At the NewPages Blog readers and writers can catch up with their favorite literary and alternative magazines, independent and university presses, creative writing programs, and writing and literary events. Find new books, new issue announcements, contest winners, and so much more!
Due to Gettysburg College’s decision to close the Gettysburg Review, the final edition was made available for preorder only. Issue 35:1 features paintings by Michael Alvarez, fiction by Dariel Suarez, Leyna Krow, Leslie Pietrzyk, and others; essays by Marilyn Abildskov, Maura Lammers, Christina Pugh, and others; poetry by Natania Rosenfeld, Angie Estes, Virginia Konchan, Samyak Shertok, and others.
Editor’s Note: Our condolences and all due respect to the long history of editorial staff, writers, and readers who have loved and supported this publication since its debut in 1988. It is sad to witness such short-sighted decision-making by the administration, shuttering the college’s thirty-five-year reputation within the literary community and beyond.
Western Lane, Chetna Maroo’s debut, Booker-Prize-shortlisted novel, follows Gopi, a British Indian teenager after the death of her mother. Before her mother’s death, her father had been taking her and her two sisters to Western Lane to play squash, but the game was nothing more than a hobby.
After the funeral, their father takes it much more seriously, mainly due to their Aunt Ranjan’s complaint that the girls are wild and need discipline. While her two sisters lose interest in the game, Gopi becomes obsessed with it, mainly as a way to build a connection with her father, but she also becomes quite good at it.
She is too good to play with her sisters, so she begins playing with Ged, a non-Indian boy whose mother works at Western Lane, a relationship that threatens to develop into something more. While her father grieves the death of her mother, Aunt Ranjan and Uncle Pavan offer to take in one of the girls to help him, which complicates Gopi’s burgeoning squash playing, as Aunt Ranjan thinks it’s unacceptable for a girl to participate in such a sport.
The novel is quiet and concise, as the characters and the narrator often leave what is most important unsaid, but readers can see the relationships fray and deepen as Gopi grows into a formidable player and teenage girl.
Western Lane by Chetna Maroo. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, November 2023.
Reviewer bio: Kevin Brown has published three books of poetry: Liturgical Calendar: Poems (Wipf and Stock); A Lexicon of Lost Words (winner of the Violet Reed Haas Prize for Poetry, Snake Nation Press); and Exit Lines (Plain View Press). He also has a memoir, Another Way: Finding Faith, Then Finding It Again, and a book of scholarship, They Love to Tell the Stories: Five Contemporary Novelists Take on the Gospels.
Blink-Ink Issue #54 is themed “Family” and features 28 works of “approximately 50 words” each, including “When Baba Flew in from Florida” by Lois Villemarie, “When Relatives from the Cool Temperate Zone Visit” by Julie Dron, “The Corn is Angry” by Karen Walker, “Sisters” by Paul Beckman, “The Green Sofa” by Sarah Shum, “Hawk Logic” by Meg Pokrass, “LEGO City” by Caiti Quatmann, “Home for the Holiday” by Jeff Harvey, “My Family Jewels” by Catfish McDaris, “Blended Family” by Kathy Lynn Carroll, and “Gothic America” by Gay Degani. See the Blink-Ink website for subscription information as well as their 2023 Pushcart Prize Nominations.
In Scorch, Natalie Rice writes “under the gravity / of immovable objects.” Our narrator asks, “How far can one carry such // emptiness?” Someone in these lyric, meditative poems wants “to be lonely,” despite the “ache in my chest completely / out of control”; yearns to feel “the freight / of my own becoming,” “to know the narrative // of my life.” In this way, Rice’s poems form a seeker’s pilgrimage and a mountain retreat “to lean / into what cannot be explained.”
There’s a sense that the poems are “tethered” to an aftermath of “collapse,” and that though there may be “nothing / left here to burn,” there is reparation and rejuvenation taking place: “a newness /… pushing / through soot,” marking how easily the natural world holds “contradictions.”
Situated in and “shaped by the living world of the Okanagan valley,” the poems “ blaze” with “iridescent bodies”: “the lady slipper / [that] blooms before the tiger lily,” “wild clematis,” “balsamroot flower,” “the last goldenrod /… plucked for the table,” and “[g]rass [that] is a fire // before it knows it is fire.” Is this “what emptiness sounds like” from “a body designed for grief”? “What if the answer // is that there is no answer?” Then, could it be enough to recognize the “unsayable // hung like a red berry in the back / of [the] throat”? Might the act of describing cast one of the “spells / to ward off longing,” “a common grief… / dissolving without telling // us why”?
Dear Reader, with a fine “ear / tethered to the ground” and “one line of a poem…tethered to two hundred / million small, beating bodies,” Natalie Rice heightens our awareness “into something so precious.”
Reviewer bio: Jami Macarty is the author of The Minuses (Center for Literary Publishing, 2020), winner of the 2020 New Mexico/Arizona Book Award – Poetry Arizona, and three chapbooks, including Mind of Spring (Vallum, 2017), winner of the 2017 Vallum Chapbook Award. Jami’s writing has been honored by financial support from Arizona Commission on the Arts, British Columbia Arts Council, and by editors at magazines such as The Capilano Review, Concision Poetry Journal, Interim, Redivider, Vallum, and Volt, where Jami’s poems appear.
In Eating Peru: A Gastronomic Journey, wine merchant–turned–archaeologist and art historian Robert Bradley shares his past twenty-five years of personal discovery about the food of Peru and the history that led to its current culinary fluorescence today. Journeying from coasts to highlands and back again, the author introduces readers to the most interesting aspects of Peruvian cuisine that he encounters along the way, with several recipes included. Bradley sizzles about Peruvian ceviche, pisco and the pisco sour, and the country’s best restaurants—two ranked in the top ten by The World’s 50 Best Restaurants 2023. He does this all while sampling food lore, Andean anthropology, history, linguistics, and the pleasures and perils of travel within Peru.
