“Nothing touches a work of art so little as words of criticism: they always result in more or less fortunate misunderstandings. Most experiences happen in a space that no word has ever entered, and more unsayable than all other things are works of art.”
—Rainer Maria Rilke

NEW AND RECOMMENDED

Richard Bausch’s new collection features a half dozen stories from Narrative, including the title story “The Fate of Others,” a movingly ironic look at writers’ mixed-up lives in academia.
Mary Morris, whose stories often appear in Narrative, is out with a new novel, The Red House, about a daughter’s strange scavenger hunt to uncover secrets of her mother’s past.
Tom Jenks’s My Reading: James Baldwin’s "Sonny’s Blues,” published by Oxford University Press, came out on Aug. 2, 2024, the 100th anniversary of Baldwin’s birth.

WORD OF MOUTH

IN THE PAST HALF CENTURY, electronic media and a trend away from speech and recitation in the teaching of literature have resulted in student writers and readers who are too little aware of the sound of good writing. Years ago, much of culture was connected to the spoken word—by recitation at school, programs at oratorical societies, amateur theatricals, and reading aloud at home—but today all that has largely been lost. The writer’s task involves restoring the physicality of words to give them life.