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!
Fictive Dream is an online magazine for short stories (500-2500 words) that give an insight into the human condition. The publication features stories “with a distinctive voice, clarity of thought, and precision of language. They may be on any subject. They may be challenging, unsettling, uplifting, cryptic but, above all, they must be well-crafted and compelling.” The publication accepts submissions on a rolling basis and publishes one story every Friday and Sunday. Recent contributors include Graham Mort, Sharon Boyle, Robert Scotellaro, Kerry Hadley-Pryce, Louis Gallo, Kim Magowan, Claire Polders, Carolina Peleretegu trans. Norma Kaminsky, Catherine McNamara, Megan Catana, Gary Fincke, and Will Musgrove.
Shō Poetry Journal is a new print publication released twice a year, and while it can’t be said it has a happy origin story, Editor Johnny Cordova has turned adversity into a beautifully crafted opportunity for both readers and writers. “Shō is a project that I abandoned in 2003 shortly after the second issue was published. I was going through a divorce, moved from Arizona to California, and wanted a clean break from everything.” Both Cordova and Editor Dominique Ahkong had moved from Southeast Asia to Arizona and started sending their own poetry to journals. “We were struck by how many journals had moved online. We saw a need in the market for a high-quality independent print journal that publishes a wide range of voices, accepts simultaneous submissions, has a reasonable response time, and that feels good in the hands.” And thus, Shō was created.
You Were Watching from the Sand: Short Stories by Juliana Lamy Red Hen Press, September 2023
Playful, kinetic, and devastating in turn, You Were Watching from the Sand is a collection in which Haitian men, women, and children who find their lives cleaved by the interminably strange bite back at the bizarre with their own oddities. In “belly,” a young woman abandoned by her only living relative makes a person from the mud beside her backyard creek. In “We Feel it in Punta Cana,” a domestic child servant in the Dominican Republic tours through his own lush imagination to make his material conditions more bearable. In “The Oldest Sensation is Anger,” a teenager invites a same-aged family friend into her apartment and uncovers a spate of disturbing secrets about her. Written in a mixture of high lyricism, absurdist comedy, and Haitian cultural witticisms, this is a collection whose dynamism matches that of its characters at every beat and turn.
To discover more great books from small, independent, and university presses, visit the NewPages Guide to Publishers as well as the New Books category on our blog. 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: Gary Fincke explores where emotion lives in the essay “In the Heart,” Kristin Lindsey is visited by the spirits of the past and present in “Ghosted,” Annette Pearson travels towards the past in search of what is remembered and forgotten in “Road Trip South,” Jacob Boyd challenges, deepens, and complicates the principles espoused in John Perry Barlow’s list of 25 Principles of Adult Behavior, beginning with the poem “Remember that Your Life Belongs to Others as Well. Do Not Endanger It Frivolously,” Christen Noel Kaufman learns to hold death in her hands in three poems beginning with “Never Close a Knife Someone Else Has Opened,” and Okwudili Nebeolisa sinks into the kind of loneliness that can only be felt on dark nights beginning with his poem “It’s Never a Ghost.”
NewPages receives many wonderful literary magazine and alternative magazine titles each month to share with our readers. You can read more about some of these titles by clicking on the “New Mag Issues” under NewPages Blog or Mags. Find out more about many of these titles with our Guide to Literary Magazines and our Big List of Literary Magazines and Big List of Alternative Magazines. If you are a publication looking to be listed here or featured on our blog and social media, please contact us. You can also subscribe to our weekly newsletter to stay the most up-to-date on all things literary!
2River View, Summer 2023 Alaska Quarterly Review, Summer/Fall 2023 Apple in the Dark, Summer 2023 Arboreal, Number 3 Arc Poetry, Summer 2023 The Awakenings Review, Spring 2023 Blue Collar Review, Spring 2023 Boulevard, 112 & 113 Cholla Needles, August 2023 Cream City Review, 47.1 Cutleaf, August 2023 The Dream Review, Issue 3 The Empty Inkwell, July 2023, Issue 1 Fictive Dream, August 2023 Free Inquiry, August/September 2023 Ganga Review, 2023 The Gettysburg Review, 34.3
Toy Gun: Poems by Matt Coonan Button Poetry, August 2023
Through each poem in the debut collection Toy Gun, Matt Coonan fires his offbeat childhood and adolescence at the page. He enters each exit wound with sharp diction and form, extracting shards of trauma, mental health, and evolutionary violence. What readers will find in this collection is ambitious anaphora—an attempt to explain the irrationality of an obsessive mind by imitation. The result of it all? Raw candor dripped on the backdrop of New York suburbia; an intimacy that lingers from backyard barbeques to funeral homes.
To discover more great books from small, independent, and university presses, visit the NewPages Guide to Publishers as well as the New Books category on our blog. Subscribe to our weekly newsletter to stay up to date!
