Dear Readers,
We’re pleased to announce that lucky Issue 13, “Machine Politics,” made it to the printer last week and will be released on Thursday, January 26. It’s one of our best and most surprising issues yet.
The issue features an outstanding essay by Russian poet and activist Kirill Medvedev on a prominent Russian literary publisher and the fate of progressive culture. Medvedev, whose poetry appeared in Issue 6, has a collection of poetry and essays, It’s No Good, translated by Keith Gessen and Cory Merrill, coming out from Ugly Duckling Presse and n+1 this spring. It will be the first English-language edition of his work.
Also in the issue is an essay by filmmaker Astra Taylor on her education outside the school system and the ongoing free school movement. In place of fiction, we have the first three scenes of a very funny new play by Benjamin Kunkel. Our “States of the Arts” series continues with an essay by James Franco and Deenah Vollmer on the problem of over-preparing for acting roles. And we’re putting the machine in Machine Politics with a short history of artificial intelligence (or the persistent stupidity of computers) and a report from Franco Moretti’s famed Literary Lab on trying to get a program to recognize novelistic genres.
The Intellectual Situation includes first-person accounts of the Occupy movements and an analysis of the early development of a left populism. In the politics section, Christopher Glazek presents a rigorous condemnation of the American prison system. Finally, in reviews, Elizabeth Gumport looks at the work of Chris Kraus and the Semiotext(e) Native Agents Series and Alice Gregory considers a year at Sotheby’s, Inc.
We’ll celebrate the launch on January 26 with readings at 7 PM at 192 Books in Manhattan from Astra Taylor’s “Unschooling” and Benjamin Kunkel’s Buzz. We hope you can join us, and please write to us with any questions about the issue at editors [at] nplusonemag.com.
—The Editors