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!
G. Davis Cathcart is the artist behind this sugar-crazed untitled work of a young man/boy enjoying his morning dose of Sugar Pops on the Winter 2016 cover of The MacGuffin.
Another comic cover on Green Mountains Review (v29 n1) is an illustration by Tim Mayer from OldGuy: Superhero. Selections of both poetry and images from the illustrated chapbook by William Trowbridge are featured within the issue.
Chinua Achebe fans: You’re going to want the newest issue of The Massachusetts Review (v.LVII, n.1; Spring 2016) “A Gathering in Honor of Chinua Achebe” on the front cover doesn’t quite convey the powerhouse of essays included within. The editor’s note gives more specific context: “In our Spring issue the Massachusetts Review is honored to feature the contributions to a recent symposium held at the University of Massachusetts Amherst on October 14 and 15, 2015. ‘Forty Years After: Chinua Achebe and Africa in the Global Imagination’ was hosted by the university’s Interdisciplinary Studies Institute . . .” and included physician-executive Dr. Chidi Achebe (third son of Chinua and Christie Achebe), Johnnetta Betsch Cole, Ekwueme Michael Thelwell, Denja Abdullahi, Jule Chametzky, Caryl Phillips, Okey Ndibe, Chika Unigwe, Chuma Nwokolo, Maaza Mengiste, and Achille Mbembe. Each of their contributions are included in this issue along with the originating essay, “An Image of Africa: Racism in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness” by Chinua Achebe.
The Spring 2016 issue of Rumninate Magazine celebrates ten years of publication! The volume features comments from readers, staff, and contributors who share their experience with “ruminating and contemplation – being still and attentive, pausing and listening.” The cover art, “Rhino” by Nicholas Price, actually appeared on the very first cover of Ruminate. Editor Brianna VanDyke says it is featured again as “a playful nod to our roots and the beautiful and gusty perserverances of a little arts magazine celebrating ten years.” And, in gratitude to their readership, tucked into each anniversary issue of Rhino is a gorgeous letterpress broadside which reads, “Always We Begin Again” – After St. Benedict. What a treat Ruminate has been for the past decade, and we all hope for many more to come!
Spring has sprung at Cleveland State University Poetry Center with freshly published titles added to their spring catalog, including the Editor’s Choice for the 2015 First Poetry Competition, Residuum by Martin Rock; the winner of the 2016 First Book Poetry Competition selected by Eileen Myles, My Fault by Leora Fridman; the winner of the 2015 Open Book Poetry Competition selected by Lesle Lewis, Shane McCrae, and Wendy Xu, The Bees Make Money in the Lion by Lo Kwa Mei-En; and the winner of the 2015 Essay Collection Competition selected by Wayne Koestenbaum, A Bestiary by Lily Hoang.
Readers can learn more about the individual titles (all four of them decked out in beautiful cover art) at the CSU Poetry Center website where links to interviews, past works, and author websites can also be found.
I normally try to focus my blog notes on one “something” per lit mag per post, but the newest issue of The Georgia Review has several somethings worth note. First, congratulations to the Review for achieving 70 years of continuous quarterly publication! Congratulations to Emily Van Kley whose poem “Dear Skull” won the 2015 Loraine Williams Poetry Prize and is featured as the first work in the issue. Editor Stephen Corey’s “To Our Readers” takes a fun trouncing on the form when he declares: “I hearby announce the invention and likely demise of the ‘braided editorial,’ an offshoot from the ‘braided essay’ that has been rather de rigueur in recent years in some literary circles – to such an extent that people teach how-to classes, and anthologies of such works are probably imminent.” Also worth note: William Walsh’s interview with and inclusion of several poems by Rita Dove. And this among so much else to recommend.
Since 1973, Saskatchewan’s Grain: the journal of eclectic writing has been publishing new and emerging writers. The Fall 2015 issue entitled “Who’s Knocking?” complied by guest editor Alice Kuiper, begins with a quote from Thomas Edison: “Opportunity is missed by most people because it is dressed in overalls, and looks like work.”
