Jean McGarry
THERE CAME A DAY WHEN, DAMN IT, he just couldn’t take any more. He’d offered the pearl-skinned girl a home, a little gal of her own, and upkeep. She’d quit her job, got as fat as she could, and outsmarted him in every way. Entering his own clean and decorated house, he felt skinned and gnawed, burnt by judgment, hobbled in his wants, urges, and habits by the scorn, digs, cracks, jabs, and smack-downs.
by Jean McGarry
DELIA LIVED ON THE SECOND FLOOR of Eldorado Street. She’d had it all to herself since the day Charlie tripped on the cat and bled to death, his nose broken, face-down on the pantry floor, where she found him on Ash Wednesday. There was still a stain on the linoleum, a grid of black and white squares. The stain was now brown, but had started as almost a pink foam. She’d lifted his head, but refused to look at the sopping wet and foaming eyes, nose, and mouth. “Poor old Chas,” she said, dropping the head and calling the police. An ambulance followed the patrol car, and Charlie Abernathy was carted away in his bathrobe and slippers. He was in the process of fixing himself a short one before breakfast and Delia’s return from the 8 o’clock mass.
Ivan Vladislavić
SHE DREAMS: THE EMPTY PEDESTAL is made of glass and resting in it like bones in a reliquary are the names of the statue’s children.
Comrade A had the habit of rapping on the toes of his boots with his cane as he walked. They were safety boots of a kind you can’t buy any more, with heat-resistant soles and steel toecaps from which the rubber tip of the cane rebounded. This drumbeat irritated Ma Z, but she had known Comrade A long enough to hold her tongue. He was touchy about the boots, which he’d been wearing since his days as a shop steward in the Metalworkers’ Union. He didn’t care that they were down at the heel and looked odd with a suit, and he would give anyone who dared to comment a lecture on the hazards of the shop floor. These boots had saved his feet more than once when a metal bar slipped off the rollers in the factory. You could still see the dents. He was touchy about the walking stick too, although he had come by that more recently.
I had the opportunity to meet with Haluk Terzioğlu, one of the founders of Spazio Hasita alongside Simone Innocenti, which is situated in Milan's NOLO district. The gallery, which combines modernism and tradition, is an example of the city's cultural development, which has been established since June 2023. Since then, Spazio Hasita has hosted artists such as Chiara Colombo, Sefa Çatuk, Francesco Damiani, Angelo Marcuccio, Alan Maglio, and Alessandro Pongan. Set in a meticulously renovated location, its direction mixes contemporary innovative thinking with Milan's artistic, creative, industrial, and cultural legacy. After discussing his unique approach to gallery administration and vision, Haluk Terzioğlu was open to sharing his story and what lies ahead for Spazio Hasita.
In the 1850s, gas consumption started to become a part of Istanbul’s daily life. Kadıköy Hasanpaşa Gashouse was the second plant built on the Anatolian side in 1891 and the last in Istanbul. The gas obtained from this plant was used for street and indoor lighting for the Anatolian part of Istanbul. It started operation in 1892 and operated regularly until World War 1. In the 1920s, with the arrival of electricity, coal gas began to lose importance. Between 1938 and 1944, Kadıköy Hasanpaşa Gashouse operated autonomously and later handed to IETT (Istanbul Electric Tramway and Tunnel Establishments) in 1945.
The Monumental Cemetery of Milan (Cimitero Monumentale di Milano), located in the Garibaldi district of Milan, Italy, is one of the most important cultural heritage sites in Europe. Filled with rich architectural monuments and sculptures, the cemetery is the resting and remembering place of many famous people in Italian history, such as; Bruno Munari, Salvatore Quasimodo, Alessandro Manzoni, Carlo Cattaneo, Luca Beltrami, etc. The cemetery was designed by Carlo Maciachini (1818–1899), who won the design competition held by the municipality of Milan in 1863. Even though it was not completed until 1887, the burials began in 1866, and the cemetery continued extending to 250,000 m2.
Refik Anadol was among the first artists to reach a large audience through artistic expression using artificial intelligence. He is a Turkish-American media artist and researcher focused on humans living in the digital age. His LA-based studio has been active for almost a decade and explores machine intelligence and the communication of data. His approach is to analyze surroundings as raw data and process them through custom-designed algorithms to create mesmerizing visuals and AI data sculptures of already-present elements that exist.
Francisco José de Goya y Lucientes, known as Goya (1746–1828), is one of the most important Spanish artists who influenced many others that came after him in the 18th and 19th centuries. He lived in a period of great change, such as the Enlightenment, the French Revolution, and Napoleon’s invasions of Spain. Being greatly influenced by the Enlightenment, he developed an expressive language on his own by rejecting the acceptable aesthetics of his time and limitations such as being under patronage. His “free” and extensive artistic production captured aspects of everyday life, the effects of war, and Spain’s political, social, and economic issues. Throughout his artistic development, Goya’s early inclination was in-between rococo and classicism while being influenced by Italian masters. After maturing, his works transformed in such a way that Goya is considered the predecessor of the Romantic movement.
