Home » NewPages Blog » Page 13

NewPages Blog

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!

Lit Mag Covers :: Picks of the Week – October 30, 2023

October 30, 2023
Magazine Stand

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!

Cycles and Cyclones (2017) mixed media (burlap, dye, wire) by Nnenna Okore is the colorful cover of Prairie Schooner‘s Winter 2022 issue.

Slightly Foxed Journal Autumn 2023 cover image

There’s so much to appreciate about Slightly Foxed: The Real Reader’s Journal from Britain, the Autumn 2023 cover artist Maxwell Doig’s, “Southwold Rooftops II,” acrylic on canvas on panel, is the perfect invitation.

Of course, at least one Halloween-themed cover would be nice, and that honor goes to The Deadlands, a monthly online zine about death. Cover image by inkshark.

To find more great reading, visit the NewPages Guide to Literary Magazines, the NewPages Big List of Literary Magazines, the NewPages Big List of Alternative Magazines, and the NewPages Guide to Publications for Young Writers. Subscribe to our weekly newsletter to stay up to date!

lit mag covers

New Book :: Interior Landscape

October 30, 2023
New Books

Interior Landscape by Mirta Rosenberg book cover image

Interior Landscape by Mirta Rosenberg
Translated by Yaki Setton and Sergio Waisman
Ugly Duckling Presse, September 2023

Mirta Rosenberg (1951-2019) is a key poet of the ’80s generation in Argentina. In Interior Landscape, Rosenberg explores questions of life and death, of changes experienced in one’s body through time and the resulting changes in perspective. These poems contemplate the dislocation of the self, posing questions about the relationship between subjectivity, perception, the body, and memory. Rosenberg’s voice is at once autobiographical and critical, displaying the interior landscapes of its experience as well as the complex ways that language forms a fundamental part of that experience. Originally published in Spanish in Argentina in 2012, Interior Landscape is the first book-length translation of Rosenberg’s poetry to be published in English.

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!

Ugly Duckling Presse

New Book :: Tinted Trails

October 29, 2023
New Books

cover of literary magazine Tint Journal's anthology Tinted Trails: Exploring Writers in English as a Second Language

Tinted Trails: Exploring Writings in English as a Second Language edited by Lisa Schantl, Filippo Bagnasco, Andrea Farber, and Chiara Meitz
Tint Journal, November 2023

Literary magazine Tint Journal celebrates its five-year anniversary with the release of Tinted Trails, the first ever printed anthology entirely dedicated to those who write in English as a second language (ESL). This collection offers both authors and readers the chance to meet via the medium of the English language, in a whirl of perspectives, sensibilities, and idiolects.

The book showcases fiction, nonfiction, and poetry previously published online on Tint Journal and a selection of so far unpublished texts from well-established translingual voices. The breadth and the possibilities of the English language are unlocked by the variety of cultural, geographical, and personal experiences of these writers, each adding a crucial contribution to the present and future development of multilingual literature. Topical introductions by Marjorie Agosín and Juhea Kim add weight and context to the collection, while the themed sections that bring together the various texts—Belonging, (lm)Migration, Upheaval, Identities—guide the reader through the peculiarities of this fundamental collection of ESL writings. A further layer is created through the artworks curated by Vanesa Erjavec and her own text illustrations.

With its origin in such a rich and diverse literary and cultural environment, Tinted Trails proudly joins the ever-growing landscape of global literature in English.

The anthology will be presented at a festival of the same name this November in Graz, Austria, and beyond where participants can experience the variety of ESL literature with authors from all over the globe, try translingual writing themselves at a workshop, and get involved in discussions about literature, art, and life in-between it all.

Sponsor Spotlight, Tint Journal

Book Review :: Excisions by Hilary Plum

October 28, 2023
Book Reviews

Excisions by Hilary Plum book cover image

Guest Post by Susan Kay Anderson

I’m attracted at once to the cover of Excisions by Hilary Plum. It is one of those famous tapestries from Medieval times, “The Unicorn Surrenders to a Maiden,” which is part of The Unicorn Tapestry series. That theme is theorized to represent Christ (with the unicorn being hunted) and the Crucifixion/Courtly Love. The titular long poem and section weaves in and out of the world of the Unicorn Tapestry and comes face-to-face with real-life situations and circumstances that Plum shows readers. The poet seems like the maiden, then like the wounded and dying unicorn, and then like the hound who has attacked the unicorn. Each line of Plum’s poems is precise and layers itself against the next line so that each creates a huge, whole image. These are such a mix of old and new, as in these lines from “If a gun disappears it reappears”:

…like
heaving stones no archeologist
schooled in empire
declines…

The images Plum creates are intriguing and captivating. I don’t know what to do with so many of them but to go back again and again to meditate and dream.