Robert C. Bradley started out as a wine merchant for New York City’s most acclaimed restaurants. A trip to Central America put him on the path to studying Mesoamerican art history and archaeology at Columbia University. He is now an associate professor in the School of Art and Design at the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley.
Editor’s Choice is not a paid promotion; selections are made solely at the discretion of the editor. To discover more great books from small, independent, and university presses, visit the NewPages Guide to Publishers as well as our Books Received monthly roundup. Subscribe to our weekly newsletter to stay up to date!
The December 2023 Magazine Stand features our monthly roundup of great new literary and alternative magazine titles we receive. You can find brief descriptions for many new magazine issues with a link to their blog post for more information. Grab a warm cuppa and settle in to enjoy some good reading. You can also subscribe to our weekly newsletter to stay the most up-to-date on all things literary.
The January 2024 issue of World Literature Today headlines Gene Luen Yang, winner of the 2023 NSK Neustadt Prize for Children’s and Young Adult Literature. Also spotlighted in this issue are Sona Jobarteh’s kora virtuosity, Icelandic noir by Katrine Jakobsdóttir and Ragnar Jónasson, and an essay on Holocaust survivor Stella Levi. Additional highlights include an essay on the untranslatable Korean term han as well as visits to Manitoba, Uruguay, and Wales. As always, lively mini-interviews, compelling poetry, and more than thirty book reviews—plus recommended reads and other great content—make the latest issue of WLT, like every issue, a passport to great reading.
The Ekphrastic Review is a journal of writing inspired by visual art. We bring brilliant writers to readers every day, with ekphrastic poetry, flash fiction, and more. View flyer and visit our website to learn more.
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Deadline: February 1, 2024 We invite Northern California authors to submit book-length poetry manuscripts. All manuscripts will be read blind. Sixteen Rivers values diversity. We encourage poets of color, young poets, and LGBTQ writers to submit. Sixteen Rivers Press is a shared-work collective, with a three-year commitment. PDF email submissions from November 1, 2023 to February 1, 2024. View our flyer and see complete guidelines on our website.
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Inside this latest issue are works from authors and artists from around the world who offer hard-won truths and insights into the realities of war and geopolitical violence. These realities include a young transgender man making sense of his father’s experiences while fighting in Korea, the multiple perspectives surrounding US soldiers being spit on when returning from Vietnam, and the history of a country as revealed to a young woman by anonymous, pre-WWII photographs. Get your copy today!
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Deadline: January 15, 2024 This year’s final judge is Nikki Wallschlaeger, author of the full-length collections Waterbaby, Crawlspace, and Houses. Manuscripts should be at least 48 pages, but there is no maximum length. All forms and styles of poetry are welcome. The winning manuscript will be published, and its author will receive $1500, promotional support, and 25 author copies. View flyer and visit website to learn more.
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Memoir Magazine accepts submissions of nonfiction, art, photography, reviews, interviews, audio, and video on a rolling basis, with the mission “to be a witness to both factual and emotional truths that resonate with the human heart by supporting writers and artists in sharing their stories.”
Some recent features include “What Love Looks Like in Public” by Jacqueline St. Joan, “Vigil” by Shirlee Jellum, “A Lunchtime” by Kate Dowling, “Along Came Bobby” by Jordan Midgley, “The Sweetness of His Breath” by Kristen Lambertin, and “Atlantic Terminal 2015” by Tanya E. Friedman.
Memoir Magazine is a black-owned and woman-owned annual print and online publication.
44 Submission Opportunities including calls for submissions, writing contests, and book prizes.
Time sure flies. Here we are with December half over with already. If you’re still trying to hit your submission goals before the end of the year, NewPages is here to help with our weekly roundup of submission opportunities including open calls and writing and book contests. There are several with deadlines today, so don’t miss out!
Don’t forget paid newsletter subscribers can get early access to the majority of submission opportunities and upcoming events before they go live on our site, so do consider subscribing or upgrading your subscription today. You also receive our monthly eLitPak Newsletter which features even more opportunities and other literary goodness. Our December 2023 eLitPak was just emailed this week.
With a beautiful cover of a painting by Octavio Quintanilla (cats sleeping on the rooftops) of what could be a view from outside a hospital, these poems are reports to professionals, from professionals, and to oneself. Where does a voice, a person exist? Clark-Sayles answers, from “Falling”: little difference between flying and falling [. . . ] wheeze of air trembling just out of reach, slow reach and wiggle to find what moves and what won’t.
In “Night Call” Clark-Sayles tells the inside story of what it’s like to be a doctor: “I will love this midnight world,” and throughout The Telling, The Listening, she puts readers directly in this world of decisions and consequences. What becomes apparent is that a lot that happens is sheer luck, and we see that many times health professionals mainly practice being witnesses to life, with much sacrifice. From “Why I Seldom Sing”: “I’ve broken through walls to gain my calling and the breaking took my voice.”
Clark-Sayles gives us poems that sing out to the world to recover what was taken and broken. Poems that are the perfect embodiment of narrative medicine: a rigorous mixture of despair, celebration, and wonderment.
Reviewer bio: Susan Kay Anderson lives in southwestern Oregon’s Umpqua River Basin. Her long poem “Man’s West Once” was selected for Barrow Street Journal’s “4 X 2 Project” and is included in Mezzanine (2019). Anderson also published Virginia Brautigan Aste’s memoir, Please Plant This Book Coast To Coast (2021).
