Ad Astra and Beyond...
A brief summary of recent and upcoming work, including pieces on Sheila Heti, the wild world of reading guides, the new Astra Magazine, and more.
Dear Friends and Readers:
As the world of algorithms becomes more…confusing…and we see less and less of each other online, I wanted to share a simple recap of some of my recent and upcoming work.
ICYMI, I wrote a piece on the latest work by Sheila Heti for Oprah Daily.
Lit Hub published an essay, “The Rich and Secret Life of a Writer of Reading Guides,” about my long career writing guides to works of world literature for publishers like Penguin Random House, HarperCollins, and Simon & Schuster.
My short story “Big Bird” (which, miraculously, Jonathan Franzen was an early reader for—thank you to him) will appear in the summer issue of Story Magazine this month! You can pre-order here and read a small sample of the story over here.
I’m also working on a piece for The Atlantic’s books desk—but you’ll have to stay tuned for more on that!
Finally, below, I wanted to share an exclusive piece that I’ve written about the new lit mag Astra Magazine, which includes an interview with Editor in Chief extraordinaire Nadja Spiegelman.
Enjoy—and feel free to share this post online if you’re compelled. Please keep in touch and let me know what you thought about my work. I’m always happy to hear from you.
x,
Je
The New Astra Magazine Has Us In Ecstasy
At a time when lit mag culture is believed to be in peril, Astra Publishing House has launched Astra Magazine, a new biannual print magazine offering readers a smorgasbord of essays, fiction, art, comics, poetry, and reviews from around the globe. Issue One, aptly titled Ecstasy, features work by a host of literary powerhouses including poet and MacArthur Fellow Terrance Hayes; Breast and Eggs author Mieko Kawakami; poet and film director Forough Farrokzhad; essayist and novelist Leslie Jamison; and fellow novelists Catherine Lacey, Chinelo Okparanta, and Otessa Moshfegh, to name just a few. The reverb has been palpable on social media and throughout the literary community.
Astra is being led by Editor in Chief Nadja Spiegelman, former online editor of The Paris Review and author of the memoir I’m Supposed to Protect You from All This and the comics Zig and Wikki. Her staff includes former Poets & Writers assistant editor Spencer Quong as online editor; Whiting Award winner and Stegner Fellow Aria Aber as poetry editor; graphic designer Shannon Jager as creative director; and writer/translator Samuel Rutter and former L.A. Review of Books Editor-at-Large Medaya Ocher, who will work on editing and acquisition.
“We currently have editors at large in London, Berlin, Beijing, Cairo, and Paris, and that will keep expanding as well,” Spiegelman tells me. “None of our team is fully American, in fact everyone but me was born elsewhere (and I'm a French citizen/spent part of my life in France). It's our genuine hope to make an international literary magazine. It's something that has never quite been able to exist before now.”
The editors are united in the vision that Astra will connect readers and writers from around the world. In the mission statement on their website, they underscore their hopes for the mag: “We want to bring about a new, borderless, and vital mode of reading, with a focus on literature in translation and original writing in English. We’re interested in the inter: the overlaps, the in-between, the authors who defy easy categorization.”
“We are on the cusp of a new era, more isolated and more interconnected than ever before,” Spiegelman says. “Astra is a magazine of this new moment, bringing us together while, the world over, we create a new language for ourselves.”
When I first hear about this new mag, I think first of the timing of its debut and what it is being born into. Astra’s debut comes on the heels of the deaths (or near-deaths) of a long list of beloved lit mags including The Believer, Tin House, Glimmer Train, and Bard College’s Conjunctions, which was only spared after protest and an outpouring of statements and support from loyal writers and readers on soc media who spoke about the mag’s lasting influence and impact. There is, also, the terrible and horrific backdrop of pandemic and war. But my mind instantly delivers me to a story that the deaf, Ukrainian-Russian-Jewish-American poet Ilya Kaminsky (Deaf Republic and Dancing in Odessa) has been sharing over and over in recent days. In his New York Times essay “Poems in a Time of Crisis” and Paris Review piece “Conversations to the Tune of Air-Raid Sirens: Odesa Writers on Literature in Wartime,” Kaminsky, author of the now-viral poem “We Lived Happily During the War,” recalls asking a friend in Ukraine how he can be of help. “[A]n older friend, a lifelong journalist,” he says, “writes back: ‘Putins come and go. If you want to help, send us some poems and essays. We are putting together a literary magazine.’” When I write to Spiegelman—who, as the daughter of Maus cartoonist Art Spiegelman and New Yorker art editor Françoise Mouly, was born into a family united in their devotion and commitment to art—and ask her about the birth of Astra, and specifically about any concerns that she may have about the timing and the obstacles at hand, she is both confident and optimistic—in response, she references this same story, this exact same quote, from Kaminsky. That we are both thinking about Kaminsky’s story at the same time feels significant. It is a good time to meditate on the confirmation that art and literature can and should—and will—go on.
Literature is essential not because of any obligation to offer morality lessons, though sometimes it does, but because it represents the essence of the independent and communal human spirit—the very thing that dictators and autocrats hope to desecrate and demolish. “Art doesn't have to be explicitly political to be engaged with the world,” Spiegelman explains. “The act of seeking beauty, of putting the lived experience into words, of giving voice to our thoughts and feelings — that will always be a radical act.”
I ask her: Why this lit mag and why now?
“When I lived outside the U.S., the young people I met who grew up or lived in major cosmopolitan cities had more in common with each other than with many of their fellow citizens. Those in my generation and younger grew up with the internet, which allows us to collapse space and time, to be in direct and easy contact with people on the other side of the world. There is a rise of nationalism around the world, but there is also a countermovement to it — a recognition of a shared set of values and aesthetics that unite us across borders. We’re interested in creating a cosmopolitan magazine, one that has multiculturalism at its heart, rather than asking each writer to represent an entire country. There isn't yet a literary magazine, a single cultural gathering place, that speaks to that community. And I think within the U.S., there's a desire for it — the front tables of bookstores in New York City are filled with books in translation. We're very slowly reckoning with the decline of our international imperialism, and with that comes a beautiful humility, a desire to understand what we have in common with the people outside our borders.”
I also ask if she can share with us a few secrets about plans for the next issue and the general future of Astra.
“The theme of our second issue will be Filth, and we're making it now…We'll be available in bookstores from Melbourne to Singapore to Oslo and we also offer international subscription rates to send the magazine directly to our readers. We hope to have launch parties for our future issues in cities around the world—Mexico city, Jakarta, Berlin, etc.—in collaboration with local literary communities. [And we’ve launched] our website, where we’ll be publishing essays and criticism nearly daily.”
During a time when there has been so much debate over who and what qualifies as essential, Astra delivers a powerful message: Art is essential. Literature is essential. There can be no ecstasy without it.
