In the Green Chair, Talking Alternative Lives:
PAUL AUSTER with J.T. Price

JUNE 2017 | Books

On an outwardly pleasant day in early April of 2017, the author appears in profile through the glass panels of his front door. When the buzzer sounds, Paul Auster rises from his dining-room table to welcome me. I have arrived, on the dot, at 2 p.m. to discuss his teeming new novel of the 1960s 4 3 2 1. It is a bildungsroman with a speculative twist: four different lives lived in alternating sequence by the same young man.

Saeed Jones: How We Fight for Our Lives

By Deena ElGenaidi

OCT 2019 | Books

Jones takes us through his childhood and adolescence, through feelings of shame and sadness, through incidents in which he learns he would never belong or find peace within certain groups and social circles. The story draws you in as he talks about his relationship with his evangelical grandmother and how her beliefs contrast with the Buddhist beliefs of his mother. Jones’s story becomes particularly heartbreaking in the ways he discusses his mother, her struggle to understand his sexuality, and the sacrifices she makes for him as a single mother.

The Festival Beneath the Festival: Selections from Toronto International Film Festival 2017

By Phil Coldiron

OCT 2017 | Film

“It’s been a bad year.” I suppose that this refrain heard around Toronto means—as it did in Berlin and Cannes—that the films intended to catch the official mood of a culture, its “radical center,” seem to have failed against the state of the world or the history of the art.

Most Dreaded Hell

by Juan Carlos Onetti, translated from the Spanish by Katherine Silver

OCT 2019 | Fiction

The first letter, the first photograph, was delivered to him at the newspaper between midnight and closing. He was banging on the typewriter, a little hungry, a little sick from coffee and tobacco, dedicated with familiar pleasure to the march of the sentence and the compliant appearance of words.