Christopher Soden’s poems are never a PR campaign for the author, never self-aggrandizing below a thin veil of manufactured vulnerability. These are not poems created to insight sighs from the audience. They are much more real than that, much more truly vulnerable than that, much more sticky and fun and difficult than that. Often life is solitary, often life is a mother-fucker, but if you are holding this book in your hands then you are not alone, even more than that: you are being held in the arms of an author who may not know you but, in each and every poem, wonders and cares about you. —Matthew Dickman author of Wonderland
In the autumn 2023 issue of Chestnut Review online, artists and writers come together to contend with embodiment, relationships with the medical system, perception, love, and other pressing themes. This issue features a conversation with Erin Little, poetry by Tyler Raso, prose by Nicole Hazan, art by Shee Gomes, and so much more for readers to enjoy.
Dale Houstman is one of the avant-garde poets often published in Caliban in the ‘80s and ‘90s, and in the 2000s as Caliban’s later incarnation, Caliban Online, edited and published by Lawrence R. Smith. On Facebook, recently, Houstman inventories his personal library under “My Unsightly Library.” It is great to see his writing; it is like Caliban has come back to life. Much like the Dada expressionists after the First World War, Houstman is as much an artist as he is a poet and writer/reader, and we get to see his surreal view at work.
Caliban Online features Houstman’s work in book form, along with half a dozen other Caliban contributors on a page called “Caliban’s Bookshelf.” These can be downloaded free of charge. Houstman’s poetry book (his sole publication), a dangerous vacation, is beautiful with its red titles and tiny dots which frame black letters on white paper, and the poems are arranged mainly in couplets and tercet stanzas; very musical looking and vibrant.
“They are ‘like Rorschach ink blots,’” Houstman says. Take a peek and be prepared to be fascinated by his pyrotechnics, by his electric mind.
Reviewer bio: Susan Kay Anderson lives in southwestern Oregon’s Umpqua River Basin. Her long poem “Man’s West Once” was selected for Barrow Street Journal’s “4 X 2 Project” and is included in Mezzanine (2019). Anderson also published Virginia Brautigan Aste’s memoir, Please Plant This Book Coast To Coast (2021).
Guest edited by Elinam Agbo, this special online issue of The Kenyon Review centers on the experiences of Black individuals and communities grappling with limited infrastructure, health care systems, archival records, personal histories, grief, climate change, and the wounds of colonialism. Inspired by the historical erasure and ongoing violence against Black lives, the issue features nonfiction by b ferguson, Edil Hassan, Erica N. Cardwell, Rickey Fayne, Ariana Benson, and Jenise Miller, alongside fiction by Leila Renee, alex terrell, N.K. Iguh, Melissa Beneche, Jeneé Skinner, Allison Noelle Conner, and Mathapelo Mofokeng.
Slim Blue Universe: Poems by Eleanor Lerman Mayapple Press, February 2024
Slim Blue Universe is acclaimed author Eleanor Lerman’s seventh collection of poetry. Her work speaks to readers in different voices – the Woodstock generation grown older, social activists still raging at the powers that be, lovers remembering days of paradise, and lonely dreamers still dreaming of better days to come – that weave together both the joys of life and its many afflictions. The poems in this collection ache with longing for what has been lost along the journey through a life shaped by the volatile middle years of the 20th century and with a yearning to look beyond the human horizon to whatever mysterious pathways may lie just up ahead.
Eleanor Lerman established a fifty-year history of published works, including numerous award-winning collections of poetry, short stories, and novels. One of the youngest people ever to be named a finalist for the National Book Award in Poetry, she also won the inaugural Juniper Prize from the University of Massachusetts Press and the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize from the American Academy of Poets, among other accolades for poetry as well as fiction.
Editor’s Choice is not a paid promotion; selections are made solely at the discretion of the editor. To discover more great books from small, independent, and university presses, visit the NewPages Guide to Publishers as well as our Books Received monthly roundup. Subscribe to our weekly newsletter to stay up to date!
In To Free the Captives, poet Tracy K. Smith brings her lyrical writing style to the essay form, as she explores what it means to be Black in America today. Rather than straightforward essays laying out an argument, though, Smith uses parts of her life—her marriage and motherhood, for example—as entry points into meditations on the world as she experiences it.
She ruminates on the difference between being Free (white) and Freed (Black) throughout the collection, as she reminds readers that the past is as present as ever, for good and ill. She draws on the lineage she knows and delves into her family history, but she also looks to the broader Black culture for ancestors who can support her and the other Freed, as they continue to shape lives of meaning and beauty.
This approach isn’t metaphorical for Smith, as she feels those who have come before her speaking to her and guiding her in who she should be and who she could yet become. Her subtitle of “A Plea for the American Soul” reminds readers that both the Free and Freed must live in and through this past, as we all seek to create a present and future together; ignoring the past will only deepen the divide that has always existed in the American soul.
Reviewer bio: Kevin Brown has published three books of poetry: Liturgical Calendar: Poems (Wipf and Stock); A Lexicon of Lost Words (winner of the Violet Reed Haas Prize for Poetry, Snake Nation Press); and Exit Lines (Plain View Press). He also has a memoir, Another Way: Finding Faith, Then Finding It Again, and a book of scholarship, They Love to Tell the Stories: Five Contemporary Novelists Take on the Gospels.
For screen-time aficionados, Rain Taxi Review of Books has been continuing to post reviews, interviews, and features to their Fall Online Edition. Some gems in this “issue” include a dialogic review (by dynamic duo Pierre Joris & Nicole Peyrafitte) of Enheduana: The Complete Poems of the World’s First Author and a feature on Jim Starlin’s Warlock comics (any Marvel fans out there?); reviews of three new poetry books in translation; interviews with Mary Jo Bang and David Jauss; and a nice handful of fiction, nonfiction, and comics reviews. Check them out (and stay tuned for a few more additions) before this season’s Online Edition wraps up, and visit their website to find out how to have the print edition of Rain Taxi delivered.