South Dakota Review, Volume 57, Number 3, had just been released and includes poetry by Alison Zheng, John Walser, Joanna Acevedo, E J Cousins, Glenn Shaheen, Richard Robbins, Jen Yáñez-Alaniz, Judith Harris, Dylan Willoughby, Tricia Bogle, Gary Charles Wilkens, Joshua Michael Stewart, Simon Anton Niño Diego, Dani Putney, and Lisa Roullard; a novella excerpt by Yelizaveta P. Renfro; short stories by Joe Davies and Rylann Watts; creative nonfiction by Chelsy Diaz Amaya and Stephanie Dickinson; and a scholarly essay by Audrey Fong. Subscriptions and copies can be ordered here.
Lit Mag Covers: Picks of the Week recognizes cover art and designs for literary magazines, whether in print or online. These are chosen solely at the discretion of the Editor. Enjoy!
Artist Fran De Anda’s work is front and back on the 2023 annual issue of Pembroke Magazine. The Magician of Roots (2022) seen here is oil and gold leaf on canvas and is utterly mesmerizing.
Continuing with the ‘gold’ theme, the image on the front cover of Brick 111 is a detail of Zhang Xiaogang’s Light No. 5, 2022, oil on canvas.
PULP Literature covers are always a unique blend of classy, classic, and surreal. Their summer 2023 issue features the painting Dreaming Underwater by Claire Lawrence.
Tara Kelly’s moving memoir, No Last Words, opens: “The day before Robert died was an otherwise perfect June day in Connecticut: warm but not hot, with a bit of a breeze, flawless blue sky, puffy white clouds—the sort of weather a sailor loves, and Robert was a sailor.”
Robert Willis was Tara’s husband, father of their children, restauranteur, sailor, bon vivant, and alcoholic. From an enchanted start in Manhattan to a townhouse in Brooklyn, from an island in Maine and back to rural Connecticut, in fast cars and sleek boats, Tara and Robert seemed to live a charmed life. But beneath the glittering exterior was the struggle of money, alcohol, and ultimately self-control and hard-won sobriety. When this couple seems to have reached an impasse, separation brings renewed love, and then tragedy brings new challenges. Kelly’s memoir is a clear-eyed excavation of the lives lived together and apart by two charismatic modern Americans, a story told in love and compassion for herself and others.
To discover more great books from small, independent, and university presses, visit the NewPages Guide to Publishers as well as the New Books category on our blog. Subscribe to our weekly newsletter to stay up to date!
In Jill Hoffman’s long-awaited second novel, STONED, forty-year-old mother of two Maud Diamond is getting a divorce. Having experienced the colossal disappointment of being jilted by a famous artist, she falls in love with a poor unknown artist who assuages the disappointment but leads to other ills. Maud’s son leaves home to live with his father; the daughter does phone sex from their new home, proclaiming, “I’m the only one in this house earning any money.” As Maud starts a literary journal called Wild Leek with her new boyfriend and moves downtown, their relationship spirals downward from her pot-smoking and his alcoholism. STONED is for anyone who has been in love or lost love, been married, divorced, or lonely. It is about the satisfactions and deprivations of sex and drugs.
To discover more great books from small, independent, and university presses, visit the NewPages Guide to Publishers as well as the New Books category on our blog. Subscribe to our weekly newsletter to stay up to date!
The thirteen stories in Rebecca Turkewitz’s debut collection, Here in the Night, are engrossing, strange, eerie, and emotionally nuanced. With psychological insight and finely crafted prose, Here in the Night investigates the joys and constraints of womanhood, of queerness, and of intimacy. Preoccupied with all manner of hauntings, these stories traverse a boarding school in the Vermont woods, the jagged coast of Maine, an attic in suburban Massachusetts, an elevator stuck between floors, and the side of an unlit highway in rural South Carolina. At the center of almost every story is the landscape of night, with all its tantalizing and terrifying potential.
To discover more great books from small, independent, and university presses, visit the NewPages Guide to Publishers as well as the New Books category on our blog. Subscribe to our weekly newsletter to stay up to date!
Issue 3 of The Dawn Review celebrates work that is surprising and otherworldly. In every piece, the self is intimately connected to its environment– as the world turns and folds inward, the self is reconstructed, and new usages of language are essential for capturing the transformations that occur in the crossroads. The works in Issue 3 refuse a concrete ending, just as life itself forces us to be constantly reborn. In “Sanctuary with the Burning Self,” Muhammed Olowonjoying renews language, writing, “I oasis of my existence. I camouflage / into fluorescence.” Meanwhile, LeAnn Perry wakes the dead in “Yes, No, Goodbye,” and Edward Gunawan allows personhood to bloom between the lines of his contrapuntal poem. Even as summer ends in Fiona Jin’s “Cassiopeia,” time is relentless, keeping the speaker “so here, so here, so here.” Issue 3 highlights the best work from the Dawn Review’s third reading period, as well as the winner and the finalists of the Dawn Prize for Poetry, judged by Sarah Ghazal Ali. Ultimately, the writers and artists in this third issue buckle against the restraints of language and form – in doing so, they unearth beauty and strangeness in how we build, rebuild, and destroy ourselves.
