The Pittsburgh Review of Books will be taken a one-month break in anticipation of the fall semester. When we return on August 31st, we’ll begin publishing not just the essays, reviews, excerpts, and interviews, but also some big announcements about the coming year, including the staff for our second cohort, and some exciting new developments. In the meantime, we’d love to hear from you at esimon@andrew.cmu.edu, not just with pitches, but with any comments about how we’re doing as we approach our first anniversary. While we’re gone, check out some of the pieces from our first year of publication which you might have missed when they first appeared:
“Address to the Class of 2026” by Viet Thanh Nguyen
“Literature demands something greater, a more capacious empathy, a more generous soul, and a more daring imagination, which leads us not to brutal solidarity but to radical solidarity.”
“Notes on Spite” by Hollis Robbins
Some “Notes on Spite” (With Apologies to Susan Sontag)
“An American Struggle” by Kangkang Kovacs
“It was a familiar sentiment, this refusal to believe, against all evidence, that massive social turmoil was something that could happen here in America.”
“Don’t Ask Me Where I’m From” by Tolani Akinola
“As direct as the question ‘where are you from’ may seem, it actually lands as being a bit imprecise; does someone want to know where I was born, where I grew up, where I currently live, what my ethnic background is, or how I culturally identify? I suspect that I’m asked this question more often than most.”
“Some Counterintuitive Things about Academic Freedom and Democracy” by Michael Bérubé
“Academic freedom is the oxygen of the open society; that truism happens to be true. But it depends on a delicate machinery which is largely known only to people inside academe, who so far have not done enough—and I certainly include myself—to explain why that machinery is important.”
“My Life Amongst the Techbros” by Sam Beckbessinger
“Technologies are not neutral. They’re built by humans and they encode the values of those humans, which means they reflect the cultures they arise from. The morality baked into most tech products is what I’d call Male American Individualism.”
“Is the Cathedral of Learning a Figment of Our Imagination?” by Martin Aurand
“How Chancellor John G. Bowman and architect Charles Z. Klauder met to consider the design of the Cathedral of Learning, which was already improbably envisioned as a university in a skyscraper… How Klauder finally cued up a recording of Richard Wagner’s ‘Magic Fire Music’ from Die Walküre.”
“The Music of What Happens” by Peter Catapano
“Still, there is something compelling in the quotidian, the nonperformance, the act of creation as it is woven into the fabric of daily life, equally compelling.”
“SUNSHINE NOIR: My KILL DICK in the Los Angeles Canon” by Luke Goebel
“Los Angeles was never the exception, not as location or as mirror. It was the early draft of America. It was the truth, told with a wink, before people perhaps wanted to see their reality more accurately reflected.”
“As Close as I Can Get to an Articulation of Irish Identity” by Donal Ryan
“In the speech I said that I don’t speak for, but I write about, rural Irish working people, my own people.”
“Darrow Farr and Sarah Bruni on Why We Write” by Darrow Farr and Sarah Bruni
“Can I ask a similar question about the transition of watching your novel become a product in the marketplace? How did that feel, to let it go? Was it a transition that you were able to anticipate?”
“Talking about Pittsburgh with Michael Chabon” by Patrick McGinty
“From my point of view, I never hesitated, never doubted for a second that Pittsburgh was a good town to set a book and that it should be in the title.”
“Simon Armitage on Translating Gilgamesh” by Melissa Eppihimer and Simon Armitage
An Assyriologist and the Poet Laureate of the United Kingdom talk about translating Gilgamesh.
“The Body and Breath” by Cameron Barnett and Rita Dove
Poets Rita Dove and Cameron Barnett on Craft and Life in Poetry.
“John Sayles on Labor, Politics, and Money” by Mason Stockstill and Nathan Pensky
The acclaimed Oscar-nominated independent filmmaker and novelist sits down with Third Person Limited at the Pittsburgh Review of Books.
