Brick Magazine

Steve McQueen’s Bass is an installation of sound and light. Occupying two floors of Schaulager in Basel, but flooding all five floors, the cycle of music runs for about three hours and thirty minutes and the light spectrum for thirty minutes. The soundtrack of Bass arises from imaginings of the middle passage. It was improvised and recorded by five bass players from the African diaspora: Marcus Miller, Meshell Ndegeocello, Aston Barrett Jr., Mamadou Kouyaté, and Laura-Simone Martin.

Early in the summer of 2025, the writer Helen Humphreys, whom I do not publish where I work at Knopf but have known for years, invited me to deliver a lecture at Queen’s University, where she teaches in the Department of English and Creative Writing. Its subject, she explained, would be “the page.” I immediately demurred; surely it would be best to ask a real writer, not me, who is only writer adjacent, a writer’s shadow, at best a scribe’s scribe.

On February 14, 1989, Salman Rushdie became the most famous writer on earth. That was when the Ayatollah Khomeini of Iran pronounced a fatwa, sentencing to death Rushdie and all involved in the publication of his novel The Satanic Verses. A bounty of £1.5 million was offered. Rushdie immediately went into hiding.

Brick Podcast Giada Scodellaro 00:00 / 00:14:00 Download file | Play in new window | Duration: 00:14:00 | Subscribe: Apple Podcasts | Spotify Giada Scodellaro reads “Lateness,” an excerpt from her novel Ruins, Child that appears in Brick 117.

d’you want to sit closer closer closer to the bathroom bathroom it’s at the back no thought I’d ask hmmm because sometimes you don’t go at all hmmm do you do I what go no I don’t need to go you know you can tilt your seat back what your seat you can tilt it, try that button doesn’t it go back anymore go where farther back no you getting hungry, I know I’m getting hungry not yet I brought lots of snacks anyway, oh look here we go we’re going, on time and all hmmm say, you know what they want...

I think about failure often. Not so much the fear of failing, as in not being able to finish writing a book or being unable to find a publisher, but failure as a part of the human lot. Failure as fate, failure as inevitable, failure as deprivation, failure as injustice. — Amitava Kumar Plastics, polymeric modes of thinking, writing. Diatoms. Single-celled, with the most exquisite and intricately patterned walls. Photosynthesis, always. The diel vertical migration, moving the most life on the planet.

Mordecai T. Gallagher is a third-year anthropology student at McGill University. He’s interested in folklore, ethnography, and archaeological method. He writes creative non-fiction on the side, just for fun. “Son and Sunning” is his first published piece. Mordecai T. Gallagher is finishing up his master’s thesis in anthropology at the University of Toronto.

Brick Podcast Episode 15: Jana Prikryl 00:00 / 00:05:50 Download file | Play in new window | Duration: 00:05:50 |

My comforts drop and melt away like snow I said but there was no one there, no there to speak of just an ear receiving and receiving certain measures from measures from afar, dah-dit, the tempo arranged to send out syllables repeating a pattern, fallen sticks, one still walking it back waving it off, joking, ceding ground to calm her, trying to, the major concession under the minor being that there’s a place for fire in this house or you might say this house is a place for fire, or you might...

I was a student at the University of Toronto and was writing poetry and got a call from a place called Coach House Press, who asked if I had perhaps a book of poetry they could publish. They had, a year earlier, published their first book of poetry by Wayne Clifford called Man in a Window. That was 1962. The press had been set up by a printer named Stan Bevington with his friend the art critic Dennis Reid. The press was a merging of visual art and writing.