The Brooklyn Rail

In Conversation

Meera Nair

By Hirsh Sawhney

Meera Nair’s debut collection Video (Random House 2003) is set in modern-day India, Bangladesh and the United States. In these 10 stories, Nair’s characters are affected by Hindu-Muslim communal violence, politics, social reform, and above all, different forms of longing. In the collection’s title story,

T Cooper: Portrait of a Young Novelist

By Randolph Lewis

I met T Cooper for the first time in Santa Fe in late December. Sitting in a cozy café just a short distance from the galleries of Canyon Road, we chatted for a few hours over some mint tea and a very fine piece of toast. We talked about her fiction, her travels, and what it takes to make art under the current military-industrial regime.

Off the Shelves

By Theodore Hamm, Megan Marz, Richard Klin, and Anne McPeak

On May 4, 1886, Chicago’s anarchists and radical labor leaders gathered in Haymarket Square to protest ongoing police violence against the movement for the eight-hour workday. Although some leaflets in circulation at the event called "workingmen … to arms!!!," most of the speakers at the rally discouraged any resort to violence.

Anne Waldman, as told to Ellen Pearlman

By Ellen Pearlman

Anne Waldman just had a major retrospective work, In the Room of Never Grieve, published by Coffee House Press. She co-founded the St. Mark’s Poetry Project, as well as co-founded the Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at Naropa University with Allen Ginsberg.