top of page
300_365 - The Hidden Door_edited_edited.png

Vol. 2 / Issue 2

June  05, 2024

Screen Shot 2024-05-24 at 11.23.09 AM.png

"I Remember… (A Bay, Ten Acres, and an Old Farmhouse)," by Anastasia Walker. As with a lot of the essays I've written the past several years, the drafting of it led me to some unexpected revelations."

A Look Back in Time ... Paul Auster  (February 3, 1947 - April 30, 2024)

"The adroit self-consciousness of his writing made him our supreme post-modernist.​" - Ian McEwan

Hadada-Circle-holding.png

And so, yes, read his books; his essays, but here, we offer his Paris Review interview: Paul Auster, The Art of Fiction No. 178, where he touches upon what it is to be an artist: "If you want to become an artist, you have to learn everything you possibly can and then you have to do everything you possibly can to forget it. And the things that you cannot forget will form the foundation of your work." On writing: "Slowly blundering my way toward consciousness."

Because his stance in front of the metafictional mirror is now frozen  ... 

“The world is so unpredictable. Things happen suddenly, unexpectedly. We want to feel we are in control of our own existence. In some ways we are, in some ways we're not. We are ruled by the forces of chance and coincidence.”

auster4_edited.jpg

The Story of My Typewriter, Sam Messer

more art = a greater tolerance

more art = a greater tolerance

300_365 - The Hidden Door_edited_edited.png

Vol. 2 / Issue 1

January  04, 2024

9781953534040-20230714201734.jpg

A review of Ben Shattuck's, Six Walks: In the Footsteps of Henry David Thoreau,  by Amanda Rioux.

Screen Shot 2023-12-30 at 12.09_edited.jpg

A young man wandering aimlessly, desperate to get lost: Belize to Guatemala, a bottle of rum in hand. "Livingston," by Alexander Hackett.

A Look Back in Time ... The collected essays of James Baldwin, 
                           Notes of a Native Son.

Screen Shot 2023-12-30 at 9.13.28 AM.png

February 26, 1958 Langston Hughes, in his review of Baldwin's Notes of a Native Son, wrote: "Few American writers handle words more effectively in the essay form than James Baldwin. As an essayist he is thought-provoking, tantalizing, irritating, abusing and amusing. And he uses words as the sea uses waves, to flow and beat, advance and retreat, rise and take a bow in disappearing." 

​

"One of the wonders of coming back to Notes after such a long time is how “current” Baldwin is. That might sound like a cliché,  but in so

Screen Shot 2023-12-30 at 9.50.21 AM.png

In  his home in Saint-Paul-de-Vence, France in 1979. Ralph Gatti/AFP/Getty Images

many instances in our lives we learn that some clichés are built on things solid and familiar and timeless. “Journey to Atlanta” is but one of a hundred examples in Notes."  — Edward P. Jones, June 29–July 5, 2012, Washington, D.C.  And as Juan Williams wrote: “The success of Baldwin’s effort as the witness is evidenced time and again by the people, black and white, gay and straight, famous and anonymous, whose humanity he unveiled in his writings. America and the literary world are far richer for his witness. The proof of a shared humanity across the divides of race, class and more is the testament that the preacher’s son, James Arthur Baldwin, has left us.”

more art = a greater tolerance

more art = a greater tolerance

300_365 - The Hidden Door_edited_edited.png

Vol. 1 / Issue 4

September 18, 2023

Screen Shot 2023-09-08 at 7.54.53 AM.png

Nathalie Guilbeault reviews Kathryn Brown Ramsperger latest novel, A Thousand Flying Things.

Screen Shot 2023-09-11 at 3.16.01 PM.png

Berlin Pride 2012, Discovering the Artist Gertrude Sandmann, an essay by Emily L Quint Freeman.

A Look Back in Time ... Slouching Towards Bethlehem by Joan Didion

One of Didion's best .... it's hard to tell, but yeah, she she was writing about 1967. "The center was not holding. It was a country of bankruptcy notices and public-auction announcements and commonplace reports of casual killings and misplaced children and abandoned homes and vandals who misspelled even the four-letter words they scrawled. It was a country in which families routinely disappeared, trailing bad checks and repossession papers. Adolescents drifted from city to torn city, sloughing off both the past and the future as snakes shed their skins, children who were never taught and would never now learn the games that had held the society together." - “Slouching Towards Bethlehem” was first published in the September 23, 1967 edition of The Saturday Evening Post. 

Slouching Towards Bethlehem

by Joan Didion

September 23, 1967

The Saturday Evening Post

Screen Shot 2023-09-14 at 8.17.43 AM.png

© Ted Streshinsky/Corbis/Corbis via Getty images

more art = a greater tolerance

Essays & Reviews_edited_edited.jpg

Vol. 1 / Issue 3

April 1, 2023

Gray Black Woman Motivational Quote Facebook Post.png

"The way it is now, in my mind’s eye: I grapple on my hands and knees, searching a dusty room for a story." One of loss 2x. An essay by Anna Oberg.

a review by.png

"Dual Realms" a review of Samara Garfinkle’s debut poetry collection by Mirabel.