The 2023 issue of the nationally-acclaimed literary magazine The Meadow captures readers with the cover photo, Lichen Fang, by Mike Clasen. Once inside, featured writers will continue to captivate, with poetry by Stacy Boe Miller, Joanne Mallari, Jeffrey Alfier, Mark Sanders, Lora Robinson, Christine Kwon, Paul Ilechko, Kathryn Levy, Jana Harris, Lori Howe, Richard Robbins, and many others. The issue also includes four essays by Lori White, Kian Razi, David Stewart, and Zachary Greenhill. The Meadow is produced by Truckee Meadows Community College in Reno, Nevada, and is currently open for submissions.
All the Ways We Lied: A Novel by Aida Zilelian Keylight Books, January 2024
Set in Queens, New York, meet the Manoukians—a dysfunctional Armenian family and the fraying rope that binds them. While a father deteriorates from terminal illness, three sisters contend with one another, their self-destructive pasts, and their indomitable mother as they face the loss of the one person holding their unstable family together. Kohar, the oldest sister, is happily married, yet grapples with fertility issues and, in turn, her own self-worth. Lucine, the middle child, is trapped in a loveless marriage and haunted by memories of her estranged father. Azad, the beloved youngest child, is burdened by an inescapable cycle of failed relationships. Zilelian uses humor and compassion to explore the fraught and contradictory landscape of sisterhood, introducing four unforgettable women who have nothing in common and are bound by blood and history.
To discover more great books from small, independent, and university presses, visit the NewPages Guide to Publishers as well as the New Books category on our blog. Subscribe to our weekly newsletter to stay up to date!
Deadline: October 15, 2023 The reading period for Consequence Volume 16.1 is open from July 15 through October 15. As always, we’re after the strongest work that deals with the consequences of war or geopolitical violence. We publish in Fiction, Nonfiction, Poetry, Translations, and Visual Art, though we are especially interested in increasing our Translations submissions.
BIPOC and people from other under-represented communities are strongly encouraged to apply.
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Submit published or unpublished poems to the 21st annual Tom Howard/Margaret Reid Poetry Contest sponsored by Winning Writers and co-sponsored by Duotrope. We will award $3,000 for the best poem in any style and $3,000 for the best poem that rhymes or has a traditional style. The top 12 poems will be published online. Final judge: Michal ‘MJ’ Jones. Deadline: September 30. Fee: $22 for 1-3 poems. View flyer for more information.
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36 Submission Opportunities including calls for submissions, writing contests, and book prizes.
Welcome to the NewPages Weekly Roundup of Submission Opportunities! August is officially half over with this week. The weather is crazy, the only thing that wants to grow properly is grass and weeds, bugs are destroying everything in the veggie garden, and invasive pests are trying to kill my roses. Hopefully your summer is going better.
I hope you are able to get some nice R&R time in before the crazy period of back-to-school and fall descends upon us. If you’re still working on your submission goals, we are here to help. 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.
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From a cathedral in Cuernavaca with its frescos of samurai and soon-to-be-martyred priests to neighborhoods in Miami at the end of lockdown, to New York City in the 1970s, or to mythic Greece, the poems in Remote Cities are conscious of history as a process happening right now. They look back at us with an urgency that demands response, not that we embrace this or that political or religious dogma but that we live our lives with a sense of their fragility and value.
To discover more great books from small, independent, and university presses, visit the NewPages Guide to Publishers as well as the New Books category on our blog. Subscribe to our weekly newsletter to stay up to date!
NewPages receives many wonderful book titles each month to share with our readers. You can read more about some of these by clicking on “New Books” under the NewPages Blog or Books tab on the menu. If you are a publisher or author looking to be listed here or featured on our blog and social media, please contact us!
Poetry
Apples & Crows, Alan Basting, Kelsay Books The Cruelties of Brooklyn, Paul Schaeffer, Box Turtle Press Directed by Lilly Obscure, Dana Curtis, Blaze Vox Excuse Me As I Kiss The Sky, Rudy Francisco, Button Poetry Feast of the Ass, Jahna Khajavi, Ugly Duckling Presse Floriography Child, Lisa C. Krueger, Red Hen Press Frida Kahlo in Fort Lauderdale, Stephen Gibson, Able Muse Press Honest Sonnets, Nicole Farmer, Kelsay Books Joan of Arkansas, Emma Wippermann, Ugly Duckling Presse Let Our Bodies Change the Subject, Jared Harel, University of Nebraska Press MA, Ida Börjel, Ugly Duckling Presse Morpheus Dips His Oar, Tamara Madison, Sheila-Na-Gig Editions Nice Nose, Buck Downs
Named for the sacred river, the annual print Ganga Review is a journal of international writings for liberation inspired by a pilgrimage through India. The Ganga Review 2023 features Michele Alborg, Hila Amit, Edward Bruce Bynum, Ch’oŭi, Craig Czury, Daniel De Leon, Antonio Di Bianco, Craig Evenson, Jay Frankston, Ian Haight, Philip Jason, Ever Jones, Ziaul Moid Khan, Hareendran Kallinkeel, Richard Leise, Alexander Mercant, Emily Murphy, E. Martin Pedersen, Patrick Pfister, Sandro Francisco Piedrahita, Thomas Piekarski, Peter L. Scamardo, Stuart Silverman, Michael T. Smith, Joseph Thomas, Ana Vidosavljevic, Kwong Kwok Wai, Sarah Walko, and Saman Zoleikhaei.