With sixty poems, eight fiction pieces, three nonfiction essays, four reviews, five new translations and a featured artist, the 223-page 2016 winter issue of The Cincinnati Review has more than a little something for everyone. It’s biblical in scope, thick in thought and entertaining as hell. Continue reading “The Cincinnati Review – Winter 2016”
“(Re)Collecting the Vietnam War” is the theme of unrestrained poetry, prose, drama, and art in this special issue of The Asian American Literary Review. This hefty volume can be regarded as a history, much like survivor accounts of other wars. Its five sections are each prefaced by a curator, some offering more explanation than others to illuminate what follows. Contributors to this volume straightforwardly talk about the past, present and future, while not glossing over the conflicts in Southeast Asia four decades ago.
Continue reading “The Asian American Literary Review – Fall/Winter 2015”Melissa Gwyn’s oil painting on the cover of Catamaran Literary Reader hints at the 40 spectacular works inside by various artists. Gwyn’s creations are hard for me to describe, so I’ll let her do it: “Drawing upon the opulence and detail of Netherlandish painting and the sensual materiality of Abstract Expressionism, my work explores an ‘embarrassment of riches’ that is both visual and thematic.” Her description still leaves me hanging, but it doesn’t distract from the beauty and complexity of her paintings that appear to be flowers or buds and other times appear otherworldly. Continue reading “Catamaran Literary Reader – Winter 2015”
South 85 Journal lets readers and writers know that they’re especially interested in writing with a strong voice and/or a strong sense of setting, and the writing in the Fall/Winter 2015 issue demonstrates this preference, with just enough selections in each genre to keep a reader interested without being overwhelmed. There’s no padding here, no skimming of pieces, no skipping anything over. Each piece begs to be fully consumed.
Continue reading “South 85 Journal – Fall/Winter 2015”Micro-mag Blink Ink has seen some exciting changes thus far in 2016, including a new and improved website, a special glossy-covered issue at the beginning of the year, and in the latest, #23, a postcard insert of Kristin Fouquet’s black and white, gender-bending photograph “Edgar Allen Poe-Boy.” But there’s more to Blink Ink than a new site and a fun postcard: there are also great little poems packed into every issue, issues small enough to comfortably fit in the back pocket of one’s jeans. Continue reading “Blink Ink – Number 23”
Phantom Drift is an annual journal of slipstream writing: fiction, nonfiction and poetry which experiment with fantastical and realist elements. The work published in Issue 5, Navigating the Slipstream, is unapologetic and unseats us from our perceptions of reality. Continue reading “Phantom Drift – Fall 2015”
For Polychrome Ink, the goal is simple: prove that “diversity is not a niche market.” The contributors and their content exhibit diverse sexuality, gender, religion, race, ability, and more. The authors featured dig into the intersection of power and vulnerability to tell stories where people are diverse, but most importantly: where people are people. Continue reading “Polychrome Ink – October 2015”
The Gay and Lesbian Review (G&LR) analyzes and affirms queer culture in the arts. The March-April 2016 issue, The Art of Memoir, compiles essays, book and theatre reviews, and a smattering of poetry to comment on and question how far the queer movement has come (or hasn’t). Continue reading “The Gay & Lesbian Review – March/April 2016”
The New Issues Poetry Prize is awarded annually for a first book of poems, and was awarded to Sawnie Morris in 2015 for her collection Her, Infinite. The annual Green Rose Prize is awarded to an established poet with Bruce Cohen as the 2015 winner with his collection Imminent Disappearances, Impossible Numbers & Panoramic X-Rays. Both the winning books were published last month.
Advance praise calls Morris’s collection a “polyvocal, strident book of immense intelligence” (Major Jackson) and a “sensual and imaginative evocation of the heroin’s journey” (Annah Sobelman).
Cohen “might be the keeper of some vast secret surveillance system” as his collection is filled with the our day-to-day, and our intimate thoughts and feelings (David Rivard).
More information on both these titles, as well as sample poems, can be found at the New Issues Press website.
