words like black blood from the frozen ground: a psalm and twenty years later you still dream of your childhood house on fire you turn to me for all of the things i can no longer give you the names of streets or of old lovers or the reassuring weight of lies and everything …
Else what shall they do which are baptized for the dead, if the dead rise not at all? Why are they then baptized for the dead? —1 Corinthians 15:29 There's a vampire in my background. He has stalked me all my life, but he failed to fix his fangs in my jugular until, like an …
Wasn't just a few years ago I liked to lie under the Griffin tree. Least that's how it was known back then. A big ol' shady tree in the middle of a field where I'd go a-rompin' with the boys, givin' 'em of my sweetness, robbin' 'em of that last bit of innocence they pretended …
History is constantly torn between science and art. Sometimes, people try to resolve this dilemma by pulling art, and fiction in particular, toward the scientific, sometimes, by stressing the artistic side of science, and, sometimes, by calling it a void argument. But how do we avoid a question inscribed in the ambiguity of the very …
"I think there is something about the fixedness of male sexuality that is comforting to us. Or the alleged fixedness."
Just before I reached puberty, my Maltese father told me, “A woman is like a cow, always with one eye opened and one eye closed.” And I wondered if he’d meant only my mother. Just before my wedding day, my father told me what he’d meant: “A woman always pretends she can’t see anything, but …
"I like the mental puzzle involved with dealing with a real situation rather than one that you can just arbitrarily choose to change. And frankly I like the social mission of writing non-fiction."
The second African-American to win a Rhodes Scholarship, John Edgar Wideman is the author of 11 novels, including most recently Two Cities. He has also written four short-story collections and is a widely published essayist and social critic.
John Waters has made 15 films, including Hairspray, Pink Flamingos, Serial Mom, Pecker, and most recently, Cecil B. DeMented. He has also done some acting. Learn more about filmmaker John Waters by visiting the Internet Movie Database and his faculty page at the European Graduate School.
Studs Terkel authored over two dozen books, including: Hard Times, Working, RACE, The Good War (which won a Pulitzer), Coming of Age, My American Century, and The Great Divide.