Excisions by Hilary Plum. Black Lawrence Press, October 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).

Guest Post, reviews, What I'm Reading

New Book :: The Shining

October 28, 2023
New Books

The Shining by Dorothea Lasky book cover image

The Shining by Dorothea Lasky
Wave Books, October 2023

As labyrinthine as its namesake, Dorothea Lasky’s The Shining is an ekphrastic horror lyric that shapes an entirely unique feminist psychological landscape. Lasky guides readers through the familiar rooms of the Overlook Hotel, both realized and imagined, inhabiting characters and spaces that have been somewhat flattened in Stephen King’s novel or Stanley Kubrick’s film adaptation. Ultimately, Lasky’s poems point to the ways in which language is always haunted—by past selves, poetic ancestors, and paradoxical histories.

Wave Books

Indie Bookstores Rock!

October 27, 2023
Books

Photograph of the staff inside indie bookstore The Open Book located in Warrenton, Virginia

Indie bookstores are cozy nooks to enjoy with the onset of fall, and 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. 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 for finding 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.

If we’re missing any stores you know about, drop us a quick note!

[Thanks to our friends at The Open Book in Warrenton, VA, for the lovely staff photo!]

indie bookstores

Book Review :: Deep Are These Distances Between Us by Susan Atefat-Peckham

October 27, 2023
Book Reviews

Guest Post by Jami Macarty

Deep Are These Distances Between Us: Poems by Susan Atefat-Peckham book cover image

In an act of personal yearning, Editor Darius Atefat-Peckham offers readers his mother’s voice from beyond. In Deep Are These Distances Between Us, Iranian-American poet Susan Atefat-Peckham (1970–2004) tenders a “shining, shimmering / space” for poems prescient, prophetic, compassionate, forgiving, and ecstatic, “her hands cupped like a bowl / filled with sunlight and water and pleading.” Atefat-Peckham pleads for “words louder than the silence between them” to offer comfort to our wounded world. The poems trace “[s]hadows / we are bound by”—the Iranian state’s gender-based oppression, the Iran-Iraq War of the 1980s, Islamophobia in the aftermath of the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks—“to speak of / and hold, to carry” and resolve, “knees snapped to the earth,” in a devotional conversation with Persian mystics.

Despite the fact that Susan Atefat-Peckham died in a car accident when her son was three years old, her mind, advocacy, heart, and soul remain “bright, burning, / and alive” in her poetry. On a day when Narges Mohammadi was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize while imprisoned for her advocacy of Iranian women’s rights and sixteen-year-old Armita Geravand was dragged unconscious from a train after being beaten for not wearing a hijab, Susan Atefat-Peckham’s poems remind us that “there is always an ear listening / in the silence.” The distances between Susan Atefat-Peckham and us may be great, yet hers is unmistakably a poetry for our perilous times. Susan Atefat-Peckham is “still / in the universe.” She lives on via her poetry, which provides readers with a “place of repeated / comfort where even scars will brighten.”

Deep Are These Distances Between Us by Susan Atefat-Peckham. CavanKerry Press, May 2023.

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. More at https://jamimacarty.com/

CavanKerry Press, Guest Post, reviews, What I'm Reading

Where to Submit Roundup: October 27, 2023

October 27, 2023
Where to Submit

36 Submission Opportunities including calls for submissions, writing contests, and book prizes.

Welcome to the last official Friday in October for 2023. November kicks off next week and that means there will be several new opportunities you can enjoy! For now, don’t forget about these submission opportunities below. Plus, since it will be November next week, don’t forget to check out our list of Writing Contests with November 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.

