Air/Light Magazine

Dec 9, 2024 | airlightmagazine.org | David Ulin

-I-Writing in a journal is a form of obsession. That’s why I don’t do it regularly. Although such a statement carries a ring of finality, of the definite, which is something I’m not sure I feel. Why I don’t keep a diary: Because I’m lazy. Because it makes the muscles in my left hand hurt. Because in the (close to) four decades since I switched from writing longhand to using a computer, the rhythm of my sentences has changed. I used to handwrite twenty-ish words a minute, but now I can type twice that.

Nov 25, 2024 | airlightmagazine.org | David Ulin

This morning, while drinking my coffee, I came across a pair of striking sentences by Henry James, written in a letter just days after the onset of World War I. “The tide that bore us along,” he lamented, “was then all the while moving to this as its grand Niagara. … It seems to me to undo everything, everything that was ours, in the most horrible retroactive way.” No … not lamented. That seems too soft, too pitiable.

Nov 25, 2024 | airlightmagazine.org | Hari Kunzru

It’s a great honor to be standing here as the recipient of the 2024 Chowdhury Prize in Literature. I’m very grateful to everyone involved in this endeavor, primarily the USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences, Kenyon College, The Kenyon Review, and the Subir and Malini Chowdhury Foundation. I’m also particularly honored to have been chosen by such an extraordinary panel of writers. David L.

Mar 26, 2024 | airlightmagazine.org | Boris Dralyuk

–for P-22, caught and killed by the authoritiesHe’d slinked out of a pre-Code film,red tooth, red claw, a handsome brutefor whom you knew you shouldn’t root,knowing what lay in store for him,knowing that he could never stopthe low growl of his appetites—he’d follow them into the heights. It’s always lonely at the top,with one way down. The running timeis scrawled in ink on every reel. The genre’s laws are ironclad.

Mar 19, 2024 | airlightmagazine.org | Armen Davoudian

I’ll always be in love with Father Tigran. I’ll wear a long black robe and never marry. I’ll stroke my bushy beard and lecture onthe Holy Translators of the fifth century,who invented the Armenian alphabetto record the Bible. To translate means to carryfrom one place to another, like a jet. We are their inheritors in this Muslim country.