With the news arriving today, on Gabriel García Márquez’s birthday, that 100 Years of Solitude is coming to Netflix, we visited our Archives to read Ilan Stavans on Gabriel García Márquez, the filmmaker. This essay appeared in Michigan Quarterly Review in 1995. __________________________________________________________________________________________ The publication
Anne Carson’s poem, “Shot List,” first appeared in Michigan Quarterly Review in 2005. We revisit “Shot List” today, in honor of Anne Carson’s birthday.
I used to sit in the kitchen and draw when Jean visited my mother. I loved to show my completed drawings to Jean. She made me feel as if I’d discovered an elemental truth, or shown her something vital. Once, when I handed her a picture I’d done of a yellow lion with spindly legs and huge round eyes, she looked at it with consideration and said, “You know, it doesn’t look like a real lion. But I think you’ve caught the spirit of a lion here, and that’s a lot more important. This lion has lion-ness.”
I was literally looking at life from la margen (the bank, the shore). I have always wanted to use the feminine gender form of margin in Spanish, the irregular line where land meets water, rather than the masculine one, which is an irrevocably peripheral band of terrain, edges outside the body of words on a page.
Vu Tran’s story, “Vagaries,” first appeared in Michigan Quarterly Review’s Fall 2004 issue. The girl, when Chau first sees her, looks restless. She sits in the restaurant’s crowded patio under a table umbrella that shades her from the bright noon sun. One arm remains in
No one these days can be unaware of the complex problems of water degradation, toxic waste, species extinction, soil and forest depletion, desertification, acid rain, and the “greenhouse” effect. As Rebecca Solnit has remarked, “the landscape itself is no longer an aesthetic refuge, but a battle ground.”