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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!

One Day I Will Write About This Place

In One Day I Will Write About This Place, Binyavanga Wainaina fulfills the promise of the title by returning to explore the paths he traveled while coming of age in Kenya and South Africa. Along the way, he traces the birth of his own desire to write down what he was experiencing, developing a complex narrative in which the personal and the public, the psychological and the political, are intertwined, sometimes joined harmoniously and at other times pulling in opposite directions. Continue reading “One Day I Will Write About This Place”

Hedda Hopper’s Hollywood

The close-up begins on the stairway. Forgotten silent star Norma Desmond (Gloria Swanson) has been lured into police custody for the murder of screenwriter/kept man Joe Gillis (William Holden, the dead narrator in the pool) with the promise of cameras. Trailing her like movie extras are several LAPD officers and an attractive older woman. She and her wide-brimmed hat are the only bright objects in the frame. Moments ago she was pleased landing the exclusive on this Hollywood cougar murder, but her demeanor crumbles watching the demented Norma walk towards the newsreel cameras until her face blurs, then fades. Continue reading “Hedda Hopper’s Hollywood”

FABRIC

One could describe Richard Froude’s FABRIC as a meditation on memory presented in prose poetry, but this description would elide too many deeply interesting facets of the work. While working from the basis of a consideration of memory’s inherent virtues and flaws, FABRIC creates a space within that consideration for the inspired moment. By “inspired,” I mean several things: the invented, the possibly mistaken, the obsessive, and the associative. Continue reading “FABRIC”

boysgirls

Fiction writers have long used the fairy tale genre as a potent vehicle for innovation and subversion, a trend that only intensified after the post-modern assault on canonical literature launched by Messrs. Barthes and Barth. By the 1960s, Italo Calvino and Jorge Luis Borges had already used the stuff of fable and fantasy to breathe new life into old forms, and authors such as Angela Carter and Robert Coover began manipulating both the form and content of classic fairy tales to interrogate and re-imagine some of the most basic assumptions of literary fiction. Continue reading “boysgirls”

For Sale By Owner

Though Kelcey Parker’s collection of short stories, For Sale By Owner, falls comfortably into the genre of discontented housewife lit—tackling subjects such as the disillusionment of a “perfect” marriage, the depression that often accompanies excessive material wealth, or the fantasies people create to distract themselves from reality—it stands out in that it has distinctly well-developed characters who are crafted with beautiful depth. Parker’s writing is thoughtful and highly literary, and she pulls readers into the disappointment of her characters’ lives while maintaining a sense of wry humor and irony. For example, in the short story “Best Friend Forever Attends a Baby Shower,” Parker describes the ache of social rejection and the growling bitterness it inspires: Continue reading “For Sale By Owner”

Mostly Redneck

Rusty Barnes’s Mostly Redneck, is, in fact, not “mostly redneck,” at least not in the way most would think of “redneck.” There are a few yokels, some pickups, a shotgun, but the pages are not inhabited by slack-jawed, one-overall-strap-loose, hill folk. The stories in this collection follow real people in all situations. For instance, in “This is What They Call Adventure,” Bob, who is simple, feeds the hens and meets a girl: Continue reading “Mostly Redneck”

The Mystery of the Hidden Driveway

In The Mystery of the Hidden Driveway, Jennifer Knox reveals a gift for making readers laugh. All 43 poems in this volume display great wit—a possible liability in hands less adroit than Knox’s. Fortunately, while rendering comical scenes, she never sacrifices pathos for a joke. Her poems feature complicated humor that emerges from funerals and interventions. Always keeping in view the high stakes for her speakers—and their friends, parents, and lovers—Knox dances on the edge of the ridiculous, obliging people to laugh at difficult situations for which there are not rational responses. Continue reading “The Mystery of the Hidden Driveway”

Alien Autopsy

There’s something to be said for the matter-of-fact voice that short-form fiction so effectively encourages. With it, images and situations that would be surprises if not entirely doubted are accepted without a bat of the lash from the narrator. Continue reading “Alien Autopsy”

