorFEB 2021 | Fiction
This month were pleased to publish an excerpt from Vesna Marics The President Shop. The novels backdrop is an allegorical country, The Nation, steeped in tyranny, but the focus is on the human rather than the trappings of propaganda. I was struck by the young woman, Mona, decoding the timelessness thats always present, even as we pass through moments that are consciously historic. Symbology, by Betsy M. Narváez, abounds in images, meanings, dreams, and visions. Here, theres no official, waking world, little external at all. Narváez gives us resonant moments over coffee of a mother and a daughter unpuzzling the language of dreams. Were also tremendously fortunate to have Maisy Card stepping in as co-editor of the fiction section of the Brooklyn Rail. Her debut novel, These Ghosts are Family, masterfully courses through the history of a family while communicating the texture and hunger of life as it was lived.

The Game of Life - Emergence in Generative Art
By Charlotte KentSEPT 2020 | ArtSeen
Moving past familiar questions about art, machines, autonomy, and authorship that have been around since the invention of photography, the generative artworks on view through Kate Vasss website offers a chance to think about our respective starting points, the steps we take, and how rules apply in this game of life.
Vincent Van Gogh: A Life in Letters
By Joshua SperlingDEC 20-JAN 21 | Books
Though lacking the inexpensive allure of the old paperback editionsnot to mention the comprehensiveness of the six-volume collectors set released in 2009A Life in Letters succeeds by placing a modest sampling of Van Goghs correspondence into dialogue with both the life and the paintings. Each phase of the artists wandering is bracketed with a brief biographical précis, refreshingly unadorned and free of the usual apocrypha.
All What I Want is Life
By Ruba Al-SweelJUL-AUG 2020 | ArtSeen
Seldom is civil unrest in the Arab world discussed beyond hushed dinner conversations or in the context of economic decay on corporate roundtables. In Dubais center for photography, Gulf Photo Plus (GPP), however, its the topic du jour. A pictorial and filmic essay drawn from Lebanon, Iraq, Algeria, and Sudan, All What I Want is Life takes its title from a cri de cur strewn across the walls of the Saadoun Tunnel in graffiti in Baghdad. This is an exhibition of protest photography, not photojournalism