[quotes from publisher’s website]
“Ill Met by Moonlight” is the theme of Hamilton Arts & Letters Magazine issue 8.2, which features a collage of works from artists featured in the issue, including “Steve” by Lisa Wöhrle from the portfolio “Then and Now: The (Young) Contemporaries.”
“Crow Chief” by Geri Digiorno is also a collage which invites readers in to the spring 2016 issue of Raleigh Review Literary & Arts Magazine. The publication’s new, larger format provides a spacious canvas for this work.
It helps to see the full spread on this cover art for the spring issue of Arroyo Literary Magazine: “Fiori Bacio (Lovers)” by ALE + ALE.
The Borrowed World by Emily Leithauser is forthcoming this July from Able Muse Press. Winner of the 2015 Able Muse Book Award, the poetry award presented annually, The Borrowed World is Leithauser’s first book.
Judge Peter Campion says of his selection, “Leithauser portrays the inevitability of loss, in romantic and familial relationships, and yet, without ever offering false resolutions or pat conclusions, she manages to make her poems themselves convincing stays against loss. I mean that this book is made to endure. The Borrowed World marks the arrival of a major talent.”
The Borrowed World is available for order at the Able Muse Press website, where digital editions will also be available upon publication.
“The memory is merely a summary/of the last time I remembered it,” writes Michael Penny in his wonderful poem, “In Memory.” Memory is the theme of the issue, which, among a collection of poems worth remembering, includes interviews with poets Aislinn Hunter, Laurie Block, and Doug Nepinak. I was unfamiliar with many of the poets here, most of whom have published primarily in Canadian journals, and I was happy to be introduced to their strong, original work. Continue reading “CV2 Contemporary Verse – Winter 2006”
From the moment you pick up Quick Fiction, something tells you it isn’t a standard literary journal. There’s the diminutive size, the quirky cover art, and, most notably, the refreshing and innovative selections of flash fiction. Each piece clocks in at five hundred words or less, the subject matter ranging from a surreal sexual encounter to sea turtles to an overdue library book to an interview with the CIA, featuring styles both lyrical and gritty, with some entries blurring the line between prose and poetry. Continue reading “Quick Fiction – Fall 2005”
Poetry dominates the spring edition of Bitter Oleander, a handsome, glossy journal produced by Bitter Oleander Press. This issue features work by twenty-six poets, with six excellent translations among them. Standouts include David Johnson’s stark and affecting three-part poem “Morning” and Christine Boyka Kluge’s “Swallowing Darkness”: “This is the time of night / when blackest dreams unfold / like bats from secret eaves.” Continue reading “The Bitter Oleander – Spring 2005”
Lake Effect, an annual journal published by Pennsylvania State Erie, features an eclectic selection of poetry, fiction, and creative nonfiction. This issue includes the winners of the Sonnenberg Poetry Award, the Rebman Fiction Award, and the Farrell Nonfiction award, plus brief paragraphs stating the judge’s reasons for selecting the winning manuscripts. Both winners in the prose categories are short pieces, two to three pages, and lush and surreal in tone. R.M. Evans’s “Seahorse,” the nonfiction winner, is a particularly innovative look at the author’s recurring dreams and filled with unique imagery, “I feel my alveoli distend like spinose balloon fish.” Continue reading “Lake Effect – Spring 2005”
isotope, a journal of literary nature and science writing, published by Utah State University, boasts an impressive selection of fiction, nonfiction, and poetry, in addition to a striking, full color portfolio of artwork by Richard Gate. This issue includes the winners of the first annual Editors’ Prizes: “Consumption,” a remarkable essay by Sunshine O’Donnell, and a suite of poems by Thomas Joswick that examine the life and art of John James Audubon. My favorite of Joswick’s poems is “Audubon Anticipates Dawn and Blood”: “Before sunrise, from scratching grounds, / where males assemble to strut and boom, / you may hear their rumpled notes, / followed, at times, by rapid / and petulant cackling, / like laughter.” Continue reading “Isotope – Spring/Summer 2005”
