Max Baer and the Star of David
In June of 1933, American boxer Max Baer and German heavyweight Max Schmeling, a former world champion, fought a highly publicized bout in front of sixty thousand fans in New York’s Yankee Stadium. Schmeling was Hitler’s favorite fighter and was favored to win. In the days leading up to the fight, Schmeling told American reporters that stories of Germany’s persecution of Jews were untrue. Max Baer, in a move that was part publicity stunt and part sincere act of defiance, sewed a large Star of David to his trunks. Baer’s subsequent victory over Schmeling became an international symbol of Jewish resistance to fascism. One year later, Baer, still with Star of David on the left leg of his trunks, became heavyweight champion of the world. Continue reading “Max Baer and the Star of David”
The Winter 2015 issue of 
The Winter 2015/2016 cover of 
It would appear that human faces have captured my attention for this week’s picks. 
Issue 1 of 
Due out at the beginning of February is the winner of the 
The winner of Milkweed Editions’s 
In April 2016, Aracelis Girmay’s The Black Maria will start hitting bookshelves. Winner of a 2015 Whiting Award for Poetry, The Black Maria “investigates African diasporic histories, the consequences of racism within American culture, and the question of human identity.”
The newest issue of 
Baltimore Review
In every issue, 
“We can’t believe it has already been five years since 
What do you get when you mashup the mythos of Frankenstein with steampunk robotics? Toss in “True Grit” meets “Three Men and a Baby” anti-heroes and some strong, clever, resourceful, female characters “just as likely to jump into bar fights as their male counterparts,” and you’ve got 
Poetry Judge Eduardo Corral
Hemingway’s Spain: Imagining the Spanish World
Teaching Hemingway and War
Teaching Hemingway and Modernism
In November 2015, the winners of the 
“Charles Baxter and MQR” by Laurence Goldstein
The winter 2015 issue of 
The 
Editor of 
With spare yet deeply evocative prose, “Floating Garden” sweeps us up into the span of a singular life, one that is as sacred as any other, one for whom “the words for things take us from what matters.” This story is a profound meditation on the nature of brutality – of man against man, of man against nature – yet it is also an unsentimental song of how we can be redeemed, “like dust into soil, so dark, so primordial.” This is a lovely gem of a tale.
Told in a rollicking, expressionistic voice, “The Hooligan Present” delivers that rarest of reading experiences; it actually makes you laugh, and then it makes you cry, and then it leaves you grateful for such artistry, for such a generous and humane vision of this dirty old world.