The Weight of Ghosts: A Memoir by Laila Halaby Red Hen Press, September 2023
The Weight of Ghosts is a circling of grief following the death of the author’s older son when he was twenty-one, a horror that was compounded by her younger son’s drug use, the country’s slow eruption as it dealt with its own brokenness, and reckoning the author had to do regarding her own story. The Weight of Ghosts is a lyrical reclaiming and an insistence by the author that she own the rights to her story, which is American flavored with an unreleasing elsewhere. The Weight of Ghosts is an immigrant story and a love story. While it is raw and honest and tragic, it is also a hopeful, funny, and original telling that demonstrates the strength of the human spirit, while offering a vocabulary for these most unmanageable human experiences.
To discover more great books from small, independent, and university presses, visit the NewPages Guide to Publishers as well as the New Books category on our blog. Subscribe to our weekly newsletter to stay up to date!
Immigration Diaries is a new online journal of short stories, personal essays, poetry, and visual art founded by Yawen Yuan. Yuan lived in Shanghai until she was nine years old when she then moved to New York City. She recounts that for many years after immigrating to the United States, she felt lost and alone in her experiences. Yuan says that after listening to authors like Min Jin Lee, who immigrated from Korea at a young age, both felt more comfortable in their own experiences. Yuan would like to help others the way listening to Lee helped her by creating a place to share immigration stories and experiences.
Robert L. Penick’s short, masterful poems have been making appearances in small press magazines since the early 1990s. The Art of Mercy, his first full-length collection, contains excerpts from four chapbooks as well as fifty-seven new and previously uncollected poems, representing the best of a long, quiet career in the poetry trenches. This book marks the first in the Beggar Poet Series produced by Shō Poetry Journal in partnership with their parent publisher, Hohm Press. “It is named for seekers across world traditions who set out on the spiritual path with nothing but a begging bowl in hand and a driving thirst for the unnameable. Some of those beggars become poets. Just as some poets, in their sacred vocation, become beggars, standing empty before the muse and writing what is given.”
To discover more great books from small, independent, and university presses, visit the NewPages Guide to Publishers as well as the New Books category on our blog. Subscribe to our weekly newsletter to stay up to date!
The Spring 2023 issue of The Baltimore Review their summer contest winners selected by Judge Kelly Weber: Rochelle L. Johnson for flash creative nonfiction; Robin Littell for flash fiction; and Jarrett Moseley for prose poem. The regular content includes poems, short stories, and creative nonfiction by Kayo Chang Black, Brendan Constantine, Roxanne Lynn Doty, Jim Genia, Sara Elkamel, Michael J. Grabell, Bronte Heron, Rochelle L. Johnson, Virginia Kane, Robin Littell, Jarrett Moseley, Robert Osborne, Charlie Peck, Remy Reed Pincumbe, Tom Roth, and Mimi Veshi. Many contributors also provide notes about their work, as well as audio recordings. All issues of The Baltimore Review back to Winter 2012 can be read online at no cost, and content from the online issues is also published in annual print compilations. Founded in 1996, The Baltimore Review showcases writers from Baltimore, across the U.S., and beyond.
And Dogs to Chase Them by Ray Trotter EastOver Press, August 2023
In Ray Trotter’s collection of stories, And Dogs to Chase Them, ordinary humans are pushed to do things in out-of-the-ordinary ways. Trotter has conjured a world of Southern hyper-reality: a good Christian woman who pushes a man down the staircase, “as final as flushing the commode”; a concrete deliveryman who ought to have double-checked the address before he got out of his truck; and a man who enacts his revenge on the self-declared Queen of the Post Office. Through a keen eye for detail, Trotter brings to life a world that is at once familiar and deeply odd and creates characters that stay with a reader long after the book is closed.
To discover more great books from small, independent, and university presses, visit the NewPages Guide to Publishers as well as the New Books category on our blog. Subscribe to our weekly newsletter to stay up to date!
Lit Mag Covers: Picks of the Week recognizes cover art and designs for literary magazines, whether in print or online. These are chosen solely at the discretion of the Editor. Enjoy!
“Grave New World” is the theme of Notre Dame Review‘s Winter/Spring 2023 issue with cover art, Invasion, ink on paper (2021) by Isabella Castellane.