Too beautiful by half, Bardsong, The Journal for Celebrating the Celtic Spirit, is an unabashed 8.5 x 11-inch publication devoted—in both senses—to the Celtic theme which is expressed by Assistant Editor Kathleen Cunningham Guler as: “[. . .] hiraeth. Untranslatable into English, my own understanding of it has come to mean several ideals: a melancholy longing for an unfulfilled dream of the way things should have been; a need to return to the ancientness of our culture and people; and that beneath the surface of what we consciously see in the present world lies another place, one that is sacred and holds the secrets that are the heart of our heritage.” Continue reading “Bardsong – Summer 2005”
32 Poems could have taken a more minimalist approach to poetry, as its design and layout would suggest, but instead it touches on every fundamental poetic theme—life, sex, change, death—with the varied imagination of the finest journals around. With a book binder’s precision, each poem is designated to one page, never longer. Continue reading “32 Poems – Spring/Summer 2005”
This issue of AQR devotes 80 pages of photo-essay to: “Chechnya: A Decade of War,” by Heidi Bradner. “A Chechen woman holds photographs of her missing sons [. . .].” For those not au courant, Stalin deported the Chechen nation to this desolate area during World War II. Deborah A. Lott’s “Fifteen,” a moving account of her father’s legacy of insanity provides this remarkable insight: “That I made the mistake of aligning myself with the parent who was crazy because I confused his intensity with love.” Continue reading “Alaska Quarterly Review – Fall/Winter 2005”
From its attractive table-of-contents pages to ads for the Missouri Review, Notre Dame Review, and Shenandoah, New Letters is a class act, including the inside-cover ads for books by and about Peter Viereck as well as for New Letters itself. Robert Stewart’s “Allow Yourself to Say, Yes, An Editor’s Note,” includes this quotation: “‘This playfulness,’ says scholar Richard Rorty, ‘is the product . . . of the power of language to make new and different things possible and important [. . .].'” Continue reading “New Letters – 2005”
Editor Jaime Robles chooses a quotation from Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose to help define “uncanny love,” this issues’ theme: “first the soul grows tender, then it sickens…but then it feels the true warmth of divine love and cries out and moans and becomes as stone flung in the forge to melt into lime, and it crackles, licked by the flame…” But there isn’t much moaning here, as it turns out. The work in issue 22 is, for the most part, controlled, tightly wound, sure of itself, and intense. Continue reading “Five Fingers – 2006”
New Letters (v82 n2) features the winners of their 2015 Literary Awards:
The New Letters Prize for Poetry
Judge Ellen Bass
Five poems by Elizabeth Haukaas
The Alexander Cappon Prize for Fiction
Judge Jayne Anne Phillips
“A Tzaddikah Goes on the Lamb” by Cady Vishniac
The Dorothy Cappon Prize for Nonfiction Essay
Judge Floyd Skloot
“Our Little Jewish Girl” by Mindy Lewis
The contest deadline for this year is May 18, 2016 and awards a $1,500 prize for the winner in each category in addition to publication.
Every year, the University of Arkansas Press awards the Miller Williams Poetry Prize to four authors: one winner and three finalists, all of which are published with the winner receiving $5,000 in cash.
March 2016 saw the publication of the three 2016 finalists: When We Were Birds by Joe Wilkins, See You Soon by Laura McKee, and Cenotaph by Brock Jones.
Series Editor Billy Collins writes in each book’s preface:
See You Soon, the casual title of Laura McKee’s book, contains poems of powerful feeling that seem composed in the kind of tranquility of recollection. [ . . . ] [R]eaders will find in Brock Jones’s Cenotaph a new way of thinking and feeling about the reailties of combat. [ . . . ] Joe Wilkins’s [ . . . ] When We Were Birds, as the title indicates, is full of imaginative novelty as well as reminders that miraculous secrets are hidden in the fabric of everyday life.
All three titles—as well as the winning [explicit, lyrics] by Andrew Gent—are now available at the University of Arkansas Press website.