40 Submission Opportunities including calls for submissions, writing contests, and book prizes.
As always, Mother Nature likes to keep us guessing. If you’re also experiencing odd weather in your neck of the woods, NewPages has the perfect excuse to keep you indoors with our weekly roundup of submission opportunities for the first full week of December 2023.
Don’t forget paid newsletter subscribers can get early access to the majority of submission opportunities and upcoming events before they go live on our site, so do consider subscribing or upgrading your subscription today. You also receive our monthly eLitPak Newsletter which features even more opportunities and other literary goodness.
Forcibly exiled to Honduras at the conclusion of No One Weeps for Me Now, Inspector Dolores Morales returns in Sergio Ramirez’s final, stand-alone volume of The Managua Trilogy, accompanied by a cast of brave priests, corrupt secret service agents, washed up former foot soldiers, and out-for-themselves vestiges of mid-century ideals, all colliding in this exuberant portrait of the depredations of oligarchs and dictators, the human cost of promises deferred, and the implacable hopes and resolve of Nicaraguans.
“Dead Men Cast No Shadows is an enormously entertaining novel about responses to perfidy in high places by one of the most prominent writers in the Spanish-speaking world. It is a courageous act of political defiance; Ramírez has paid a painful price for simply putting pen to paper to tell the truth. . . . He examines a shameful period in Nicaraguan history through the lens of a police/detective yarn and he succeeds magnificently.”— Brooks Geikan, The Arts Fuse
Now living in exile in Spain, Sergio Ramirez is the only Central American author ever to be awarded the Cervantes Prize, the highest honor in Spanish language letters.
Nothing invites company more than a gently swaying porch swing on a beautiful day, which makes SWING an aptly named biannual print publication of fiction, poetry, nonfiction, and comics, welcoming readers and writers alike. Also aptly named, shares Editor Leigh Anne Couch, as SWING is published by “an incredible literary nonprofit in Nashville called The Porch. Not only do we share a budget and staff, but a spirit of openness and curiosity. The word swing points, prismatically, toward objects and actions and relationships, toward music and influence and ambivalence. It won’t be pinned down, and yet it’s securely attached to The Porch.”
For readers and writers, this connection bodes well in our tumultuous times of publication defunding and rocky start-ups, to which Couch is no newcomer. Formerly at Duke University Press, the Greensboro Review, and the Sewanee Review, she is now a freelance editor, who edits the poetry series Sewanee Poetry at LSU, and has published several poetry collections of her own. “SWING grew out of the ethos of The Porch,” Couch says, “and the longing of its editor to experience the thrill of treasure hunting and mysterious resonances again after a five-year break from working in literary magazines. Its ethos is about connection: the unintended and therefore mysterious dialogue between the poems, stories, and essays within.”
The Fall 2023 issue of Valley Voices includes contributions about experiences of memorable moments in the Civil Rights Movement. Robert Butler’s short memoir presents his experience as a teacher at Tougaloo College and his participation as a marcher in Port Gibson. Diane Williams remembers the riots in Newark, New Jersey, in 1967 when she was a 14-year-old girl.
Creative expressions by other writers include poetic tributes to historical figures, immigrant life, police violence, and racial crimes. Toru Kiuchi’s essay surveys the Kokura Incident and its significance as “a trigger for a true and definite integration in the Army and in the United States.” Charlie R. Braxton’s essay discusses human rights in Africa. Further, Mack Hassler’s empathetic poem about the goose and Ted McCormack’s essay about collective wisdom lead to other issues as well as harmony rather than discord in our global society.
Although Valley Voices has decided not to publish reviews anymore, it did gather a few related to the theme of the issue, including Jerome Berglund’s review of William R. Ferris’s book of photography, I Am A Man.
The newest issue of Jewish Fiction .net just came out, and Editor Nora Gold welcomes readers to their 35th issue which celebrates Chanukah. In Issue 35 readers will find 12 terrific stories originally written in Russian, Hebrew, Yiddish, and English. “We hope these stories enhance your celebration of the upcoming holiday, and especially in these challenging times we wish you and those you love a Chanukah filled with miracles and light!” This is also an exciting time for Jewish Fiction .net: one of their stories was selected for the Pushcart Prize and published last month in the latest The Pushcart Prize: Best of the Small Presses anthology!
The Future, Naomi Alderman’s latest novel, is set in a near-future America that’s dominated by three tech companies: Fantail, Anvil, and Medlar. Those companies are a clear combination of social media sites (ranging from Facebook to TikTok), Apple, and Amazon, and their three leaders echo attributes of Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, and Steve Jobs.
I would like to say that the fictional companies are doing far more damage to Alderman’s world than their real-life inspiration, but I could only say that for certain because Alderman lets readers know what her CEOs are actually up to. They’re preparing for the end of the world, as was Martha Einkorn — who was raised in a cult that focused on preparing for the end of the world, but who has become the assistant for the CEO of Fantail — and Lai Zhen, a survivalist who’s become famous thanks to her online presence.
They meet and begin a relationship that is complicated by the billionaires’ seeming desire to bring about the end of the world as they know it. Alderman’s satire of our technology-obsessed world and the egos that run it is spot on, but she also creates characters worth caring about.
Readers won’t just want the world to continue because they want to see the tech leaders lose, but because they want Martha and Lai Zhen to live on.
The Future by Naomi Alderman. Simon and Schuster, November 2023.