The Tiger Moth Review marks the publication of its tenth issue this summer, which celebrates the voices of writers and artists from Singapore, the region, and the rest of the world. Issue 10 is a compact issue that begins with Liberty Leggett’s “Instructions for surviving the twenty-first century,” which includes learning to “breathe salt water.” There is a sense of honoring our ancestors and recognizing the wisdom and knowledge of the communal and collective in KayLee Chie Kuehl, Andy Oram, and Zen Teh’s poetry and art. Death is a theme in this issue, as is the rebirth and reclamation of self and home. Alejandra Pena’s closing poem offers “a rebellion, a lighthouse, a map home” remembering our fathers who parted seas and walked without shoes or sleep in search of “the promised land” now called home. Other contributors from this issue include Claire Jean Kim, Marie-Andree Auclair, Tara Menon, Adrienne Pilon, Amy Akiko, Georgie Bailey, Drew Townsend, Smitha Sehgal, Eliana Franklin, Upasana Mitter, Calvin VanErgens, and Cerra Cathryn Anderson. Editor Esther Vincent Xueming adds, “Two current and former students of mine, Renee Yeap and Joseph Lee, have their prose and poetry featured respectively, and this is an immensely proud moment for me as an educator.”
Winner of the 2023 Whiting Award for Drama, Emma Wippermann’s Joan of Arkansas is an election-season closet drama about climate catastrophe, divine gender expression, the instructions of angels, and heavenly revelation relayed via viral video. Fifteen-year-old Joan has been tasked by God (They/Them) to ensure that Charles VII (R–Arkansas) adopts radical climate policy and wins his bid as the Lord’s candidate to become the president of the United States. Arkansas is flooding, the West is burning, and borders are closed: “Heaven or / internet—it’s / hard to be / good.”
To discover more great books from small, independent, and university presses, visit the NewPages Guide to Publishers as well as the New Books category on our blog. Subscribe to our weekly newsletter to stay up to date!
The 2023 Poetry Marathon is now open for applications! No running shoes required for this marathon, but you will definitely need stamina and perseverance! This annual event invites writers to join in a half- or full-day of poetry writing, responding to prompts posted on the hour starting a 9:00am EST on Saturday, September 2, and running (no pun intended) through 9:00am EST Sunday, September 3. If you’re not up for the full 24-hour marathon, there are two 12-hour half-marathons (my speed). The first is for day folk and goes from 9:00am-9:00pm on September 2, and the second is for night owls, from 9:00pm on September 2 to 9:00am on September 3. The platform is WordPress, which allows each participant their own space to post as well as to give and receive feedback. Participants who successfully complete their event will receive a certificate of achievement and are eligible to submit works for inclusion in the annual anthology. Over the past several years, the marathon has had over 500 participants each year, though not all finished. That’s the challenge! Registration is open through August 28. Hope to see some of you there!
In Joy Taylor’s satirical fiction Silent Bob, BJ and Rainey are two misfits from a rural town in Kentucky living their everyday lives, until they stumble upon a shocking secret: humanity is controlled by invisible creatures called the viziers who manipulate through pheromones and telepathic suggestion. Delving deeper, they uncover a bizarre world where laughter and tears are commodities and are forced to strive to be more than just “syrup units” providing the viziers with all the tragi-comic emotion they can eat. Silent Bob is a thought-provoking dark comedic exploration of the human condition, exposing the absurdity and vulnerability of our lives. With subtle humor and unexpected twists, Taylor’s craft will leave readers questioning the true nature of their emotions and the forces shaping their lives.
To discover more great books from small, independent, and university presses, visit the NewPages Guide to Publishers as well as the New Books category on our blog. Subscribe to our weekly newsletter to stay up to date!
37 Submission Opportunities including calls for submissions, writing contests, and book prizes.
The first full week of August is behind us. The back-to-school busy season is officially here. NewPages is back with our weekly roundup of submission opportunities to help keep your submitting goals strong by saving you time during this crazy time of year.
NewPages Newsletter subscribers with a paid subscription get early and first access to our submission opportunities and upcoming events, the majority before they go live on our site. Consider subscribing today. Our August eLitPak will be emailed to our current subscribers next week, too!
Snow After Fire: A Memoir of the Paradise Camp Fire & its Aftermath by Kandi Maxwell Legacy Book Press, June 2023
In November 2018, Kandi, already struggling with anxiety and chronic fatigue, faces her family’s unthinkable losses after the Paradise Camp Fire. Her two sons and two granddaughters are immediately displaced when their homes are demolished, and they come to live with Kandi and her husband in their small cabin. As Kandi’s solitude-seeking husband moves out and her energy wanes, she wonders how much of herself she can and should give up for her family. When her family can finally move into temporary FEMA housing, hope flourishes, but as the months go by, Kandi faces illness, more fires, the COVID-19 pandemic, the loss of her parents, housing issues for herself and her family, and the prospect of being torn from her most cherished refuge—the forests and the wild lands she called home.
To discover more great books from small, independent, and university presses, visit the NewPages Guide to Publishers as well as the New Books category on our blog. Subscribe to our weekly newsletter to stay up to date!
