Home

FROM THIS SEASON'S ISSUE: Commencement 2011


Envoy: From Deep to Dark

Hidden away from view behind unassuming doors, under humming fluorescent lights and encased in corrugated steel, rest most of the six million objects in the collection of the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology. The place is deliberately hard to find.

Climbing Flying Mountain

Reinhold Messner and his brother Günther reached the summit of Nanga Parbat in June 1970. They were the third mountaineering team ever to do so. Nanga Parbat, located in Northern Pakistan, is the ninth-highest mountain in the world, and the deadliest after Annapurna.

With Chinese Characteristics

In the fall of 2010, Fudan University in Shanghai announced that its Chinese department was about to revitalize the country’s literature. Creative writing was getting “a new face.”

Notes From
21 South Street

Interview with Sheila Heti

In 2007, The New York Times Magazine asked a group of young writers for essays about their college experiences. Most of the responses were predictable—addictions to good grades, new horizons abroad, the pleasures and terrors of youth activism. Then there was the piece by Sheila Heti, a Canadian writer who studied playwriting at the National Theatre School of Canada before attending the University of Toronto to study art history and philosophy.

Poetry

Kore

I didn’t realize there was no grass. There was dirt to be swept up to chant

Fiction

Havahart

Know going in that I hardly knew the girl, that I remember the look of her more than anything else. If you’re trying to understand this thing, you’re brushing the bottom of the barrel with me.