It Might Turn Out We Are Real

A quotation attributed to William Butler Yeats can be found in cyberspace, “What can be explained is not poetry.” At least 63 people have “liked” this quotation, but not me. I appreciate explanation. Susan’s Scarlata’s new collection is bookended by both an introductory “Proem” and end “Notes.” The “Proem” explains that her 64 poems are: “A recoup of the Sapphic Stanza form… They are strung… linked without attempt to present any sum total.” The first poem, “What Is Your Business Here?” begins, “I dreamed I carried a snake / to a burnt cracked tree /…Our needs and wants” include “a plectrum” and we are advised to “throw these bits / in two directions at once.” “Plectrum” is explained in the notes: “A plectrum is a spear point used for striking the lyre.” Continue reading “It Might Turn Out We Are Real”

Of a Monstrous Child

In a competitive field such as creative writing, where anybody who’s anybody needs to make their name a brand, this anthology makes the monstrous crowds a family, pairing mentor with student. Each person introduces somebody else, and gives some refreshingly personal insider information on how they met and who they are. Instead of a wimpy, some-odd-word-count biography stuck in the back, the reader is provided with a backstory, making the entire collection significantly more personal. Continue reading “Of a Monstrous Child”

Documentary :: A Road Not Taken

A Road Not Taken is a book/DVD project by two Swiss artists and film makers, Christina Hemauer and Roman Keller, about the story of the Jimmy Carter White House Solar Installation.

Publisher Synopsis:

You may not remember this but in 1979, President Jimmy Carter installed solar panels on the roof of the White House West Wing.

The panels, which were used to heat water for the staff eating area, were a symbol of a new solar strategy that Carter had said was going to “move our Nation toward true energy security and abundant, readily available, energy supplies.”

But in 1986, President Ronald Reagan removed the solar panels while the White House roof was being repaired. They were never reinstalled.

In 1991, the panels were retrieved from government storage and brought to the environmentally-minded Unity College about an hour southeast of Bangor, Maine. There, with help of Academy Award winning actress Glenn Close, the panels were refurbished and used to heat water in the cafeteria up until 2005. They are still there, although they no longer function.

Swiss directors Christina Hemauer and Roman Keller follow the route the panels took, using them as a backdrop to explore American oil dependency and the lack of political will to pursue alternative energy sources.

In the movie A Road Not Taken, the filmmakers took two solar panels from Unity, placed them in the back of two students’ 1990 Dodge Ram pick-up truck (which had been retrofitted to run on vegetable oil) and delivered one of them to the Jimmy Carter Library & Museum in Atlanta and the other to the National Museum of American History in Washington.

In 1979, Carter warned, “a generation from now, this solar heater can either be a curiosity, a museum piece, an example of a road not taken, or it can be just a small part of one of the greatest and most exciting adventures ever undertaken by the American people – harnessing the power of the sun to enrich our lives as we move away from our crippling dependence on foreign oil.”

It turns out Carter’s warning was at least partially correct: two of his solar panels are museum pieces now.

Request for Small Press Display Books

A letter from Natalija & Ognjen, curators of an upcoming small press book exhibit in Croatia seeking U.S. participation:

Dear colleagues,

we would like to invite you and your press to participate in an exhibition that would present independent US presses and their editions to the literary public, but also to translators, editors, critics, and literary scholars of Croatia and the neighboring region.

This exhibition (IamN – Izlozba americkih nakladnika / Exhibition of American Independent Presses) will be organized under the auspices of ZVONA i NARI (Bells & Pomegranates) Library and Literary Retreat, and curated by us, Natalija Grgorinic & Ognjen Raden.

ZVONA i NARI is a recently founded non-profit organization based in Liznjan, Croatia with a goal of promoting literary communication across the geographical borders (more information, albeit still only in Croatian, is available at www.zvonainari.hr). The two of us are writers, writing and publishing both in Croatian and English, graduates of Otis College’s MFA Writing Program (Los Angeles, CA), who have just earned a PhD in Literature at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, OH.

Having spent the better part of the past eight years in the US, we have become well acquainted with its literary scene, especially the independent one, and have for some time been aware of how little of that scene is noticed outside of the US borders. Unfortunately, the only literature that ever gets registered on an international scale is the one that gets picked up by commercial, corporate publishers, which, in our view, accounts for a very bland picture of what American literature is about.