The third edition of The Gettysburg Review Volume 34 features paintings by Marjorie Thompson, fiction by Linda Mannheim, Jess Jelsma Masterton, Benjamin Powell, Zara Karschay, Gen Del Raye, and Asha Thanki; essays by Talley V. Kayser, Kathryn Nuernberger, Bradley Bazzle, and Rebecca McClanahan; poetry by Alice Friman, Karin Gottshall, David Moolten, Cody Smith, Esther Lin, Michael Waters, Chelsea Hill, Fleda Brown, M. K. Foster, Heather Christle, Afua Ansong, Jeremy Radin, Brian Swann, Nick Lantz, Joseph J. Capista, Christopher Howell, and Bruce Beasley. A complete table of contents as well as subscription and single-copy purchase information can be found on their website.
A Practical Guide to Levitation brings together thirty of José Eduardo Aguaulusa’s short stories, some written just last year and some so old he doesn’t remember writing them. Naturally, there is a real variety to be found here; “The President’s Madness,” in which the president of the United States awakes from a coma speaking only Portuguese, has a postmodern flavor, and would not seem out of place in a Donald Barthelme collection. “Elevator Philosophy” and “The Tree That Swallowed Time,” however, are more akin to the light-hearted, acutely sad narratives of Adolfo Bioy Casares.
Agualusa is of Portuguese and Brazillian descent, hailing from Nova Lisboa, Portuguese Angola. Magical Realism is a clear influence on his writing. In fact, Agualusa’s literary idols pop us as characters; In the opening story, Jorge Luis Borges finds himself ambling around in the afterlife. Unfortunately for him, it is not the heavenly Library of Babel he was banking on, but an infinite plantation of banana trees. The grand cosmic surveyor has made a clerical error; Borges has been mistaken for Gabriel Garcia Marquez and finds himself in the latters’ heaven. The final image is of Borges eating banana after banana in hell (he finds no more appropriate name for another man’s paradise) with a wry grin on his face; Garcia Marquez must be in the heaven meant for Borges, and thus in his own sort of down below. A nod to Borges’ famously polemic takes on certain Latin American writers, perhaps. (Roberto Arlt, for example, was described as “an imbecile… extraordinarily uneducated” by his fellow countryman.)
The stories compiled here are brought together by abstract and metaphysical topics, with the backdrop of colonization and civil war an everpresent.
A Practical Guide to Levitation by José Eduardo Agualusa, translated from Portuguese by Daniel Hahn. Archipelago Press, August 2023.
Reviewer Bio: Colm McKenna is a second-hand bookseller based in Paris. He has published and self-published an array of short stories and articles, hoping to eventually release a collection of stories. He is mainly interested in the works of John Cowper Powys, Claude Houghton, and a range of Latin American writers.
Perfect for a hot summer’s day, the August 2023 issue of The Lake poetry journal is now online and features Gale Acuff, Kate Gale, Charlie Hill, Beth McDonough, Lauren K. Nixon, Sandra Noel, Nikita Parik, Marka Rifat, Laura Rockhold, Megan Wildhood, A.D. Winans, Victoria Wiswell. Readers can also dig into reviews of David Groff’s Living in Suspense, Bob Hicok’s Water Look Away, and Sarah Wimbush’s Shelling Peas with my Grandmother in the Gorgiolands. The Lake also features ‘One Poem Reviews’ in which authors can share a poem from a recently published collection. This month, discover new works by James Brasfield, Gary D. Grossman, and Kate Maxwell.
Lies about Black People: How to Combat Racist Stereotypes and Why It Matters by Omekongo Dibinga Prometheus Books, July 2023
From the Black Lives Matter movement to the health and economic disparities exacerbated during the COVID-19 pandemic, Americans have been forced to reckon with our country’s fraught history – and present – of racial bias and inequality. Now that we have scratched the surface of courageous conversations about race, many are wondering: what is the next step toward healing and justice? Lies About Black People: How to Combat Racist Stereotypes and Why it Matters is designed for anyone who wants to examine their own biases and behaviors with a deeper critical lens in order to take action, make change, and engage positively in the fight for racial equality.
To discover more great books from small, independent, and university presses, visit the NewPages Guide to Publishers as well as the New Books category on our blog. Subscribe to our weekly newsletter to stay up to date!
You Tell Me is the theme of Mudfish 23 print literary journal. Honesty, emotion, shock, subtlety, poems whose reverberant language and intensity awaken more poems in the reader’s mind. And while the first Mudfish published in 1984 was a slender issue, it has expanded to include poetry, fiction, and artwork. This issue includes the winner of the 16th Mudfish Poetry Prize judged by Marie Howe, “The Voice of One Crying” by Alyssa Stadtlander, as well as honorable mentions by Micahel Miller and Willam Barnes. Readers can also enjoy contributions from Stephanie Emily Dickinson, Paula Finn, Susan Stringfellow, Janet Kirchheimer, Mary Black, George Kramer, Michael Alexander Guy, Timothy J. Nolan, Rachelle Jewell Shapiro, Allison Hammond, Raphaela Simon, Timothy Yanick Hunter, Josina LeWuan, Theodore Darst, Paul Wuensche, and many more. Editor Jill Hoffman strives to select work that is a memorable experience and to make each issue a work of art.