Reviewer bio: Kevin Brown has published three books of poetry: Liturgical Calendar: Poems (Wipf and Stock); A Lexicon of Lost Words (winner of the Violet Reed Haas Prize for Poetry, Snake Nation Press); and Exit Lines (Plain View Press). He also has a memoir, Another Way: Finding Faith, Then Finding It Again, and a book of scholarship, They Love to Tell the Stories: Five Contemporary Novelists Take on the Gospels.
The Lake December 2023 issue of poetry and poetics is now online featuring works by Beatriu Delaveda, Chris Dornon, Alexanda Etheridge, Tim Fellows, Willian Ogden Haynes, Mary Beth Hines, David James, Carolyn Martin, Sandra Noel, Ian Parks, Frances Sackett, J. R. Solonche. Book reviews include Jaswinder Bolina’s English as a Second Language, Alan Catlin’s How Will the Heart Endure?, and J.V. Birch’s ice cream ‘n’ tar. “One Poem Reviews” features one poem from a poet’s new collection, and this month spotlights works by Katherine Coda, Jonaki Ray, and Hannah Stone.
Imagine zoning out during a campfire talk at a National Park, wondering what the ranger’s life is really like during their off-hours. . . This book of essays satisfies some of that curiosity as Jeff Darren Muse takes readers through his life’s journey. Muse offers the ins and outs of his profession through carefully constructed prose and is very entertaining in his telling. In his chapter “SAR Talk,” Muse describes being behind the counter while his co-rangers pack up gear: “The counter is important, I tell myself. The lead ranger put me here because I’m good with people. […] I’ve got a shiny badge that looks like a toy. I’ve got a buzz cut, a thinning hairline. I’m in my own damn storm. On a ledge. Stuck.” Here, Muse is talking about his own anger that has put him “on a ledge.” This writing explores how Muse rescues himself by acknowledging what is around him and what and who has traveled before him. Gary Snyder is one of his role models, and Muse shares private thoughts and experiences walking in Snyder’s footsteps, traveling further and further into ranger adventures.
Reviewer bio: Susan Kay Anderson lives in southwestern Oregon’s Umpqua River Basin. Her long poem “Man’s West Once” was selected for Barrow Street Journal’s “4 X 2 Project” and is included in Mezzanine (2019). Anderson also published Virginia Brautigan Aste’s memoir, Please Plant This Book Coast To Coast (2021).
The 114th Greensboro Review features the winner of the 2023 Amon Liner Poetry Prize, Madeleine Poole’s “Pile of Maggots,” as well as an Editor’s Note, “In Praise of LitMags,” by Terry L. Kennedy. In this Fall 2023 issue, discover new flash fiction, poems, and stories from an outstanding group of more than two dozen emerging and established writers, including Allison Field Bell, Stacie Cassarino, Sasha Debevec-McKenney, Corinne Dekkers, Chard deNiord, Arielle Hebert, John Hoppenthaler, Nalea J. Ko, AG Latham, Michael Meyerhofer, Ania Mroczek, John A. Nieves, Rachel Richardson, Robert Stone, and Mimi Yang.
Tandem: A Novel by Andy Mozina Tortoise Books, October 2023
In Andy Mozina’s novel Tandem, Mike Kovacs is an economics professor who’s trying to get over a bitter divorce. He is barely on speaking terms with his only child. And he has just killed two bicyclists in an inebriated hit-and-run at a deserted Michigan beach.
Claire Boland’s daughter is one of the victims. She’s racked with guilt over what she might have done differently as a parent. Her marriage is buckling under the weight of the tragedy. And yet there’s one person who seems to understand the magnitude of her grief—her neighbor, Mike Kovacs.
Tandem is a dark comedy about two lives that intersect in the most awful way possible. Mozina’s novel details the absurd lengths people go to avoid uncomfortable truths. It’s an exploration of the weight of guilt and the longing for justice—and the extreme lengths we will go to for love.
Andy Mozina is the author of the novel Contrary Motion (Spiegel & Grau) and two story collections: Quality Snacks was a finalist for the Flannery O’Connor Award, and The Women Were Leaving the Men won the GLCA New Writers Award. He teaches literature and creative writing at Kalamazoo College.
Editor’s Choice is not a paid promotion; selections are made solely at the discretion of the editor; descriptions are from the publisher’s website. To discover more great books from small, independent, and university presses, visit the NewPages Guide to Publishers as well as our Books Received monthly roundup. Subscribe to our weekly newsletter to stay up to date!
Cutleaf publishes a new issue online every other week and will update readers via email so they can keep reading fresh new prose and poetry that “responds to our common experience and reflects our differences.” Recent contributions: Kathleen Gibbons reunites a father and daughter after many years apart in “I’m On Highway 1”; Jude Marr explores concepts of space and movement in three poems beginning with “Moving Continents”; George Singleton remembers what could have been lost over a conversation in his local diner in “Thanksgiving”; Matt Cashion’s characters sweat it out in a waiting room in “Love Song for the Headless”; Jennifer LoveGrove reminds us that “it’s embarrassing to still hope / to be loved” in three poems beginning with “We are all touch-me-nots now, exploding at the slightest provocation”; and Mary Winsor examines how hard it is to be at the bedside of a miracle in “Defying the Gods.”
In response to Karen Massey’s Songs From The Dementia Suitcase, I wonder who would want these songs, let alone be handed this suitcase, when the whole world is at odds with memory (past wrongs/wars/devastation)? Well, what I found inside this excellent work was a surprise in the form of a short poem of found material called “Two Blue Songs,” which Massey notes uses Virginia Woolf’s “The Waves” as a source text. “Two Blue Songs” is folded into narrative poems having to do with family and caregiving. Not that the work is bereft of these; what surprises me is the wonderful short parts to it, divided “1.” and “2.” which look a little old-fashioned, yet so familiar and comforting when the poem glides into the unknown: “all the world thick with swans” and “it is summer it is winter.” Stumbling upon this poem was a moment of grace and understanding, if such a thing can be said of the understanding of dementia and its stealth. It is so, so difficult to write about dementia without sounding sappy or drippy. Maybe the key to what this is all about is indeed in waves and the soothing nature of water.