I Wanted to Write a Poem, William Carlos Williams explained why he reduced a five line stanza so that it would match a four line stanza: “See how much better it conforms to the page, how much better it looks?” Unsurprisingly, this same attention to form–form for form’s sake, as an aesthetic consideration, perhaps even more than a literary one–characterizes much of the work of the fifteen writers Seneca Review features in their Spring 2005 edition “New Lyric Essayists.” Continue reading “Seneca Review – Spring 2005”
This issue’s guest editors, Crystal Wilkinson, a professor of creative writing at the University of Indiana, and award-winning poet, Debra Kang Dean, have selected four stories, five essays, and fifty pages of poetry by established and emerging writers. I was struck by the volume’s unifying tone, which might be best described as poignant — quiet, traditional work, deeply felt, writing that is both psychologically astute and moving. Edmund August gets my vote for the most poignant title in the issue, perhaps for one of the most poignant titles of all-time: “How Will We Know Which One of Us Died First?” Continue reading “The Louisville Review – Fall 2005”
“Ooh, mail art!” Such was my glee in flipping through Fourteen Hills, which is chock full of collages by collaborators Mike Dickau & Jon Held Jr., not to mention the inimitable Winston Smith. This issue of the journal is something of a collage itself, boasting a variety of talented writers from San Francisco and from around the world. Binyavanga Wainaina’s “Hell is in Bed with Mrs. Peprah” takes the reader to a beauty shop in Kenya in the late 70s, where a young girl sits among the hot combs and gossip and listens to the educated, eccentric, and undeniably strong “Auntie” Peprah defend herself against naysayers. Continue reading “Fourteen Hills – Winter/Spring 2005”
The ten stories of this issue are eclectic in style and, alas, quality: most are engaging, many are well-written, and some could use a bit more work. Descant opens with Paul H. Williams’ “Seeds in the Cellar” about a young man who is somewhat embarrassed by his Cherokee heritage but embraces it in a private moment of mourning for his dead grandfather. Continue reading “Decant – 2004”
Black Lawrence Press annually awards The Hudson Prize for an unpublished collection of poems or short stories. In 2014, Matthew Cheney brought home the prize with his story collection Blood.
The stories in Blood, published in January 2016, range across various styles, modes, genres, and tones as they explore the worlds of family, love, memory, and loss.
More information about Blood can be found at the Black Lawrence Press website, where readers can also order copies of Cheney’s collection.
New England Review v37 n1 includes a literary criticism section entitled The Mind at the End of the Palm: Wallace Stevens Thinking. In a series of five essays, “five poet-critics consider Wallace Stevens, with a focus on Stevens as a ‘philosophical’ poet (or not). The first four were presented as a symposium at the AWP Conference in 2014 [by David Baker, Linda Gregerson, Carl Phillips, Stanley Plumly], then gathered by David Baker and edited for print; the final essay, by Carol Frost, came to NER serendipitously, at about the same time. They all look closely at Stevens’s poetry and why it continues to engage us so deeply, more than a hundred years after he published his first poems.” Baker’s contribution can be read on the NER website here.
The newest issue of The Bitter Oleander: A Magazine of Contemporary International Poetry & Short Fiction (v22 n1) features an interview with comtemporary Greek writer Dimitris Lyacos as well as a seletion of his poems from his Poena Damni triology, translated by Shorsha Sullivan. An excerpt from his interview with TBO’s editor and a selection from his featured work can be read on The Bitter Oleander’s webite here.
