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Growing Up with a Low Rent Robin Williams
By Simon A. Smith
photo by the author
You never told anyone the whole story about your dad. You let most people think he was little more than a kooky horndog or dirty sailor. It was better for both of you. He got to see himself as the comedian he always wanted to be, and you got to pretend you weren’t dying inside every time he told another unsettling joke. That way, your friends felt it was harmless to laugh at all his unsavory antics. Like when you were at the pizza joint downtown,
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Sand Wall
By Laura Schadler
art by Caspar David Friedrich, 1817
I.
The woman’s recurring dream found her online dating, tapping ineffectually through a glitchy and pixelated app. In each subsequent dream, she feared it had been too long to respond to a message from the previous night.
The woman had married at a strange in-between time when almost no one online dated.
In a second dream, a small panther prowled along with that sultry shoulder swivel, as if on its way to kill something. She often woke distraught.
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LIT 37, Suddenly Summer 2024
Get ready for the green energy. Our Suddenly Summer issue arrives online this Wednesday July 3, 2024. Love LIT? Then join us in person with TNS publication compatriots, 12th Street Journal at the NYC Poetry Festival on Governors Island Sunday July 14th at 1pm at the Beckett Stage. Afterwards, come say hi at the New School Table and pick up some back issues of LIT and 12th Street to read on the ferry, at the beach, or any green grass slice of heaven on earth you happen to find yourself in this summer. We are all about summer.
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LIT Monthly Writing Prompt: June Edition
by Richard Berwind, Managing Editor
Hello to the LIT community!
June is my birth month, so I find it very fitting that this month I am able to share something that inspires me in my writing and hope that it will inspire yours.
Every year, I find myself crying around the time of my birthday. It comes sporadically; a random insertion of grief and pain on days that should otherwise feel renewing. I spend days on end researching, looking up the who, the how, and the why this phenomenon happens, as if understanding its deepest mechanisms will make the sudden onset of grief roll away into the summer haze.
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LIT Monthly Writing Prompt: May Edition and Tribute to Paul Auster
by Charlotte Slivka, Editor in Chief
Dear LIT community,
Spring has sprung and it is as if the trees were in a race to sprout their leaves. After the first pinks of Magnolia and Cherry trees, then the yellows of Forsythia, followed by that brazen and bold purple of the Eastern Redbuds, the new green leaves seem to have shocked their way to the surface just within the last few days. It’s dizzying and disorienting to think of barren winter as a back door slam, but here we are in our bare feet on cold earth and new grass.
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From the Walls of The New School to The MET: Revisiting Thomas Hart Benton’s America Today
by Vicky Oliver, Nonfiction Editor
photo by the author
Thomas Hart Benton’s ten-panel mural, painted with egg tempera and oil glazing over Permalba on a gesso ground linen mounted to wood panels with a honeycomb interior. Originally painted in 1930-1931 for the New School, America Today now resides at the MET.At the New School, we write stories. Whether we are setting down our pasts or conjuring a future world or are just trying to capture what is happening right now in the present,
