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A Conversation with Van Gessel

By Mary Kenagy Mitchell Interview

Van Gessel has been Shūsaku Endō’s primary English translator since the 1970s. He has translated eight of his novels and worked as a consultant on Martin Scorsese’s adaptation of Silence. We asked him about the previously untranslated Endō story in Image issue 92, and about what Endō’s work has to say to the West. Can…

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Inventing the Kingdom

By Gregory Wolfe Essay

WHEN The Kingdom landed on my desk with a thud, I could tell that it would pose a challenge—that it would be a book I had to contend with. In addition to being a substantial tome, it comes with the cultural imprimatur conveyed by its publisher, the venerable Farrar, Straus and Giroux, whose backlist includes…

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The Nightmare God: Art and Sublime Terror

By Natalie Vestin Book Review

Seiobo There Below by László Krasznahorkai, translated from Hungarian by Ottilie Mulzet (New Directions, 2013) Sudden Death by Álvaro Enrigue, translated from Spanish by Natasha Wimmer (Riverhead Books, 2016) A Story of America Goes Walking by Saara Myrene Raappana and Rebekah Wilkins-Pepiton (Shechem Press, 2016) Peter Hujar: Lost Downtown by Vince Aletti and Stephen Koch…

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Cindy Jackson’s Bevy of Boisterous Bodies

By Gordon Fuglie Essay

CONTEMPORARY FIGURATIVE ART may owe more to the golden age of comic books than many art watchers are prepared to admit. Beyond the ironic appropriation of comics by late art-world A-lister Roy Lichtenstein or au courant nihilistic punkster Raymond Pettibon, illustrated narrative has a much longer pedigree. Earlier in the twentieth century, the angular and…

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Still Mending: South Africa between the Shadow and the Light

By Rachel Hostetter Smith Essay

NEXT TO THE ENTRANCE to the Constitutional Court in Johannesburg, South Africa, where the chief justices meet to uphold what has been called the “most progressive” of constitutions, stands a bronze sculpture by Dumile Feni, a South African of Xhosa descent. It is based on a smaller clay work made in 1987, at the height…

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Hymn to the Blessed Mother

By Shūsaku Endō Short Story

UNTIL LAST YEAR, I worked in a small apartment on Nampeidai in Shibuya. In actuality, the apartment was not on Nampeidai proper, but was located away from the main street and all its spacious mansions, and thus the deposit and the rent were not so very expensive. Of the apartment’s two rooms, I used one…

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Rock, Paper, Scissors

By Maxim Osipov Short Story

ONCE that creature had thudded to the floor and finally gone quiet, she had waited for her rage to subside and her breathing to return to normal before washing everything off at the hand basin in the toilet—the place she always washed. It was, perhaps, inadvisable to destroy all evidence of contact with the rapist—she realized…

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Sovereignty of the Void

By Christian Bobin Essay

YOU MIGHT BE AT A DISTANCE from your life. As always: an ordinary state, banal. Your body headed straight for the abyss, with the forward momentum of age. And beneath the freshness of blood there is weakness, ashes. Nostalgia: the soul. Sick, yes. Without a doubt: sick. And the real name of that sickness would be…

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The Cloud of Unknowing

By Kevin Honold Essay

I. The TAXI DRIVER stopped and gestured to the empty desert. “There.” I saw nothing. “Where?” “There.” Now I saw, or thought I saw, some irregularity in the distance, about a mile away—the reflection of standing water, or maybe the attenuated shadow of a dip in the ground. After I paid the man, he sped…

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A Conversation with James McMichael

By R.M. Haines Interview

James McMichael was born in Pasadena, California, in 1939. After earning a doctorate at Stanford University, he taught at the University of California Irvine for over forty years. McMichael’s early work consists largely of shorter lyrics and sequences notable for their restraint, subtle musicality, and clarity of perception. These same qualities mark the more expansive…

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