If I believed in fate as an intelligent force, I would see my relationship with Jay as predestined. From the very beginning Ma Kirton, his grandmother, wanted us to be friends. Not sure if to this extent, but she’s dead […]
“Sometimes we revolutionaries are alone; even our children see us as strangers.”– Che Guevara The “guest speaker” was coming; and the Party bosses were at it again. Hush-hush everything seemed, or sounded. But I also wanted it […]
[Editorial note: Part one was published in December 2013.] III. Shakespeare, Nothingness, and the Audience An actress who worked professionally in the 1920s said to me of Shakespeare: “To appreciate him, I think, you have to realize that Shakespeare was […]
My Multi-Ethnic Friends & Other Stories, Cyril Dabydeen, Guernica Editions, Fall 2013,206 pages I waded into these short stories with no inkling of what shoreline I was leaving, what stones were underfoot, what spirits were alive in the water. […]
The knock comes as Ellie scratches at the remnants of a dream. A chilly wind on her cheeks. Moving against gravity high up into the blue, her head tilted towards a melee of trills and chirps. Ellie squeezes the sounds […]
Cricket’s on the TV. It’s on but you’re not watching. You’re lying on the couch in front of the TV, but your back is to the TV and your face is burrowing its way into the back of the […]
I have become interested in the sonnet form recently after years of writing and publishing books of free verse. My preference is free verse but why not try my hand at writing a sonnet? It would be a […]
An essay on reading Bread and Wine By Ignazio Silone Signet Classics, 2005 – Fiction – 279 pages Forty years ago, I read Bread and Wine while living in Calcutta. Despite my indifference towards the folks who wrote […]
I used to take my short stories to girls’ homes and read them to them. Can you imagine the reaction reading a short story to a girl instead of pawing her? Ray Bradbury Women want love […]
No, it was not you I was thinking of when you caught me. I didn’t answer you last night, because to give such an answer is no answer. It merely opens the floodgates to more questions. None of […]
Does she usually read this way? Always in the same room? Is the tiny black object on the trunk (on the steel cabinet) really a bird? Why exactly am I moved by this image? There are 48 black-and-white photographs in […]
As Trixie and I filed out of the interpretation booth for the coffee-break, a smiling woman intercepted us. Trixie and I exchanged a look, returned the woman’s smile and said hi. She explained that she was training as a […]
I come before you in this essay without any intellectual pretensions whatever, because that is precisely what I will try to probe here, whether certain varieties of contemporary and short writing, inter alia, can be considered representations of literature. […]
After two months cruising the southwest Mexican coast, picking up poco espanole and John, I was ready to go home. We caught the ferry at Puerto Vallarta and landed before noon on the tip of the Mexican Bahas. We planned […]
In the Drear Light of Zoo I see my shadow Elongated Etiolated, uprooted And high Plugged into the miracle Of electricity I buzz harmonies Of post-bop Kabala The Caliban of a soul I have Crouches in hiding […]
Part I This country’s fathers’ paramount desire was this – pursuit, unlimited, of wealth. But Jefferson, whose land and slaves were surely wealth enough, wrote “happiness” instead and not because he’d had his fill, but since he thought […]
G. Willow Wilson is a boundary and border crosser of the rarest variety–a sophisticated political thinker who is also a cracking storyteller. In Alif the Unseen, she gives us a novel whose thriller elements are in perfect equipoise with a […]
ARS POETICA Although I have dreamt of floating virginal and weightless, my blue gown ballooning on an updraft, orange fire rippling off my fingers, I am crouching naked, my pale breasts stretched slightly, brown nipples spilling into […]
Wood ashes I growl in the back of my throat. There will always be ashes waiting to be carried out. Cold, burnt out, the opposite of harmful. Composition of ash: animal to vegetable to mineral soul. […]
There is something obscenely theatrical about the Bhopal disaster. On the night of December 2nd 1984, a leak at a Union Carbide pesticide plant caused a 27-ton cloud of methyl isocyanate to drift across the Indian metropolis of Bhopal, […]
[Editors’ note: We are publishing Patrick Barnard’s essay “The Ladder is Gone” in two parts: the first installment in this issue of Montreal Serai and the second in the next issue this coming Spring. In this first part of the […]