Martial arts fans who are writers, or vice versa, Clinch: A Martial Arts Literary Magazine is a new open-access online biannual of fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and visual arts. Editor-in-Chief Grant Young says Clinch was started because of “a gap in the market.” He explains, “There are some great literary magazines out there that focus on sports, but none that focus solely on martial arts. Since I’m a huge martial arts fan and a writer myself, I sought to close that gap. In other words, I wanted to bridge the gap between the martial arts and writing communities; both of which I keep close to heart.”
Dear Beloved Humans: Selected Poems by Grzegorz Wróblewski Translated by Piotr Gwiazda Lavender Ink, May 2023
Grzegorz Wróblewski’s Dear Beloved Humans offers a representative selection of poems by a Polish writer and visual artist based in Copenhagen for the last thirty-five years. A third volume of Wróblewski’s poetry translated into English by Piotr Gwiazda, it shows its remarkable scope and variety, from the early 1980s poems, with their motifs of existential anxiety and radical estrangement, to those written in the last decade, with their satirical insights on nationalism and capitalism, among other topics. The collection crystallizes the nature of his lifelong project: an attempt to portray, through something theoretically as simple and unassuming as poetry, what it means to be alive at this moment in the planet’s history.
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Feast of the Ass by Jahan Khajavi draws extensively on Iranian poetic traditions and the history of their reception in English translation, presenting a series of verses that play in the fields of love poetry’s address. Khajavi irreverently ruffles the “classical grandeur & quiet dignity” of inherited forms in order to consider the poet’s relationship to death, literature, race, religion, and sexuality, his “queer shoulder / set not to the wheel—so long, Solon!—but turned on to some bolder / axon.”
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The Summer 2023 print issue of The Main Street Rag is available for purchase and opens with “Abandoned Places,” an interview with photographer Lynn Black, whose work is featured on the cover. The issue also includes prose works by Frank X. Christmas, Jim Ray Daniels, Ed Davis, Dean Z. Douthat, Barbara Eckroad, Andy Fogle, and Robert Sachs, and poetry by James Breeden, Les Brown, Raymond Byrnes, Steve Cambron, Terri Brown-Davidson, Robert Cooperman, Douglas K. Currier, RC deWinter, Susan Donnelly, Jeffrey Dreiblatt, David Galloway, Alan Haider, Jay Klokker, Cordelia Hanemann, Zebulon Huset, Judith Janoo, Gary Lark, David Lawton, Mark Madigan, Gary Mesick, Nancy Carol Moody, Mary Hills Kuck, Madeleine Cohen Oakley, Brian J. Pilling, Deb Pfeiffer, Matthew J. Spireng, Timothy Robbins, T. Parker Sanborn, John J. Ronan, Richard Ryal, Landa wo, Neil Shepard, Kashiana Singh, Theodore Turner, Tom Wayman, Eric Weil, and Marie Gray Wise as well as several book reviews.
In his collection of essays Black on Black, Daniel Black takes a different approach to Blackness than many contemporary writers. Rather than focusing on the systemic racism so prevalent in American society, he takes that reality for granted, then turns his attention to a celebration of Blackness. He celebrates Black female directors, historically Black colleges and universities (HBCUs), the Black church, and activists and writers ranging from Frederick Douglass to Toni Morrison. Most of all, he centers his essays around self-love in the Black community, as he wants to spotlight the resilience and brilliance of that community, as his subtitle shows. He goes even further and celebrates LGBTQ+ Black resilience, as they battle AIDS, as well as those within and outside of their race. However, his book is not just unvarnished praise, as he also questions the institutions of power, especially the church and HBCUs, wanting them to be better. A superficial reading makes Daniel Black sound like Booker T. Washington—especially when he argues about the failure of integration—but a closer reading shows him to be more Malcolm X. He wants those who are White or straight or cisgender to see the beauty of Blackness and queerness, but he also wants his community to build on their brilliance, to grow even more beautiful.
Black on Black by Daniel Black. Hanover Square Press, January 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. Twitter @kevinbrownwrite or kevinbrownwrites.weebly.com/.
Match Point! by Maddie Gallegos First Second, September 2023
In this debut middle-grade graphic novel by Maddie Gallegos is about two girls: one who hates racquetball and another who loves it. Rosie Vo is at odds with her dad. He pushes his racquetball hobby to the point that she dreads ever spending time with him. Thankfully, new kid Blair moves to town and becomes fast friends with Rosie. She’s cool, a great listener, and even better, the best distraction from the tension Rosie feels at home. Rosie’s convinced Blair is the answer to all her dad-problems. If only Blair could be the racquetball genius Rosie’s dad has always wanted! But Blair disagrees, hoping to show her that with a friend by her side, Rosie can face both her dad and racquetball.