Hence, by organizing this exhibition, we hope to offer local Croatian translators and publishers a deeper insight into current US literary trends and potentially establish new routes for literary dialogue and exchange. To participate in this exhibition all you have to do is send us at least one copy of each title you would like us to present. We encourage you to send primarily poetry and prose (meaning fiction and literature-oriented essays) of American writers. Please, accompany your books with any information you find relevant, either in regards to the authors or your press.

Depending on the number of books we receive for the exhibition, by October 2011 we will compile both digital and print catalogues, we will present the exhibition to the general public in participating public libraries in Croatia as well as the region, and will keep the books at our library in Liznjan making them permanently accessible to translators, publishers, and literary scholars who will stay at our literary retreat.

Here we need to emphasize that programs organized by ZVONA i NARI are absolutely free to the public: writers, translators, editors, critics, indeed all active participants in the world of literature. In fact, should you or any of your authors want to visit us, we would be more than happy to present your press and your work. Unfortunately, at this time, we still have no means of covering our guests’ travel expenses – our retreat offers free accommodation and logistical support to visiting writers.

For further information, regarding the exhibition, our literary retreat, or any other matter, contact us at: [email protected] or + 385 52 540 642.

You can send your entries for the exhibition to:

ZVONA i NARI

(for IamN)

Liznjan 840 B

52204 Liznjan

Croatia – Hrvatska

Should you decide to participate, do inform us of your decision by email so that we are aware of your entry, and that we are able to better organize our activities regarding the exhibition.

If, however, you find you have no interest in presenting your titles in this way or at this time, but have other projects we could help you with, please, remain in contact.

Thank you for your time.

Best regards,

Natalija Grgorinic & Ognjen Raden

www.zvonainari.hr

Think Symposium on Forum

The most recent issue of Think Journal (3.4) is dedicated to the Symposium: What We Talk About When We Talk About Form. “This is a round-table discussion conducted between March and May, 2011, among Ernest Hilbert, Julie Kane, Kate Northrop, David J. Rothman (co-moderator), David Sanders, Timothy Steele, Marilyn Taylor, Deborah Warren, James Matthew Wilson, with Christine Yurick as the moderator. Simon Jarvis and Tom Cable were asked to comment on the discussion in its entirety and their responses are included as an epilogue.”

New Lit on the Block :: Inlandia

In an effort to spotlight the Inland Southern California region’s rich literary heritage, Inlandia: A Literary Journey features regionally-focused poems, stories, essays, memoir, novel excerpts, book reviews, interviews, and a rotating feature of work produced by participants from the Inlandia Creative Writing Workshops series.

The editorial staff is made up of: Cati Porter, Editor-in-Chief; Maureen Alsop, Associate Editor, Poetry; Jo Scott-Coe, Associate Editor, Nonfiction; Gayle Brandeis, Associate Editor, Fiction; and Ruth Nolan, Associate Editor, Fiction.

The first issues available online include fiction by Kate Anger, Rebecca K. O’Connor, Samantha Lamph, Rayme Waters, E.J. Jones, and Valerie Henderson; poetry by Nicelle Davis, Karen Greenbaum-Maya, Stephanie Barbé Hammer, Gregory Liffick, Louise Mathias, Jeff Mays, Shin Yu Pai, Jean Waggoner, Cynthia Anderson, Nancy Scott Campbell, Marcyn Clements, Mike Cluff, Rachelle Cruz, Sheela Free, Karen Greenbaum-Maya, Cindy Rinne, and Ash Russell; nonfiction by Judy Kronenfeld, as well as Inlandia Creative Writing Workshop Features.

Inlandia reads submissions year-round.

New Lit on the Block :: Adanna

Adanna: A Journal for Women, about Women was created by Editor Christine Redman-Waldeyer as a way that she, a mother of three with a teaching career, could “pursue the writing life without traveling.” Her lifetime of wanting “to be utterly female and to do what the boys could do” is also in the philosophy of creating a magazine open to all, but that specifically “celebrate[s] the lives and writing of women.” Redman-Waldeyer hopes that Adanna will “offer women a new opportunity to publish in a publishing world where the gender scales are too often unfavorably tilted.”