Calls and Contests 2023

New Books October 2023

October 26, 2023
New Books, News

drawing of a bear reading a book while sitting on a stack of books

Welcome to the end of October! Hard to believe it is here already, isn’t it? With the ending of October comes our monthly breakdown of all the wonderful new and forthcoming titles that NewPages has received during the month. You can view the full list here.

If you are a follower of our blog or a subscriber to our weekly newsletter, you can see several of the titles we received featured. For publishers or authors looking to be featured on our blog and social media, please visit our FAQ page.

Still haven’t gone through the complete list from September yet? No worries. You can access the archive online here.

Book Stand 2023-10

Magazine Stand :: Southern Humanities Review – 56.3

October 26, 2023
Magazine Stand

Southern Humanities Review Issue 56.3 cover image

Southern Humanities Review issue 56.3 features the 2023 Auburn Witness Poetry Prize winner, Samyak Shertok, and his poem “Mother Tongue: A Haunting.” Judge Joy Harjo also selected Hussain Ahmed and Shannan Mann as runners-up. Other finalists include Jessica Cohn, Julia Kolchinsky Dasbach, David Moolten, Jed Myers, Wesley Rothman, Melanie Tafejian, and Felicia Zamora. The rest of the issue is filled with nonfiction by Esinam Bediako and Amy Benson; fiction by Judith Dancoff, Emmett Knowlton, Nicole Simonsen, and Heather Swain; with cover art by André Masson. On October 19, 2023, Southern Humanities Review celebrated the tenth year of the Auburn Witness Poetry Prize at an event presented by the Jule Collins Smith Museum of Fine Art with the judge and winner in conversation.

Discover loads more great lit mags with our Guide to Literary Magazines, Big List of Literary Magazines, and Big List of Alternative Magazines. If you are a publication looking to be listed in our monthly roundup or featured on our blog and social media, please contact us.

Southern Humanities Review

Magazine Stand :: Club Plum – 4.4

October 26, 2023
Magazine Stand

Volume 4, Issue 4 of Club Plum opens the door to October for you to tiptoe inside and enjoy this “Literary Horror Issue.” Maybe the door is entry to a vulnerable memory or gives way to the horrors of a childhood home. Perhaps we will enter a shed and witness our father’s obsession, or come face-to-face with our obsession in the neighborhood bar. Half-dead birds flap around our grandmother, and hogs haunt us in the road. Sometimes, though, the haunting is soft and necessary, and we strain to listen lest we miss it as we desperately conjure our beloved ghosts. Other times, we need to let our ghosts float away like ships that we don’t recognize simply so we can go on. Dare to enter and enjoy Creative Nonfiction by Faune Albert and Ainsley Davis; Flash Nonfiction by Amy DeBellis; Flash Fiction by Mileva Anastasiadou, Daniel David Froid, Enrico Gilberti, Emily Ives-Keeler, John Kucera, and George Nevgodovskyy; Prose Poetry by Helen Stevens Chinitz, Daniel A. Rabuzzi, Jonny Shae Ransbottom, and Royal Rhodes; and Art by David Boyle, Thomas Riesner and Claudia Tong.

Club Plum Literary Journal

New Book :: The Medieval Worlds of Neil Gaiman

October 26, 2023
New Books

The Medieval Worlds of Neil Gaiman: From Beowulf to Sleeping Beauty by Shiloh Carroll book cover image

The Medieval Worlds of Neil Gaiman: From Beowulf to Sleeping Beauty by Shiloh Carroll
University of Iowa Press, September 2023

Readers love to sink into Gaiman’s medieval worlds—but what makes them “medieval”? Shiloh Carroll offers an introduction to the idea of medievalism, how the literature and culture of the Middle Ages have been reinterpreted and repurposed over the centuries, and how the layers of interpretation have impacted Gaiman’s own use of medieval material. She examines influences from Norse mythology and Beowulf to medieval romances and fairy tales in order to expand readers’ understanding and appreciation of Gaiman’s work, as well as the rest of the medievalist films, TV shows, and books that are so popular today.