Always been a fan of E.E. Cummings? Then Spring is the journal for you – nothing for 234 pages but essays about Cummings, poetry influenced by Cummings, and critical examinations of his life and work, with titles like “Hermetism in the Poetry of E.E. Cummings: An Analysis of Three Obscure Poems” and “Squaring the Self: Versions of Transcendentalism in The Enormous Room.” You may see how these kinds of pieces may appeal mainly to scholars of the late poet’s work, but even amateur fans of Cummings can appreciate the playful poems, like this one by Tony Quagliano called “ON BLY ON POETRY”:
Continue reading “Spring – October 2002”
This slim but vivacious lit mag out of the University of South Dakota is bristling with content: eight short stories, twenty-eight poems, and two essays. Continue reading “South Dakota Review – Winter 2003”
Everything expected of a journal co-founded by Robert Penn Warren and Cleanth Brooks is here in an issue commemorating Warren’s 10oth birthday with his own fine prose (three letters to friends) and six memoirs—including the delightful “Places: A Memoir” by his daughter, poet Rosanna Warren. In a season in which rereading All the King’s Men for dominant themes seems ever more relevant, the brilliant short stories in this issue touch upon war in “Hot Coffee, Summer” by Christine Grillo, in John Lee’s perfect, first-published story “Fires”—”[. . .] a thin blaze over the northern horizon, and we heard that Seoul was about to fall when the pyobom, the leopard, began to appear in the valley,” and in Asako Serizawa’s memorable study of Alzheimer’s Disease “Flight,” astonishingly also a first publication. Continue reading “The Southern Review – Spring 2005”
Sometimes clichés are true: this issue of Prism International illustrates the concept that good things do come in small packages. The journal contains poetry which ranges from Bernadette Higgins’ traditional poem, “Short Wave,” describing language, music, and thoughts which tease and cross on the air late at night, to a strong contemporary poem by Matt Robinson, “why we wrap our wrists the same each time,” exploring a hockey player’s quest to “do anything” to beat his “jinx.” Ouyang Yu translates four Chinese poems from the 8th and 9th century, which are beautiful in their simplicity and complexity. Continue reading “PRISM International – Fall 2003”
The Writer’s Hotel, a hybrid writers conference that meets each June at a floating campus between three hotels in Midtown, Manhattan, is not just another writers conference. With an environment much like that of a Creative Writing MFA community, they work with each writer on a target manuscript from the moment of acceptance, for months before the conference, and offer the rare opportunity to polish manuscripts with professional editors before meeting with instructors, writers, agents, industry professionals and editors on site. There is no other writers conference quite like The Writer’s Hotel.
Writers tend to arrive at the conference feeling an artistic momentum, and come ready to bring their work to market at the heart of the publishing industry in New York City. Writers will have reading opportunities at a well-known NYC venue, will attend daily events held in inspiring locations around the city, and will participate in several intensive writing workshops, attend lectures, pitch meetings and literary events, and go on historic literary walking tours.
This year’s conference takes place from June 1-7 and faculty includes Meghan Daum, Dolen Perkins-Valdez, Scott Wolven, Shanna McNair, Marie Howe, Tim Seibles, Roger Bonair-Agard, Elyssa East, Wesley McNair, Bill Roorbach, Kevin Larimer, Carey Salerno, Elaine Trevorrow and Bethany Ball. Conference space is limited and the deadline for application is April 22, 2016. Free to apply, writers may upload 20 -25 pages of writing with a brief letter of interest at TWH’s Submittable.
Field: Contemporary Poetry and Poetics Spring 2016 issue features a strking image – no photo credit given – which shows I’m not always drawn to splashy color covers. You can read some sample poems from the issue here.
Literary Juice is an online bi-monthly of all genres of prose, poetry, and art. As the editors note: “Lately, we’ve done away with all artistrict boundaries.” This issue’s cover photo is “We Almost Rejected the Barn But No One Wants To Be Trolled by Cows” by A. Riding.
“Sad Cactus” by Netherlands photo artist Stanislaw Lewkowicz is featured on the cover of the online Hermeneutic Chaos March 2016 issue. Lewkowicz’s mezmerizing image is the perfect match for Hermeneutic Chaos, which editors consider a collection of “beautifully crafted narrative mindscapes that move us with their linguistic, emotional expanse and powerful imagery.”
In 2015, Derrick Austin was announced as the winner of the A. Poulin Jr. Poetry Prize through BOA Editions, Ltd. The prize is awarded to honor a poet’s first book, as well as honoring the publisher’s late founder. Austin’s winning title Trouble the Water will be published this month.