The next submission period for Issue #2 is January 31-April 30, 2012, but Adanna is currently accepting “love poetry” for a contest. The 50 poems selected will be published in a perfect-bound print edition.

The inaugural issue of Adanna is guest edited by Diane Lockward, and includes the following contributors:

POETRY
Jennifer Arin, Janet A. Baker, Carol Berg, Kristin Berkey-Abbott, Pam Bernard, Debra Bruce, Sarah Busse, Laura Cherry, Laura E. Davis, Jessica G. de Koninck, Erika Dreifus, George Drew, Lois Parker Edstrom, Susan V. Facknitz, Patricia Fargnoli, Ann Fisher-Wirth, Alice B. Fogel, Ruth Foley, Maria Gillan, Maryanne Hannan, Penny Harter, Ann Hostetler, Adele Kenny, Claire Keyes, Kathleen Kirk, Jacqueline Kolosov, Judy Kronenfeld, Michelle Lerner, Robin Lim, Diane Lockward, Sandy Longhorn, Angie Macri, Marjorie Maddox, Greg McBride, Judith H. Montgomery, Julie L. Moore, Jim O’Rourke, Connie Post, Susanna Rich, Helen Ruggieri, Judith Skillman, Sarah J. Sloat, Molly Spencer, Christine Stewart-Nunez, Madeline Tiger, Ingrid Wendt, Laura S. Whalen, TJ Wiley, Lisa Zimmerman

SHORT STORIES
Margo Berdeshevsky, Colleen S. Harris, Liesl Jobson, Lani Friend, Nwamaka Osakwe, Pramila Venkateswaran

CREATIVE NON‐FICTION
Jessica McCaughey, Yelizaveta P. Renfro

ESSAY
Beatrice M. Hogg

Memoir (and) Prize Winners

The Memoir (and) Prizes for Memoir in Prose or Poetry are awarded to the most outstanding prose or poetry memoirs—traditional, nontraditional or experimental—drawn from the submission period.

Issue 8 (2011) of Memoir (and) awarded Grand Prize to David Norman, “Flight Patterns”; Second Prize to Charles Atkinson, “Passing Bell for Kobun Chino, Sensie”; and Third Prize to William Caverlee, “Longleaf Parish.” Each contributor receives a cash award in addition to publication.

The submission period for Issue 10 is now open and will close at noon Pacific time, August 16, 2011.

Michael Redhill Steps Down

Michael Redhill will step down as proprietor and publisher of Brick effective with the publication of the current issue (87). In his introduction to the issue, Redhill explains that he will still be with the magazine as part of an editorial/ownership collective which also includes Michael Helm, Michael Ondaatje, Esta Spalding, Linda Spalding, and Rebecca Silver Slayter.

Redhill imparts some of what he has learned from his having “been involved with Brick, in one form or another, for much of [his] adult life.” He writes:

This is the eighty-seventh issue of Brick, a small Canadian literary journal that has existed for thirty-three years and, at any given time, has never had more than 2.5 employees. As a business model, Brick could be in MBA textbooks as an example of what not to do. A small cultural concern is about the worst kind of business you could have: humans may begin to die from the moment they’re born, but arts businesses need daily resuscitation from the moment of inception. Innovation, legwork, networking, enthusiasm, and a refusal to be surprised by disaster are just a few things you need to make a go of it. And success is not expressed in profit, or even survival. Success for something like Brick is simply being able to play a meaningful role in a time and place, be part of a conversation, and stick around at least long enough to be taken seriously. In that regard, Brick has been a smashing success and all signs point to it continuing to succeed for many years to come.

Cooking in Rome with Alimentum

Cook & Tour in Rome, Italy w/ Alimentum Publisher Paulette Licitra
October 11-17, 2011

Shop at the outdoor food markets, small food shops, Roman supermarkets and bring the bounty back to a fabulous apartment in the historic center of Rome to cook and dine.