Giovanni Bellini (1438–1516) was a renowned 15th-century Venetian painter and was recognized for his harmonious use of color. His paintings featured diverse Renaissance and late Gothic styles. The masterpiece Lamentation over the Dead Christ(1475) is one of the finest works of Italian art, and it demonstrated Bellini's maturity. The work portrays the anointing of Christ’s body before his entombment. The four figures—Christ, Joseph of Arimathea, Nicodemus, and the Magdalene—are depicted.
By Jonas Hassen Khemiri
THERE HE STANDS NOW, and it’s either him or his brother. It’s him. It has to be him. You can tell by the clothes, the posture, the glances he casts at the station clock. His brother would never try to disguise his height by shifting his weight onto one leg and pushing the other slightly out in front. His brother would never feel this anxious just because someone was a little late. That’s something only he would do, he who is not his brother, he who stands there on the platform and has just calculated that fifteen minutes is nine hundred seconds and nine hundred seconds is nothing.
by Sigrid Nunez
ON THE MORNING of the first day of the year, Nell is looking over her bookshelves while listening to a podcast. She’d made a single New Year’s resolution: to declutter her small apartment, starting with getting rid of some of her books. On the podcast, a journalist is explaining why January first is such a common birthday in Afghanistan and Pakistan. Nell’s eye lands on the spine of a thin paperback by a French writer, Édouard Levé. She pulls it from the shelf and reads the back cover: “Édouard Levé was born on January 1, 1965.”
by Sigrid Nunez
HE WAS A DUKE, or an earl—he was some sort of nobility—and not the first of his kind to visit the hotel. Royalty, rock stars, movie stars, rich and famous people from all over the world came to stay there. Some had become familiar faces, returning each time they happened to be in New York. Couples who’d spent their wedding nights at the hotel booked the same room for their anniversaries, and there was a family that got together every Christmas and requested that a tree and decorations for hanging be waiting in their suite when they arrived. As for the English lord, he’d been there once already, a year ago, then as now by himself. It was not uncommon for a guest to sign the register using a false name. Last time, he’d been the Count of Monty Python. This time, he was Lord Sauron.
by Nathan Englander
THERE WAS A LIST of things Alex swore he’d tend to before the baby arrived. The poplar shingles, the nursery door, the staircase to the cellar that was missing a step. Desperate as he was to get it all done, Alex was stuck in a funk from which he couldn’t pry himself free. He knew his wife had every right to be frustrated with him and wished he could tell her so. But communicating with Shannon was yet another thing Alex lately couldn’t do.
by Daniel Lefferts
LAST SUMMER MY FRIEND Andrew and I spent a few days in Fort Lauderdale. We did not enjoy our time there very much. I’d been reluctant to go for a number of reasons. Out of our six-person friend group Andrew and I were the least close, Florida in August sounded miserable, and I was low on PTO and low on cash. But Andrew insisted. He was bored and everyone else was busy. He even offered to cover my plane ticket.
By María José Bilbao
NOW THE WHOLE WORLD knows her as the woman who gave up her body. According to official statistics, she’s the third person to become a gas in all of South America.
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| Patrick McGrath |
Patrick McGrath is a convivial sort. Pushing hair from his eyes with a smile, he'll have you seated, snug, and sipping tea on the couch before you've had a chance to say hello. He's a man who loves a joke and laughs easily; it's difficult to imagine him underdressed. One does, however, imagine sightseeing with Patrick to be a chore. Point out a placid canoe-filled expanse of lakefront brimming with delightful lily pads, and he is as likely to point out an excellent place to dump a pallid and bloated body.
I wrote the below for the Curious Tales blog.
You may well have noticed we've a new book in the works. As mentioned earlier, Congregation of Innocents takes its inspiration from the late great Shirley Jackson who passed away fifty years ago this year.
My Mother
My mother's first depressive illness occurred when I was seven years old, and I felt it was my fault. I felt I should have prevented it. This was about a year before my father left us. His name was Fred Weir. In those days he could be generous, amusing, an expansive man — my brother, Walt, plays the role at times — but there were signs, perceptible to me if not to others, when an explosion was imminent. Then the sudden loss of temper, the storming from the room, the slamming door at the end of the hall and the appalled silence afterward. But I could deflect all this. I would play the fool, or be the baby, distract him from the mounting wave of boredom and frustration he must have felt at being trapped within the suffocating domestic atmosphere my mother liked to foster. Later, when she began writing books, she fostered no atmosphere at all other than genteel squalor and heavy drinking and gloom. But by then my father was long gone.