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Hailing from Cholla Needles Arts & Literary Library in Joshua Tree, California, Cholla Needles is a monthly print literary magazine publishing both established and emerging writers and artists whose distinctive voices and perspectives draw readers in to enjoy experiencing art, photography, and poetry. The newest issue (80) features beautifully mesmerizing cover artwork by Douglas A. Blanc welcoming readers into the issue filled with contributions from Douglas A. Blanc, Rose Baldwin, Brian Harman, Bruno Talerico, Yuan Changming, Duane Anderson, James Marvelle, Roger G. Singer, Terry Firkins, Todd Shimoda, and Jonathan Ferrini.
Lit Mag Covers: Picks of the Week recognizes cover art and designs for literary magazines, whether in print or online. These are chosen solely at the discretion of the Editor. Enjoy!
Image Summer 2023 cover features work by British artist Jake Lever, who installs his gilded “soul boats” in ancient churches. More of his work can be seen inside the publication as well as on Image‘s website.
The front and back cover of the Summer 2023 issue of The Georgia Review features detail from plumb and fathom (2022) by Las Hermana Iglesias, whose work is also featured in this issue.
The cover image of the Summer 2023 issue of The Massachusetts Review features this untitled detail photograph of James Baldwin “in and around Istanbul, Turkey, c. 1968, part of the exhibit God Made My Face: A Collective Portrait of James Baldwin curated by Hilton Als at the Mead Art Museum – selections of which are featured inside this issue as well.
The Teller’s Cage: Poems and Imaginary Movies by John Philip Drury Able Muse Press, January 2024
The poems in John Philip Drury’s The Teller’s Cage swell the heart and the imagination through their cinematic storytelling. The collection opens with baseball and culminates with persona poems starring the poet’s mother, along the way unraveling factual and fantastical chronicles in enchanting locales. Drury’s formal prowess is on display throughout this versified blockbuster. Drury earned degrees from Stony Brook University, the Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins, and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and is the author of four previous books of poetry.
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The Ledger of Mistakes by Kathy Nelson Terrapin Books, August 2023
The poems in Kathy Nelson’s The Ledger of Mistakes explore the complexities of mother-daughter love in the context of a mother’s Alzheimer’s decline and death. Old, unresolved conflicts, the daughter’s recognition of her own mortality, the lifelong desire for an unattainable closeness—these are the pressures that exert their clarifying power in these poems. While the work is rooted in personal experience, it achieves, not journalistic autobiography, but the emotional truth that can arise from poetry. The poems range widely in form: there are sonnets, a pantoum, a villanelle, a rondelet, a triolet, a prose poem as well as more unconventional forms. Kathy Nelson is the 2019 recipient of the James Dickey Award and an MFA graduate of the Warren Wilson Program for Writers.
To discover more great books from small, independent, and university presses, visit the NewPages Guide to Publishers as well as the New Books category on our blog. Subscribe to our weekly newsletter to stay up to date!
Rachel Custer’s new poetry collection, Flatback Sally Country, tells emotionally resonant stories of people who inhabit a hard-scrabble, left-behind, middle-American community. Through a combination of blunt and lyrical language, employing well-crafted formal and free-verse, these poems reliably deliver both pleasure and gut-punch. Custer’s linguistic alchemy draws the reader in from the start: “All day the sky is a closed fist [. . . ] All day the pregnant air [. . . ] It’s the kind of day that crouches low / behind your fear.” From there, each poem is as solid and satisfying as the next. Flatback Sally Country’s characters and sensibility are reminiscent of Marilynne Robinson’s novels, particularly Lila. Like Robinson, Custer shares glimpses into the lives of people born into overwhelmingly difficult circumstances. Yet, despite violence and hardship, the book flickers with redemptive moments, with love. Custer’s writing of this place and its people is a testament to survival, and to what matters. Its stunning closing, “As for me and my house, we will” is a praise song and a fitting conclusion to this review:
“praise the Lord of porkfat and Flatback Sally. [. . . ] praise hurt [. . . ] the same sin again and again. [. . . ] praise heat [. . . ] praise good killing one’s own dinner and the skin / tearing free from muscle at our hands / praise desperate land”
Reviewer bio: Mary Beth Hines writes poetry, short fiction, and non-fiction from her home in Massachusetts. Her work appears in Bracken, Crab Orchard Review, Cider Press Review, Tar River Poetry, Valparaiso, and elsewhere. Kelsay Books published her poetry collection Winter at a Summer House in 2021. Visit her at www.marybethhines.com
NewPages Guide to Independent Bookstores in the U.S. and Canada is a great resource for finding local independent bookstores both in your own area and as you travel around. There is no better way to get to know a city than to check in with their local indie bookstore(s). For authors and publishers, our list is a great resource to find sales outlets and reading venues to promote your books.
NewPages.com currently lists only brick-and-mortar stores (no online-only, pop-up, mobile, comics-only shops, or shops with books as a side business). We offer free enhanced listings in our Guide to Independent Bookstores to help booksellers connect with book lovers, so you can find a lot of info for many of the stores.