Reviewer bio: Susan Kay Anderson lives in southwestern Oregon’s Umpqua River Basin. Her long poem “Man’s West Once” was selected for Barrow Street Journal’s “4 X 2 Project” and is included in Mezzanine (2019). Anderson also published Virginia Brautigan Aste’s memoir, Please Plant This Book Coast To Coast (2021).
The stories in Sara Hosey’s stunning collection, Dirty Suburbia, trace the lives of girls and women struggling to live with dignity in a world that often hates them.
Dirty suburbias are working-class neighborhoods in which girls who are left to fend for themselves sometimes become predators, as well as affluent communities in which women discover that money is no protection against sexism, both their own and others’.
46 Submission Opportunities including calls for submissions, writing contests, and book prizes.
And time keeps marching on. Happy December! Mother Nature is having fun with us deciding to mix rain and snow together to create a big slushy mess for us in Michigan today. If you’re weather is just as messy, NewPages is here with our first weekly roundup of submission opportunities for December 2023. A perfect excuse to stay indoors and keep those submission goals you set for yourself going as strong as possible. As it is the first of the month, there are a host of new opportunities to enjoy.
Don’t forget paid newsletter subscribers can get early access to the majority of submission opportunities and upcoming events before they go live on our site, so do consider subscribing or upgrading your subscription today. You also receive our monthly eLitPak Newsletter which features even more opportunities and other literary goodness.
In her Colorado Review Fall/Winter 2023 essay, “Reconsidering the Sunflowers,” Stephanie Harrison recalls her father’s habit of painting just one side of their family’s house a different color each year and the moment she saw this through fresh eyes: “Something in me had blinked and refocused. It was like the optical illusion I’d marveled over in fifth grade: beautiful woman or hag? Definitely hag. Once I’d seen it, I couldn’t stop seeing it.” A stand-in for her father’s sense of self, the house reflects the elusiveness of his identity — ever-shifting throughout their relationship — and ultimately his struggles with mental health. Questions of identity and self are at the heart of this issue, as characters — and writers — examine themselves closely in pivotal moments and ask some hard questions. This issue also features work by Jonathan W. Chu, Christopher Citro, Timothy Donnelly, Lindsey Drager, K. S. Dyal, Suzie Eckl, John Gallaher, Adam Giannelli, Jacob M. Hall, Chengru He, Karan Kapoor, John Kinsella, Arah Ko, Brandon Krieg, Jami Macarty, Caleb A. P. Parker, Susan Rich, Petra Salazar, Liane Strauss, Amy Stuber, Jaz Sufi, Eugene Stein, Cole Swensen, Sher Ting, Marc Vincenz, Hannah V. Warren, Tana Jean Welch & Brad Wetherell.
Kathleen Rooney’s, Where Are the Snows, is dedicated “To the future.” This book of prose-influenced poems seems longer than seventy-three pages. Mainly consisting of long sentences reaching across the page like obsessions, it is beautifully made, with attractive cover and front matter graphics. The Table of Contents seems demure because of its scallop-edged border. Line breaks are not of concern here. Instead, being entertaining is. Underneath the jokes and ironic spins, Rooney blends advice column writing with poetry. Each poem is about a fact or observation and explores every facet as far as the imagination will go. In “The Point in Time or Space At Which Something Originates,” Rooney explores “newness,” the word “new,” and “beginnings.” She writes: “Can beginner’s luck apply from moment to moment? Not sure, but I hope so.” I wouldn’t go as far as saying she uses the techniques of stand-up comedians, but elements are here in what gets turned around. In the poem, “Foretelling the Future by a Randomly Chosen Passage from a Book,” Rooney concludes: “Quick! Somebody give me another assignment. Somebody tell me that what we do matters.” Rooney’s book matters. Laughing during the pain of life matters.
Where Are the Snows by Kathleen Rooney. Texas A&M University Press, September 2022.
Reviewer bio: Susan Kay Anderson lives in southwestern Oregon’s Umpqua River Basin. Her long poem “Man’s West Once” was selected for Barrow Street Journal’s “4 X 2 Project” and is included in Mezzanine (2019). Anderson also published Virginia Brautigan Aste’s memoir, Please Plant This Book Coast To Coast (2021).
Consequence Volume 15.2 (Fall 2023) features works from authors and artists from around the world who offer hard-won truths and insights into the realities of war and geopolitical violence. These realities include a young transgender man making sense of his father’s experiences while fighting in Korea, the multiple perspectives surrounding US soldiers being spit on when returning from Vietnam, and the history of a country as revealed to a young woman by anonymous, pre-WWII photographs. There are also works that address the ways we express these realities in the latest installation of our “What is War Poetry?” series. Earlier installations focused on these expressions via The Iliad and the Bhagavad Gita. In this iteration, writers explore these depictions through a different lens, through texts and ideas that could be construed as antiwar. The editors are excited to share this volume!
Established in 1967, The Malahat Review is a quarterly literary magazine dedicated to publishing the best poetry, fiction, and creative nonfiction by Canadian and international writers. Their current fall issue #224 showcases cover art by Cammie Staros, Far Horizons Award for Short Fiction winner Eleanor Fuller, and new work by Odette Auger, Chee Brossy, Alicia Gee, Karine Hack, Warren Heiti, Mark Anthony Jarman, Joseph Kidney, Y. S. Lee, Winshen Liu, Sadie McCarney, Matt Robinson, Kawai Shen, Sun Tzu-Ping (translated by Nicholas Wong), Rhea Tregebov, and Olivia Wenzel (translated by Sylvia Franke). Visit their website for more info and to sign up for their email list to receive their monthly newsletter with author interviews, contest entry deals, info on upcoming issues, and more.
