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Matias Viegener's 2500 RANDOM THINGS ABOUT ME TOO

Janis Butler Holm

An entire book composed solely of lists on Facebook? Please—spare me. Or so one might think before reading Matias Viegener's 2500 Random Things about Me Too, a memoir-like experiment in nonfiction constraint writing. In this tour de force, Viegener—artist, writer, critic, and teacher at the California Institute of the Arts—has taken postmodern fragmentation to its successful extreme, providing by accumulation a strangely satisfying nonnarrative of his life and world. Published by Les Figues Press, a print venue known for its support of innovative artists, the book is simply and handsomely designed, with a short introduction by writer Kevin Killian.

Human Rights Index #39: Guns and Human Rights

TIR staff

The Human Rights Index is prepared three times a year by the University of Iowa Center for Human Rights. The Iowa Review is proud to feature the Index on its web site, to suggest the global political and socioeconomic context within which we read and write.

Human Rights Index #39

Prepared by The University of Iowa Center for Human Rights (UICHR)*

Slate.com reprints "Fifty Things about My Mother"

TIR staff

Slate.com's featuring Laura Lynn Brown's gorgeous essay, "Fifty Things about My Mother," which originally appeared in our Winter 2013/14 issue—just in time for Mother's Day!

Thanks, Slate!

(Photo: Brown and her mother circa 1977 on the Delaware beach)

Human Rights Index #38: Corruption

TIR staff

Human Rights Index #38

Prepared by The University of Iowa Center for Human Rights (UICHR)*

Highbrowse: always have something to read

TIR staff

So long, boring bus rides to work—and welcome, Highbrowse!

Highbrowse—highbrow.se—is a brilliant new website that aggregates writing (poems, stories, essays, interviews, book reviews) freely available on the websites of literary periodicals like The Iowa Review, The New Yorker, Witness, Ninth Letter, Los Angeles Review of Books, Poets & Writers, Virginia Quarterly, Bookforum, The American Scholar (and lots more), presenting the titles in an easy-to-scan format, including—get this—the approximate time it'll take you to read each piece.

And each title links back to the original website where the text is posted, directing much-needed traffic to litmag websites.

Human Rights Index #39

Human Rights Index #38

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