University of Iowa Press

Magazine Stand :: Bellevue Literary Review – Issue 45

October 25, 2023
Magazine Stand

Bellevue Literary Review‘s latest issue (45) is on the theme of “Taking Care.” In the foreword, Poetry Editor Sarah M. Sala writes: “Three years since the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic, we continue to redefine what ‘taking care’ means for us as individuals but also as an interdependent collective. In this issue of BLR, readers will find a variety of poetry, fiction, and nonfiction that explore the many facets of caregiving and how we care for one another, for ourselves, and for the world.” The issue features poetry by Richard Blanco, Jen Karetnick, and Jehanne Dubrow, fiction by Abby Seiff and Joy Guo, nonfiction by Sheree L. Greer and Eric Raymond, and many more talented writers. The evocative cover art is by Tatana Kellner.

Bellevue Literary Review

Book Review :: Intaglio Daughters by Laynie Browne

October 25, 2023
Book Reviews

Intaglio Daughters by Laynie Browne book cover image

Guest Post by Susan Kay Anderson

Okay, these are weird poems, weird-in-a-good-way weird because they excite the imagination. Browne has taken Lyn Hejinian’s [alert: L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poetry] poems and added her own two cents to them. She has not embellished them but taken a title and then riffed on it. Each poem ends with the title (which are phrases, mostly) changed around. This adds to the meaning and feeling of what Hejinian has done. It stretches the sense of things, as in “Language is as blind as sheep”:

It begins with,

Imbroglio daughters, imbroglio mind…

concluding with,

…Language unkind and steep

This adds to what Hejinian has built, and while these poems can be seen as collaborative, they use the found material of titles and transform them into sparkling jewels of poems, turning them luxurious and dazzling.

I don’t mind combing through these with the weight of mystery that comes with the territory of oblique writing like Language Poets are famous for, and away from which many, many poets run. These are poems to run to, towards the playfully topsy-turvy.

Intaglio Daughters by Laynie Browne. Ornithopter Press, September 2023.

Guest Post, Ornithopter Press, reviews, What I'm Reading

New Book :: Read Me

October 24, 2023
New Books

Read Me: Selected Works by Holly Melgard book cover image

Read Me: Selected Works by Holly Melgard
Ugly Duckling Presse, September 2023

Holly Melgard’s Read Me gathers the tools necessary to make sense of contemporary problems so ubiquitous they seem too big to name. Spanning a multiplicity of genres, media, and tonal registers, this book surveys Holly Melgard’s formally experimental poetic works produced between 2008 and 2023, including sound poems, essays on poetics, and books that exploit print on demand to, for example, counterfeit money. In often wildly comic turns of thought, Melgard’s work cleaves personal agency from automated defaults by mapping trauma and technocracy from the inside out. From critical talks to fictional monologues, the poet translates into language the unremarkable torments of neoliberalization in the digital age.

Ugly Duckling Presse

Magazine Stand :: Carve Magazine – Summer 2023

October 24, 2023
Magazine Stand

The Summer 2023 issue of Carve Magazine features short stories and interviews with Mary Grimm, Zeeva Bukai, Tobenna Nwosu, Ambata Kazi; new poetry from Barbara Tomash, James Davis, Isabel De Aguiar, and Paulette Guerin; and new nonfiction by Jeffrey Utzinger and Lauren Osborn. Additional features include Carve’s delightful “Decline/Accept,” in which an author previously declined by Carve but accepted elsewhere comments on the process along with Carve‘s reading committee and the publisher that accepted the work. “Harbor” by Kimberly Y. Liu is highlighted here. And, finally, “One to Watch” offers readers an excerpt from Take Creek, For Example by Chris Rugeley.

Carve

New Book :: The Book of Merlin

October 23, 2023
New Books

The Book of Merlin translated by Larry Beckett book cover image

The Book of Merlin translated by Larry Beckett
Livingston Press, October 2023

Larry Beckett’s The Book of Merlin is the first translation of Merlin of the Wild’s complete works. How can the writings of a 6th-century poet/prophet speak to us moderns? Page after page of battles and death answer that most succinctly. This is not the Merlin with a wand that you grew up with. Translator Larry Beckett’s poetry ranges from songs, Song to the Siren, to blank sonnets, Songs and Sonnets, to the epic American Cycle, including Paul Bunyan, Wyatt Earp, Amelia Earhart, and seven other book-length poems. His work Beat Poetry is a story of the poets and poetry of the fifties San Francisco renaissance. Beckett is currently working on a translation of Verlaine’s poetry.