A Look Back in Time ... Frank Sinatra Has a Cold

"In the winter of 1965, writer Gay Talese arrived in Los Angeles with an assignment from Esquire to profile Frank Sinatra. The legendary singer was approaching fifty, under the weather, out of sorts, and unwilling to be interviewed. The result, "Frank Sinatra Has a Cold," ran in April 1966 and became one of the most celebrated magazine stories ever published, a pioneering example of what came to be called New Journalism -- a work of rigorously faithful fact enlivened with the kind of vivid storytelling that had previously been reserved for fiction." - Esquire

Frank Sinatra Has a Cold

 

Esquire by Gay Talese

​

April 1966​

hd-aspect-1449950955-sinatra-11.jpg

more art = a greater tolerance

Essays & Reviews_edited_edited_edited.jpg

Vol. 1 / Issue 2

December 29, 2022

310256589_10159900094848766_3570280774474607743_n (1).jpg

A Look at Russia's War in Ukraine September 12 – December 18, 2022

The social media posts of former  ‘Soviet subject’ 

Screen Shot 2022-12-16 at 4.21_edited.png
Underwater-view-of-a-woman-floating-in-water-by-Toni-Frissell-1947-This.png

A personal essay about an interdependent mother-daughter relationship complicated by secrets and resentment. "Locked Together, Locked Apart: Just Beyond My Reach" by Anna Stolley Persky.

A Look Back in Time ...

"Why the snake? That is, why is the unconscious so loathe to speak to us? Why the images, metaphors, pictures? Why the dreams, for that matter."

The Kekulé Problem

 

Where did language come from?

 

BY CORMAC MCCARTHY

​

April 17, 2017​

4cba82c003288667e155c00ea758d033.jpg

In this issue, where among other things, we look at language—the exploration of bilingualism and the benefits of it, we offer Cormac McCarthy's article from Nautilus magazine April 17, 2017, where he asks: "Where did language come from?" 

12154_48c0b3cf0c62e40eeff5a9b07a63d953.jpg

more art = a greater tolerance

more art = a greater tolerance

Essays & Reviews_edited_edited_edited.jpg

Vol. 1 / Issue 1

October 3, 2022

depositphotos_45478049-stock-photo-crisis-management_edited_edited.jpg

ON QUITTING ALCOHOL, an excerpt from author Josip Novakovich's forthcoming book, Vignettes, Montreal Publishing Company, June 2023. 

SURVIVORS COVER V2.jpg

Rolling Stone, The New Yorker, Vanity Fair, and The Village Voice journalist Robert Coe explores 1974 Big Sur, California. An excerpt from his upcoming book, SURVIVORS OF A FUTURE that never happened, A Critical Review 1974 - 1994,  Montreal Publishing Company, November 15, 2022.

Screen Shot 2022-08-08 at 12.15.52 PM.png

AS PER USUAL, an essay by Tamas Dobozy. "Each photograph emits the opposite of testimony," writes Tamas Dobozy in his collection of 21 essays, each one based on a photograph by Karl Griffiths-Fulton, entitled, The Ministry of Loss.

Stone DZ Tense (1) (2) (1).tif

NO PAST TENSE, an excerpt by D. Z. Stone

Willi and Kati Salcer were two Czech Jews who as teenagers had been swept up by the Holocaust in Hungary and survived Auschwitz and Mauthausen, respectively. The Salcers are now both gone but I think they would be pleased that No Past Tense is taught in college courses on the Holocaust and Jewish Literature, and is on the shelves of over 500 university libraries. Publisher, Vallentine Mitchell.

content.jpeg

THE LITTLE BOOK YOU HAVEN'T READ, BUT SHOULD,  a review by Christian Fennell of Sheila Watson's The Double Hook . A book written in 1959 that still reads today as if it was written tomorrow.

A Look Back in Time ...

With an eye to preserving that which should be remembered, and learning from it.

The
Nelligan
Review

“The Kentucky Derby Is Decadent and Depraved”
By Hunter S. Thompson
From Scanlan’s, June 1970

1_hgzn9UW_n4xRsmLNt0w3zg.jpeg

“I was sure it was the last article I was ever going to do for anybody,” said Hunter S. Thompson in a 1974 interview with Playboy. “Then when it came out, there were massive numbers of letters, phone calls, congratulations, people calling it a ‘great breakthrough in journalism.’

And I thought, ‘Holy shit, if I can write like this and get away with it, why should I keep trying to write like the New York Times?’ It was like falling down an elevator shaft and landing in a pool full of mermaids.”

Screen Shot 2022-09-29 at 6.14.34 AM.png

The
Nelligan
Review

bottom of page