Sands Murray-Wassink: In Good Company

By Titus Nouwens

JUNE 2021 | ArtSeen

Over the years Sands has produced an exhaustive amount of paintings, videos, performances, and texts, at once completely and unabashedly about him and at the same time about much more than himself—his loved ones, his fellow artists, the artworld, the role of artists, and patriarchal society at large.

Cue Ball

By Bobby Crace

APRIL 2023 | Fiction

We’re often told that successful fiction catalogs a protagonist’s emotional transformation, but what I find most appealing about Bobby Grace’s “Cue Ball” is that the two main characters, best friends who we follow from childhood to adulthood, resist change to the very end. As a child, Rory moves from Ireland to Arkansas and grows up feeling like an outsider. He latches onto BB, a troubled boy who idolizes his hustler father. When BB’s father abandons him, he decides to follow in his footsteps and leave town too, even though Rory is certain that his friend will meet a terrible fate. Over several decades, we watch the boys' physical transformations, but despite BB’s determination to destroy himself and his friendship, Rory’s love for him persists. Ultimately, “Cue Ball” is a story about devotion and vulnerability, about making a home in people instead of places, and accepting that some people cannot be changed, but deciding to love them anyway.

Homage to Ferl, the Owner of the Building

By Garrett Caples

APRIL 2021 | Poetry

Garrett Caples is a poet and an editor for City Lights Books. His latest book of poems, Lovers of Today, will appear in the fall from Wave Books.

Charlotte Wells’s Aftersun

By Adi Dina

MARCH 2023 | Film

Thirty-one-year-old Calum (Paul Mescal) and his eleven-year-old daughter Sophie (Frankie Corio) are on their last holiday vacation to Turkey. Twenty years later, Sophie, now a mother herself, looks back at clips recorded on her father’s Panasonic camcorder in an attempt to grasp the fleeting memories of their final time together.