Mario Tama talks about his five years spent photographing post-Katrina New Orleans and his newly released book, Coming Back: New Orleans Resurgent, in a conversation with Darren Ching and Debra Klomp Ching of Klompching Gallery. NEW! 9/1

The art of history combined with contemporary photographic assemblage is explored with photographer Marc Baruth in a discussion with Darren Ching and Debra Klomp Ching of Klompching Gallery.

In the first section of a vital new book, Allan Peterson writes of the natural world: “There is no other/To explain where it came from is speculation like reading/water from a faucet. Beyond what we think/in our dreams or ideas it is still there/even the island of walruses.”

Elizabeth Alexander recounts a key moment from the history of slavery in a sequence whose variety and force ask what it means to live with a brutal legacy in which “Many things are true at once.”

In a sequence of prose poems about the young man who defected from the Soviet bloc and came to live with her childhood family, Jessica Fisher reflects on the ways political landscapes map themselves onto individual lives.

Laura Christina Dunn summons memories of a beached whale and a lost love, wondering how much of how we live can be sustained.

In post-Shock and Awe Baghdad, a team of reporters placed its operation in the hands of a trusted Iraqi driver. In an exceptional memoir, Thanassis Cambanis reports how it all went wrong for Sa’ad al-Azawi — and for Iraq.

“My obsession with Marisa Snow as a possible target began in Advanced English…” In Ann Stewart’s novella, a teenage gay bashing in Michigan’s Cereal City opens out to an exploration of rage, first love, and consequence.

Forty years ago this month, Neil Young and Miles Davis shared a bill at a theater in New York City. Nate Chinen looks at two stars whose orbits passed tantalizingly close.

Running out of trouble in Bed-Stuy — and into it in Virginia. A new story from Belle Boggs, winner of the 2009 Bakeless Prize in Fiction.

Markus Popp’s sonic project Oval has been credited with pioneering the influential genre called “glitch.” Now, after nearly a decade of silence, Oval has returned with a decidedly new musical direction. At Length speaks with Popp about this metamorphosis and previews a new track.

At Length talks to musician and composer Matthew Shipp about his new record 4D, his influential work as curator of the groundbreaking and genre-smashing Blue Series for Thirsty Ear Records and his often difficult relationship with the jazz establishment.

At Length joins novelist Jeff Vandermeer and rock band Murder by Death’s Adam Turla in a conversation about the latter’s haunting soundtrack to Vandermeer’s darkly fantastic detective novel, Finch, the third and final volume in his award-winning Ambergris Trilogy.

Dynamic pianist and composer Myra Melford talks to At Length about her new record, The Whole Tree Gone, and pushing the boundaries of geography, genre and gender.