Music & Literature no. 9

Music & Literature no. 9 features immersive portfolios on two artists. The Swiss-German writer Peter Bichsel is one of the best short-prose stylists of his generation and has earned a devoted following in the German-speaking world for his charming, melancholic stories-yet his work is all but unpublished in English. This portfolio announces the great writer in our own literature through a generous selection of works spanning his entire career, from his short fiction and an excerpt from his enigmatic first novel, translated by Michael Hofmann, to his incisive and often poignant newspaper columns in Lydia Davis's translation. Candid interviews and a compilation of essays offer insight into the nature of Bichsel's artistry as it has developed over nearly six decades, highlighting the themes to which he returns time and again: the peculiar history and attitudes of the Swiss, the struggle for inner freedom and the rights of minorities, and the pleasures of reading. A special tribute by Claire-Louise Bennett rounds out this comprehensive introduction to one of Europe's most outstanding contemporary storytellers. Over the past twenty years, Canadian poet Sylvia Legris has quietly built a remarkable, multilayered body of work worthy of deep exploration and appreciation. An artist of relentless evolution and experimentation, Legris's poetics compress and expand, infusing elements of dance, botany, and human machinery into new structures and imagery that is at once wildly imaginative and deeply visceral. Alongside a retrospective selection of her poetry, capped by a series of new and unpublished works, is an exclusive conversation with fellow pioneer Will Alexander that dives into the mystery of "poetic ignition." Essays and tributes by several leading young poets imagine-and reimagine-the prismatic Legris across her many forms and permutations, completing our most eclectic portfolio to date.