In Janice Deal’s linked story collection, everyday people navigate the uncertainties of life in the American heartland, seeking order in chaos with a very human mix of resilience and folly.
At first glance, the fictional Ephrem, Illinois, seems a friendly, familiar town—it draws you right in, even if you don’t need supplies at the mall or a snack at Brat Station. But as you come closer, you discover people who are complex and unpredictable. Life itself is capricious, and loneliness can turn a person strange. Yet there’s much affection here, small and large examples of human kindness.
For years, Janice Deal has been publishing award-winning stories about Ephrem. (Reviewers have compared them to Anton Chekhov, Sherwood Anderson, and Flannery O’Connor.) Now assembled for the first time, these extraordinary tales offer a masterful snapshot of life in today’s small-town America.
Janice Deal is the author of a novel, The Sound of Rabbits, and a previous story collection, The Decline of Pigeons. Stories from Strange Attractors have won The Moth Short Story Prize and the Cagibi Macaron Prize. Janice has also received an Illinois Arts Council Artists Fellowship Award for prose.
The Fiddlehead No. 297 (Autumn 2023) features poetry, fiction, creative nonfiction, and reviews written by some of the best new and established writers. Contributors include Anne Marie Todkill — winner of our 2023 Creative Nonfiction contest — Jack Wang, David Ly, Annick MacAskill, Bryn Harris, and many more. Visit The Fiddlehead website to see a full list of contributors, read excerpts from selected works, and order a copy of No. 297. Cover art is Fall Canoe Route by Réjean Roy.
Linda Villarosa’s Under the Skin: The Hidden Toll of Racism on American Lives and on the Health of Our Nation exposes the overt and hidden racism that runs throughout the healthcare industry, as well as other health-related concerns—such as the influence of social and physical living conditions on mortality. Villarosa draws on the history of health and medicine to show the variety of ways the then-legalized and socially accepted racism continues to affect how healthcare professionals today see people of color, especially African Americans. What was once obvious and intentional is now built into systems, whether that’s the way research privileges the white body or medical technologies continue the bias against Black bodies. One of her main throughlines is how the medical establishment doesn’t listen to African Americans, especially women, and especially mothers. No matter what their socioeconomic status or education level, African Americans have to work to convince those in the healthcare system that their pain is real, that their suffering needs attention. Time and time again, those pleas are ignored, leading to higher rates of mortality among minority communities, again, especially in maternal deaths. Villarosa ends the book by focusing on the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic, but she also ends with hope that changes are happening, even amid such continued suffering.
Reviewer bio: Kevin Brown has published three books of poetry: Liturgical Calendar: Poems (Wipf and Stock); A Lexicon of Lost Words (winner of the Violet Reed Haas Prize for Poetry, Snake Nation Press); and Exit Lines (Plain View Press). He also has a memoir, Another Way: Finding Faith, Then Finding It Again, and a book of scholarship, They Love to Tell the Stories: Five Contemporary Novelists Take on the Gospels. Twitter @kevinbrownwrite
45 Submission Opportunities including calls for submissions, writing contests, and book prizes.
I hope that you all had a happy and safe Thanksgiving filled with good food and good company. If you’re ready to tackle some more submission goals while munching on all the Thanksgiving leftovers, NewPages has you covered with our weekly roundup of submission opportunities for the week of November 24, 2023. As November will officially be over with next week, don’t forget to get submissions in for November 30 deadlines!
Don’t forget paid newsletter subscribers can get early access to the majority of submission opportunities and upcoming events before they go live on our site, so do consider subscribing or upgrading your subscription today. You also receive our monthly eLitPak Newsletter which features even more opportunities and other literary goodness.
The First Line Fall 2023 issue tasked writers with the line, “As soon as Harriet entered the building, she headed to the seventh floor.” Contributors include Brian Shaw, Gretchen Oliver, Footnotes by Doug Devaney, Georgi Presecky, Ruswa Fatehpuri, Alison Morretta, Vernon McDonald, Harriet Takes a Ride by Mary Corbin, and an essay by A. R. Cochrane. The First Lines for 2024 have been announced along with their deadlines. Visit the publication’s website for complete submission information.
The Fall 2023 (8.2) issue of Collateral is now online for readers to share in the contributions of literary and visual art revealing the impact of military service and violent conflict beyond the combat zone. The publication features poetry by Karen Arnold, Sarwa Azeez, Sarah Colby, Leonore Hildebrandt, James King, Ron Lavalette, Antony Owen, Zara Raab, Siavash Saadlou, Danielle Sellers, J.C. Todd, B.A. Van Sise, and Charles Weld; fiction by J. Malcolm Garcia, Marc Levy, Joseph Porter, and Yuhan Tang; creative nonfiction by MaxieJane Frazier, Barbara Krasner, and Jennifer Eden Rogers; and an interview with featured visual artist Amber Zora.
So Late in the Day, Claire Keegan’s latest collection of stories is subtitled “stories of women and men.” That could just as well read, “stories of women who are trying to live their lives and men who attempt to thwart them.” The middle of three stories, “The Long and Painful Death,” originally published in 2007, tells of a writer who just wants to use her two weeks at a retreat to produce new work, but one man intrudes upon her solitude. She reverts to societal expectations of what a woman should do to entertain a guest, ruining her day. The final story, “Antarctica,” first published in 1999, is more extreme in the complications that ensue. It’s the title story, though, that is the gem of this strong collection. Keegan published it last year, and it is a story that speaks to the gender dynamics of our time. The premise is simple, as it follows a man who meets a woman, then proposes to her. However, their relationship doesn’t go as planned, and he has the opportunity to learn about the world and women, but he learns exactly the wrong lesson. Keegan’s style, as always, is sparse and powerful, much like Chekhov, her favorite writer (who makes an appearance in the middle story). Keegan creates women who want to craft meaningful lives in the world, but the men who interact with them do their best to prevent those lives from coming to fruition.
