"I've always had a healthy respect for the feelings that children have," says Dragonwagon, "so in the story the little girl asks the questions and her mother answers them in a way that is not condescending. It's funny. Sometimes it has some wisdom in it."
Dragonwagon was in her mid-20s when she first published Will It Be Okay?— a time when she says she was much more the child in the story than the adult. Now 70, Crescent Dragonwagon has written more than two dozen children's books, as well as novels, cookbooks and poetry.
When the Covid-19 pandemic hit in 2020, Dragonwagon says she felt like she needed something to do. She and her husband started reading children's books out loud every night.
Astra Magazine, Spiegelman said, was “both unusual and exciting, a glamorous and subversive literary project, a breath of fresh air and hope.” And then it was over, leaving fewer places in the United States to publish and read new fiction. Its short existence offers insight both into what is possible for a literary magazine to accomplish and into the tenuous place such publications occupy in the American publishing landscape.
Few artists boast a style and subject matter so singular that three separate specialists would use the same word to describe them: “strange.” Yet that’s exactly what happened when Smithsonian magazine asked a trio of scholars about Dora Maar, a 20th-century French photographer and painter whose oeuvre in many ways defies explanation. Almost all of her artworks capture a certain uncanniness in their surroundings, bringing to light the strange in the mundane.
One of Maar’s most famous works—the 1936 photograph Père Ubu—is a perfect example of this phenomenon. It’s the kind of art that requires repeat viewings, all of which yield something new. There’s something inscrutable about the subject’s scaly body, its one slightly open eye, its barely outstretched claws and its ear flaps clouded by shadows. The viewer is left to question whether the figure is alien or something found in nature; they want to know more, but at the same time, they’re slightly disgusted, says Andrea Nelson, an associate curator at the National Gallery of Art (NGA) in Washington, D.C. Donors gifted a print of the Surrealist image to the museum in 2021.
They told me there were a lot of monkeys. And, of course, I’ve seen the pictures from previous years.
But when I found myself amidst a ravenous troop of long-tailed macaques in a mad, The Hunger Games-esque dash to stuff their faces with as much food as possible, I was absolutely astounded. I had never seen so many monkeys in my life. Let alone ones that are the guests of honor of a lavish feast.
Romance novels are rarely surprising. It's usually obvious from page one who is going to end up with whom. Heck, sometimes you don't even have to open the book — it's all right there on the cover. But being surprised is not why we read them. Like so many things in life, it's the journey (and, yes, the romance!). And that's where Emily Henry's "Book Lovers" will grab you.
Maybe one day I will learn how to live
without, without her and her, and she and