Livingston Press, University of West Alabama

Book Review :: The Glass City by Jen Knox

October 23, 2023
Book Reviews

The Glass City by Jen Knox book cover image

Guest Post by Ashley Holloway

Originally published in 2017, Jen Knox’s revised edition of The Glass City is a brilliant collection of seventeen stories that fluidly combine seemingly unrelated themes together in unexpected ways. In this futuristic-yet-timely collection, Knox highlights society’s overwhelming sense of entitlement and narcissistic tendencies and their relationship to our changing climate. Each story is a mirror thrust in our faces, urging us to get over our love affair with ourselves, reminding us that “people didn’t need to further distinguish themselves from nature.” With buildings collapsing from exhaustion, virtual races run at home on treadmills, terrorist attacks, never-ending snowstorms, and characters with extra layers of toes from food contamination, Mother Nature acts as an omnipotent protagonist throughout, serving her primitive justice as a warning to society for the perils of continuing along the same trajectory. However, like the art of Kintsugi, Knox leaves us with the thought that what was once broken can indeed be salvaged and transformed into something beautiful.

The Glass City & Other Stories by Jen Knox. Press Americana, September 2023 (re-release).

Reviewer bio: Ashley Holloway teaches healthcare leadership at Bow Valley College in Calgary, AB. She writes in a variety of genres with work appearing across Canada and the US and has co-authored three books. Ashley is an editor for Unleash Press and her work has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize.

Guest Post, reviews, What I'm Reading

New Book :: Nadia

October 21, 2023
New Books

Nadia: A Novel by Christine Evans book cover image

Nadia: A Novel by Christine Evans
University of Iowa Press, September 2023

Nadia by Christine Evans moves between the competing perspectives of two survivors of the 1990s Balkan Wars who have escaped to London, only to discover that the war has followed them there. Nadia is a young refugee who just wants to forget the past—until Iggy starts temping at her London office. Afraid he may be a sniper from the war she fled, Nadia starts seeing threats everywhere, alongside unsettling visions of her lost girlfriend, Sanja. As her volatile connection with Iggy unravels, Nadia is forced to face the ethically shaky choices she made to escape the war, her survivor guilt, and her disavowed queer sexuality.

University of Iowa Press

Book Review :: What Just Happened by Richard Hell and Christopher Wool

October 21, 2023
Book Reviews

What Just Happened by Richard Hell book cover image

Guest Post by Susan Kay Anderson

Really, what just happened when I read this book of poems, scribble scrabble drawings, photographs of crows, essays, and a memoir/list? Do I finally realize why my friend Robert Christie (who was a musician) was so enamored by Richard Hell? Probably. Coming across this writer reminds me of all the things I loved about Robert and his wife, Denise, what is direct and plainspoken, what is unusual and gifted.

Hell references Bill Knott in poems, and this can tickle the funny bone in a way that is curioser and curiouser. We do get a sublime glimpse into Hell’s music life and see that it cannot be separated from his writing. Even his essays are sprinkled with pure poetic reverie, “For instance, Roy Orbison hummed like chauffeured teal.” (“Falling Asleep”) My goodness! This is genius territory, beware!

My favorite poem is “Poets,” as I have just never read what poets do and what poetry is expressed so profoundly:

what poets hope to have
their writing do is somehow
trick into being
all that time forgot

Forgetting you, we are certainly not, Richard Hell.

What Just Happened by Richard Hell with images by Christopher Wool. Winter Editions, June 2023.

Guest Post, reviews, What I'm Reading, Winter Editions

October 2023 eLitPak :: NOMADartx Review Seeks Works on the Theme of “Clarity”

October 20, 2023
Calls for Submissions

Screenshot of NOMADartx Review's clarity-themed call for submissions flyer — click image to open flyer

Deadline: Rolling
NOMADartx Review would love to see your interpretations on the theme of “clarity,” open to broad interpretation. Our cross-disciplinary online journal publishes one piece of visual art and one piece of writing (under 3500 words) monthly, and we like personal essays, paintings, poetry, photography, sketches, stories, and creative industry-specific articles. We especially welcome under-represented voices. Complete guidelines at our website.

Want early access to our eLitPak flyers? Subscribe to our weekly newsletter! You can also support NewPages with a paid subscription and get early access to the majority submission opportunities, upcoming events, and more before they are posted to our site.