Reviewer bio: Kevin Brown has published three books of poetry: Liturgical Calendar: Poems (Wipf and Stock); A Lexicon of Lost Words (winner of the Violet Reed Haas Prize for Poetry, Snake Nation Press); and Exit Lines (Plain View Press). He also has a memoir, Another Way: Finding Faith, Then Finding It Again, and a book of scholarship, They Love to Tell the Stories: Five Contemporary Novelists Take on the Gospels. Twitter @kevinbrownwrite or kevinbrownwrites.weebly.com/.
With Death, an Orange Segment Between Our Teeth by Marie-Claire Bancquart Translated from the French by Wendeline A. Hardenberg Orison Books, November 2023
Marie-Claire Bancquart (1932–2019) was a prolific and prize-winning French poet, novelist, essayist, and critic. In her poetry, she combines an erudite vocabulary and references to classical literature with an earthy sensibility and a fascination with experiencing the smallest moments of everyday life fully. The deceptive simplicity of her poems lays bare the mysteries underlying the world we inhabit and our very existence. Wendeline A. Hardenberg’s careful and skillful translations are sure to broaden the audience for this significant poet as yet too little known outside of France.
In Good Grief, the Ground, Margaret Ray’s debut collection, “we are in Central Florida.” It is late summer. We are coming of age, making out at the movies, sneaking into a pool, navigating gender tensions and expectations, and “no one is dead yet.” The poet writes personally of “the cusp of childhood” and adulthood and expands socio-politically to “the border / between” a “violent history / of colonialization” and what we “get away with… because” we “are white,” between queer desire and autonomy, between “this woman and wanting” “and wanting to be.” There is “a glow of danger and ferocity pulsing off” Ray’s lines, a ”buzzing-heat-made-into-sound that means” “we change // when we can name things.” But in reality “naming it’s no inoculation against / what happens in every parking lot alone at night.” There are “too many dead women.” In these poems, Ray is the one who carries both her younger and adult selves “across the threshold” where “[c]hildren are made of risk” and “someone says hysterectomy.” Whether we are children or adults, “everything / has always arranged itself into before / and after.” Everyone has to be “fluent in the grammar / of emergency.” The poems emit “the feeling of being ready to go somewhere,” but soon realize “there were never any good exit strategies.” Considering this ground of no exit, do we continue to risk “betting on anything” or do we go about “inoculating … against / hope”? Ray’s poems strive toward “self-sufficient womanhood” to “build the version where memory works,” to “feel at home in this life.” Isn’t that what we all want, dear reader? Margaret Ray’s Good Grief, the Ground “sparkles with impermanence,” “the most delicious tingling.”
Reviewer bio: Jami Macarty is the author of The Minuses (Center for Literary Publishing, 2020), winner of the 2020 New Mexico/Arizona Book Award – Poetry Arizona, and three chapbooks, including Mind of Spring (Vallum, 2017), winner of the 2017 Vallum Chapbook Award. Jami’s writing has been honored by financial support from Arizona Commission on the Arts, British Columbia Arts Council, and by editors at magazines such as The Capilano Review, Concision Poetry Journal, Interim, Redivider, Vallum, and Volt, where Jami’s poems appear.
Apogee/Perigee by Leesa Dean is about relationships near and far. What is the poet’s relationship to situations, people, and other everyday items? I see Dean’s poems in a creative, concrete way; and see them as points on an astrology chart, which is circular and the connecting points to various houses/states of being. This is a sacred, esoteric book of poems not to be approached offhandedly. Slowly, by studying these dialed-up, circles of potency, there is a lot revealed, as in these lines from “House of Values”:
[. . . ] movies on repeat. ice cream on repeat. dinner at bedtime. toys kept in Crown Royale bags.
At first, I did not get that these were astrology charts. They looked like maps with scroll and script writing. When I went back and examined them, it was plain as can be. In these lines, Dean remembers her grandmother’s teachings:
[. . . ] her eyes lit like bright swans when her mouth formed the words.
I love, “her eyes lit like bright swans” so much. I can see and feel this image. The mystery, the sacred, and the overcoming of what was endured make for careful reading. If I read nothing else, I would be satisfied.
Apogee/Perigee by Leesa Dean. above/ground press, April 2023.
Reviewer bio: Susan Kay Anderson lives in southwestern Oregon’s Umpqua River Basin. Her long poem “Man’s West Once” was selected for Barrow Street Journal’s “4 X 2 Project” and is included in Mezzanine (2019). Anderson also published Virginia Brautigan Aste’s memoir, Please Plant This Book Coast To Coast (2021).
The Capture of Krao Farini by Nay Saysourinho Ugly Duckling Presse, September 2023
The Capture of Krao Farini is part Turing test, part circus flyer. Written in the imagined voice of Krao Farini, a real sideshow performer brought to the United States at the turn of the 20th century, the book dissolves the line between algorithm and spectacle to reveal the ultimate consolation prize – to be acclaimed as human enough. Nay Saysourinho is a writer, visual artist, and recipient of a 2023 Baldwin for the Arts Fellowship. She was previously a Rona Jaffe Fellow at MacDowell and a Short Fiction Scholar at Tin House Winter Workshop. She holds a Berkeley Fellowship from Yale and has received support from Kundiman, The Writers Grotto, and the Tucson Festival of Books Literary Awards.
