Farewell to Deputy Editor Maxwell George
On Max’s last day at the Oxford American, we’re sharing ten highlights from his years with the magazine.
An installment in our weekly series, The By and By.
For twenty years, football was my purpose, my reason, white lines and rules for everything, the scoreboard keeping track of it all. Do I want it back? Do I pine for a helmet and a fourth-quarter drive?
Not exactly.
A new episode of Points South is now playing!
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Episode Four features the OA editors discussing the upcoming South Carolina Music Issue and sharing their favorite stories and behind-the-scenes moments. Plus: A preview of the issue’s tracklist
For more information visit oxfordamerican.org/pointssouth.
An installment in our weekly series, The By and By.
In my research following Leibniz and Spinoza as their paths cross and then diverge, I became interested more broadly in the failure of the Enlightenment to extinguish the things it’s meant to have extinguished: superstition and religious bigotry, tribalism and barbarity, feudalistic economies and stupid, evil, mass death. Their world, on the cusp of a new modernity, begins to look more like ours than not: the post-Westphalian order giving rise to the nation-state and with it, bellicose nationalism, the Trans-Atlantic slave trade birthing global capitalism and the system of racial hierarchy that persists today in its wake.
Interested in how the climate of the South “coalesces with the lifestyle and culture” of the region, Eric Ruby celebrates “light, color, heat, and haze,” in his project Leanen n’ Dreamen, exploring how these atmospheric elements inform a way of life in Tennessee, North Carolina, and Missouri.
NASA astronaut Ronald McNair is the cover star of the 21st Annual Southern Music Issue & Sampler featuring South Carolina!
A feature short story from the Fall 2019 issue.
The godmother is like an ancestor who never really left. Someone who’s here even when they’re not. The godmother is what happens when somebody asks your name and you suddenly can’t remember. When it’s gorgeous outside and you work up the nerve to be part of something but not enough nerve to brush your hair, that’s the godmother. Maybe you stay up too late and are tempted to give yourself completely to unrequited obsessions. That’s the godmother’s doing, too.
An installment in our weekly series, The By and By.
This is the most Marvin Gaye sentiment ever. There is no such thing as a fun, cheap fling in the Marvin Gaye universe. There is no hedonistic misbehavior of a random sort that doesn’t yield an awful psychic consequence. There is only this: wheels within wheels, complications, betrayals, and toxic jealousies. And then getting back together. He heard it through the grapevine. But since we’re still friends. This is his foreplay.
An excerpt from the collection Step Into the Circle: Writers in Modern Appalachia.
In my family, the women of generations past—and sometimes present—often found themselves without choices or options, hemmed into lives they could not escape. I recognized them in the pages of Lee’s novels, and I was able to better comprehend their experiences. But I also heard whispers in her chapters, invitations to escape and understand, yes, but also to imagine..
A new episode of Points South is now playing!
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Episode Three features Arkansas’s “cemetery angel,” Ruth Coker Burks, John Jeremiah Sullivan’s “Three Encounters” + a performance by Los Texmaniacs.
For more information visit oxfordamerican.org/pointssouth.
A featured short story from the Fall 2019 issue.
She took a trowel and dug. After a few minutes, Antonia disappeared into the shed and came back with a shovel. She thrust it into the ground and stomped. Deeper and deeper she dug. When she deemed it complete, she lay down, burying herself neatly with dirt.
A Points South essay from the Fall 2019 issue
This approach, of stitching different strands of colored yarn through canvas so many times that the individual strings join in a subtle and collective harmony, leads to an image made of rigorous yet soft details. Nothing is exact but everything is defined. The result is a portrait—Miller’s work is almost exclusively portraits—that from across a room is startlingly realistic and that up close, near the strands, can feel alive and uncomfortably intimate, like being so near someone’s personal affairs that fears and failures are sensed.
