Some nights, when medication and meditation have failed to put me to sleep, I think of the relatives who abandoned my family to become white people. Several generations ago, in midsized Ohio cities during the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries, some of my father’s ancestors walked away from their families, their homes, and their neighborhoods and…
by Caille Millner (Originally published in The Halloween Review) I foresaw a death shortly after my 12th birthday. At the time, I had no idea what I was seeing. I woke up screaming in the early hours. Gasping for air, windmilling bedsheets with my fists. My mother came running into my room. She gripped my…
(Originally published in Michigan Quarterly Review’s Winter 2016 issue, republished here at Longreads.) I need to tell you about someone whose name I can’t speak. The lack of a name is inconvenient, but it’s not the most important thing about him; he gave it up so long ago. Everything important that I can tell you…
By Caille Millner, The Paris Review Daily, Aug. 25, 2016 Thomas Mann’s home in Pacific Palisades, California, is up for sale. The news came as a surprise: the house, designed by the modernist architect J. R. Davidson, was believed to have a reliable owner with Chester Lappen, the lawyer who bought it from Mann…
By Caille Millner, The Paris Review Daily, Jan. 16, 2016 In 1982, the artist Lorraine O’Grady staged her first major performance piece in Central Park, “Rivers, First Draft.” In the park’s bucolic Loch section, the audience watched a black woman in a red dress walk down the ravine. Red is a sign for wanton women,…
Cecily is six months pregnant with someone else’s child when her husband tells her that he wants a baby of his own. It’s not a complete surprise — if he never grew jealous of all the other babies she’s carried, she’d wonder. *Read the full text of this short story at Joyland Magazine.
LOS ANGELES — Historical Fiction, Tyler Shields’s new photography show at the Andrew Weiss gallery in Los Angeles, is an interpretation of some important moments in 20th-century US history. Shields, a former professional inline skater who launched his photography career on MySpace, fancies himself a provocateur. The greatest surprise of this show, though, may not…
Why does Tokyo look so unfamiliar in Nagano Shigeichi’s photographs? He used no slights of hand; followed no special methodology. His influences were the usual ones for his generation — William Eugene Smith, Life magazine, celebrated Japanese photojournalists like Kimura Ihei and Fujimoto Shihachi. He didn’t have pretentions of being an art photographer, a title…
MARTÍN RAMÍREZ, a Mexican-born peasant who spent the last three decades of his life in a California mental hospital, is now recognized as one of the state’s greatest artists. His alleged misdiagnosis and subsequent incarceration in a psychiatric institution, almost certainly against his will, inspired some of his greatest work — part of a trend…
SEE THE MAN. He’s standing next to a newsstand on a busy street in Santiago de Chile, talking to people as they rush by. At first you try to avoid looking at him, worried that he might be a beggar or something worse. For years it’s been too dangerous to talk to strangers. You never…