Ken Krimstein’s recently published graphic novel/biography of Hannah Arendt, The Three Escapes of Hannah Arendt — A Tyranny of Truth (Bloomsbury 2018), was a finalist for the 2019 Society of Midland Authors’ Award, a finalist for the Jewish Book Council’s 2018 National Jewish Book Awards, a finalist for the 2019 Chautauqua Literary Prize, named one of the best graphic novels of the year by Forbes, and included on the top ten list of The Comics Journal. It has been translated into six languages and is in print around the world. In addition, Ken publishes cartoons in the New Yorker, Punch, the Wall Street Journal, and has written for New York Observer’s “New Yorker’s Diary” and McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, Yankee Pot Roast, Mr. Beller’s Neighborhood, and The Chicago Tribune.
How can a piece of writing build trust across continents, cultures, and contexts? We find out in these parallel reflections between two writers.
Trained to be producers and consumers in a marketplace of literature, most writers don’t know how to be citizens of a polity. In the concluding essay of the Polity of Literature series the editor, Matthew Stadler, proposes an experiment to help us: The GOAT PoL (The Geopolitical Open Atlas of The Polity of Literature).
Travis Ray ComesLast committed a terrible crime, but what should happen next? Stories of injury and stories of repair involve us all. We must tell and receive these stories collectively.
In part two, the purposes and ambitions of queer literature change in the ‘80s with the rise of AIDS and a punishing, homophobic backlash. These cultural conditions birthed a new political awareness—one that linked queer communities to other historically marginalized and oppressed people.
In part one of this candid personal memoir, Michael Bronski recalls the birth, life, and future of a queer polity of literature, circa 1964 to 1980.
On a short trip to document the Aramaic revival, Ben Shields gets lost in a story from which there seems to be no escape.
We want to find living examples of a functioning Polity of Literature. A friend suggests, why not look at prison writing?
When an anarchist hosts a blog it becomes a polity. Dennis Cooper’s features literature (and GIF novels).
How will we read and write—how will we make literature—after the global economy has collapsed? Nyasha Bhobo tells us how they get it done in Zimbabwe.
Provoked by blind spots in a recent New York Times piece about “the African literary scene,” Zimbabwean writer Audrey Simango reports on the conditions she finds on-the-ground for millennial African writers today. The conditions look good.
Facilitating a writing group at a temporary emergency shelter for people experiencing homelessness during a pandemic has its ups and downs.
The children that poet Robert Glück taught booed the “Poetry Playhouse” and wrote scatological jokes. He asked them for more.
