“A Good Without Light” is an excerpt from Curtis White’s new book, The Barbaric Heart, and appears in the Hope/Dread issue of Tin House. White will be appearing at the third installment of our Disjecta reading/music series Saturday the 21st at 7 pm, along with the poet David Biespiel. Adrian Orange & the Child Slave Rebellion will follow. Proceeds will benefit BARK.
A Good Without Light, by Curtis White
“As so often happens in disasters, the best course always seemed the one for which it was now too late.”
–Tacitus, The Histories
For environmental, business, and political organizations alike, the term that has come to stand for the hope of the natural world is “sustainable.” Sustainable agriculture. Sustainable cities. Sustainable development. Sustainable economies. But you would be mistaken if you assumed that the point of sustainability was to change our ways. It’s not, really. The great unspoken assumption of the sustainability movement is the idea that although the economic, political, and social systems that have produced our current environmental calamity are bad, they do not need to be entirely replaced. In fact, the point of sustainability often seems to be to preserve—not overthrow—the economic and social status quo.
This should not be surprising. Sustainability is, after all, a mainstream response to environmental crisis. It may want change, but it does not want what would amount to a fundamental self-confrontation. While it wants to modify existing models of production and consumption, especially of energy, it does not want to abandon what it calls “freedom,” especially the freedom to own and use large accumulations of private property. And certainly it does not want to ask, “What went wrong in the great Western experiment with freedom? Why do we seem to be mostly free to destroy ourselves?” Read More
Tin House is seeking to invest in fiction, essays, and poetry that address the often taboo subject of CLASS IN AMERICA. We are looking for all perspectives: from or about the rich to the middle class to the poor and those who have moved up or down. We want to know more about those who identify with a non-traditional class, or consider themselves classless, along with those who have immigrated from class-bound or class-less countries or societies. Also, what are the new class indicators in our increasingly digitized, global, and green world? The issue will be out September 1, on stands through November. Our deadline is June 1, but this issue is sure to fill sooner than later.
J.C. Hallman’s anthology, 
Like everyone else, at a certain point, several hours in, you begin to wonder if doing your job is insane. And, like everyone else, the first evidence that it’s not is that you get paid for it.
Parents: You know that 10,000th time you read your kid Go, Dog. Go! as your unfinished copy of that Anne Carson collection you really wanted to read sat on the coffee table and served as nothing but a sippy-cup coaster and a reminder of all the great writers you no longer had the time to fully appreciate? (FULL DISCLOSURE: I have no particular experience with or knowledge of parenting.) Not to worry. Kingsley Tufts winner and National Book Critics Circle Award nominee Matthea Harvey has a new book that your kids will love as much as you do. Next month, Tin House will make our foray into children’s book publishing with The Little General and The Giant Snowflake. Harvey was kind enough to answer some of my fanboy questions:
Tin House #41 should be hitting your mailboxes or newsstand any day now. The dual theme is Hope/Dread (our designer, the fabulous Janet Parker, created stunning covers for each). In the dread corner, look for Nick Cave, Ander Monson, Alex Lemon, Matthea Harvey, and other doomsayers. Flying the colors of hope, we have Karen Russell, Abigail Thomas, Mahmoud Darwish, Matthea Harvey (she’s good enough to have her cake and eat it too), and, as you’ll see below, Cory Doctorow. The “Genre” label created something of a controversy on this site awhile back, but Doctorow’s take on what Science Fiction is capable of is pretty tough to argue with. 
Human credulity is indeed wonderful. There may be good reasons for believing in a King or a Judge or a Lord Mayor. When we see them go sweeping by in their robes and their wigs, with their heralds and their outriders, our knees begin to shake and our looks to falter. But what reason there is for believing in critics it is impossible to say. They have neither wigs nor outriders. They differ in no way from other people if one sees them in the flesh. Yet these insignificant fellow creatures have only to shut themselves up in a room, dip a pen in the ink, and call themselves ‘we’, for the rest of us to believe that they are somehow exalted, inspired, infallible. Wigs grow on their heads. Robes cover their limbs. No greater miracle was ever performed by the power of human credulity. And, like most miracles, this one, too, has had a weakening effect upon the mind of the believer. He begins to think that critics, because they call themselves so, must be right. He begins to suppose that something actually happens to a book when it has been praised or denounced in print. He begins to doubt and conceal his own sensitive, hesitating apprehensions when they conflict with the critics’ decrees.
The essays in The Story About the Story differ from traditional literary criticism in many ways. They contemplate rather than argue. They do not artificially sublimate subjectivity. They preserve mystery instead of dissecting it. And often they expand the scope of what they are willing to address so as to speak to the basics—the history, the process, the purpose—of literature itself.
After thirty years on West Seventeenth Street in Chelsea, Deborah Eisenberg is moving house. The closets have “disgorged” their contents, books tip sideways on their shelves, boxes lie here and there. Eisenberg and her beloved comrade, the playwright and actor Wallace Shawn, will be moving to a sixth-floor walk-up a few blocks away, a small “palace” of elegant moldings, terraces, a willow tree. Shawn says, in his lovely, wry, and bemused way, “We think it will make our declining years more . . . acceptable.” And the exercise they’ll get apparently makes their doctor “ecstatic.” It’s no accident that some people in sixth-floor walk-ups are ninety years old and going strong.
Rasskazy–”One Year in Paradise”–has been published by the Virgina Quarterly Review (you can read a preview of it 
Jeff Parker: In your story “Bregovich’s Sixth” from the Rasskazy anthology, the narrator is concerned about a neighbor’s dog he has nicknamed Ivan Denisovich. The story is in many ways a meditation on the condition of freedom in Russia. He imagines Solzhenitsyn himself voluntarily imprisoned at his dacha outside Moscow, and he seems to consider himself imprisoned, though he’s never been in jail. This results in a final, perhaps futile, act. How should an American reader understand this psychological context?
On September 1st we’ll be celebrating the release of our new anthology 
Michiel Heyns’ novel 
Michiel Heyns’ The Children’s Day is the second of our international series (you may have seen our first, When I Forgot, on the cover of the New York Times Book Review). We couldn’t be more excited to bring this novel to readers in the U.S. It’s a coming-of-age story set in apartheid South Africa, narrated by the sometimes precocious, sometimes naive Simon–it’s tender, and funny, and…
Exotic locales, conspicuous consumption, and sordid love triangles are all staples of the summer beach read, and Patricia Highsmith’s classic thriller The Talented Mr. 
