Wang Xiaoni News Today

Join Words Without Borders for a reading with Kareem Abu-Zeid, Arthur Sze, Christina Vo, and Ryo Yamaguchi at La Mama

Black holes are prisons of light. They are both metaphor and physical entity, mute commentary on what is known, unknown, and unknowable. Well-studied but poorly understood, like a virus. What happens gravitationally if you squeeze the mass of an object to a point? This was Karl Schwarzschild’s question while stationed at the Russian front of the First World War. You get a point of no volume and infinite density — a singularity. It would be surrounded by a region where nothing, not even ligh...