Rich in religious and artistic imagery, Trouble the Water is an intriguing exploration of race, sexuality, and identity, particularly where selfhood is in flux, interrogating what it means to be, as Austin says, “fully human as a queer, black body” in 21st-century America.
Copies of Trouble the Water are available for preorder at BOA Editions, Ltd.’s website.
Bitter Oleander Press has announced Christien Gholson as the winner of the 2015 Bitter Oleander Press Library of Poetry Award. Gholson’s winning book All the Beautiful Dead was released last month.
Judge Anthony Seidman calls All the Beautiful Dead “a harrowing, razor-biting collection which addresses the wounded and the outcast, in a landscape of boxcars, poppies, crows, empty fields, the lights of Las Vegas which can’t overpower the open black mouth of the desert night, and the rusted lives and emotional shrapnel ranging from Wales to Colorado, New Mexico to Gaza.”
For more information, check out the Bitter Oleander Press shop.
Maya has problems. In fact, Maya has Problems with a capital P. She’s in a boring marriage with Peter, an alcoholic with a conservative family she doesn’t fit into. She’s having an affair with Ogden, one of her former professors who is more than twice her age. She struggles with an eating disorder. Her mother has MS and struggles to care for herself. There are changes happening at her job which may leave her desperate for money. And she juggles all these problems under the haze of her biggest problem: a budding addiction to heroin. Jade Sharma guides us through the haze in her forthcoming, aptly-named novel, Problems. Continue reading “Problems”
A friend of mine said Google killed the revolutionary. The 99% feel rich. We’re numb and fat. I have access to everything I could ever want. As a matter of fact, my imagination no longer seems as vast as the possibilities created by the internet. However, M.L. Liebler confronts this notion a bit. It is a nudge of awakening. In a generation of Americans with infinite privilege, poverty isn’t even true poverty. He has seen the revolutions in Detroit and the raging in the desert on the other side of the planet. I Want to Be Once has the heart of a sage bringing wisdom to those without experience. While I may be stuck behind my computer, living a life of privilege and low conceit, seeking out only those things pertinent to me, Liebler delivers the news of reality and a slant to go along with it. The revolution is in the letter. Continue reading “I Want to Be Once”
Strange Theater brings us a reality where words can deposit you, drop you off, let you move struck by what you know, yet cannot quite believe (this is where we are at?). John Amen is in conversation with us. There is a we, and we have come to a turning point, we of this culture, we of this species, not knowing what we thought we were: Continue reading “Strange Theater”
Reading the surrealist essays in Adam Tipps Weinstein’s Some Versions of the Ice, one is quick to make comparisons. The most obvious is to magical realist writers such as Jorge Luis Borges or Italo Calvino, but there are many other resonances. His essay “The False Pigeon: A History”—a fictional account of a natural history museum—reads like it dropped straight from the pages of George Saunders’s CivilWarLand in Bad Decline, and the deceptively straightforward expositional tone that he employs throughout—which Michael Martone mentions in his wonderful blurb as a “hyper-rational empiricism [running] stoically and joyfully amok”—often echoes Lydia Davis. Continue reading “Some Versions of the Ice”
Selah Saterstrom’s Slab opens with a gripe, or a warning, perhaps, that the play won’t start. But then it does, and from page one, the story takes off at a breakneck pace and proceeds with all the force of a hurricane. Continue reading “Slab”
Italian novelist Paolo Giordano’s novella Like Family, in spite of its short length, encapsulates as much of life as his well-known novel The Solitude of Prime Numbers. His previous career as a physicist shows up in both works, while in this one, he is married with a small child employing a housekeeper. As the husband, father, and employer, he is the unnamed narrator in the story. The housekeeper, a central character, is also the child’s caretaker and confidante to the couple. The housekeeper is a middle-aged widow whom the narrator refers to Mrs. A while at the same time being named Babette by the couple (after the Karen Blixen story and film about a woman who prepares a fabulous feast to strict, frugal northerners). We do not know the housekeeper’s real name until the very end, which is important: she is family to the couple but they barely know her. Continue reading “Like Family”