Tour Rome’s best of best places: Piazza Navona, Trevi Fountain, Pantheon, Spanish Steps, Capitoline Hill, Coliseum, St. Peter’s, Teatro Marcellus, Bocca di Verita, and more, plus great neighborhoods for shopping: boutiques, flea markets, and department stores.

The Good Books

Issue #14 of PEN America features The Good Books, in which over fifty writers — including Yiyun Li, Anne Fadiman, Karen Russell, Gary Shteyngart, David Shields, and many more — choose the works in translation they’d bring to a great global book swap. Several contributions are available for reading online.

Vote: Million Writers Award 2011

The storySouth Million Writers Award is for any fictional short story of at least a 1,000 words first published in an online publication during 2010. “Publication” means any magazine or journal with an editorial process (so self-published stories are not eligible). The deadline for nominations was March 15, 2011. The list of notable stories of the year was released on April 17, 2011, and the top ten stories were released on June 6.

NewPages Reviewer Henry Tonn offered his own take on the selections before they went to Sanford and two other judges to choose the final ten.

Voting on the top stories of the year will last for one month after the top ten stories are released, so the rest is up to you! Visit storySouth Million Writers Award page by July 6 to read and vote on the following top ten online stories of 2011:

“Hell Dogs” by Daphne Buter (FRiGG: A Magazine of Fiction and Poetry)
“Arvies” by Adam-Troy Castro (Lightspeed Magazine)
“The Green Book” by Amal El-Mohtar (Apex Magazine)
“Do You Have a Place for Me” by Roxane Gay (Spork Press)
“Here is David, the Greatest of Descendants” by Spencer Kealamakia (Anderbo)
“The Incorrupt Body of Carlo Busso” by Eric Maroney (Eclectica)
“Cancer Party” by Nicola Mason (Blackbird)
“Arthur Arellano” by Viet Thanh Nguyen (Narrative Magazine)
“Elegy for a Young Elk” by Hannu Rajaniemi (Subterranean Magazine)
“Most of Them Would Follow Wandering Fires” by Amber Sparks (Barrelhouse)

EdgePiece Promises to Work With You

Just when I thought I’d heard it all (sometimes over and over), along comes a whole new and ambitiously innovative new publication. Still in the submission stage for its inaugural issue, EdgePiece is a collective of “emerging editors launching emerging writers.”

The editors include Head Editor Sarah Lindsay, Readers and Developmental Editors Sarah Lucas, Dakota Morgan, Pamela S. Wall, Katie Damphousse, Max Pickering, and Copy Editor Pamela S. Wall.

The editorial process, and the use of “developmental editors” means the editors will work with authors to help them polish their work to prepare them for publication: “We edit for spelling, grammar and in some cases, clarity/strength of arguments/purpose. We do NOT touch the author/artist’s voice, vision, or personal style, and we never fully reject a piece. We suggest improvements and encourage the author/artist to resubmit, for we are capable of seeing the potential in all submissions we receive.”

EdgePiece is currently “hungry” for fiction, non-fiction, poetry, with consideration for book/essay/poetry/film reviews, photography and other graphic/visual art for their first tri-annual issue.

Interviews: Amy Chua and Jessica Hagedorn

Kartika Review, a national Asian American literary arts journal, recently published Issue 9 for Spring 2011. The issue features two author interviews, with Amy Chua on her memoir Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother and Jessica Hagedorn on her novel Toxicology. Kartika Review is available in print as well as online.

New Lit on the Block :: Fjords

Editors John Gosslee and Sarah Gallagher, along with a full staff, bring forth Fjords, a full-color, print annual “comprised of new cultural developments in art and literature,” featuring fiction, poetry, photography, visual art, new voices, authoritative figures, occasional biographies, interviews and film reviews.

The editors both solicit works from writers and artists, but maintain an open submission policy, “which creates a diverse collection of regional and international works from different eras, movements, and languages.” In addition to the print publication, Fjords also publishes some of its authors in a strictly audio format, which can be found on their website.

Included in the first print edition: poems by Carolyn Kreiter-Foronda, Corey Mesler, Olympia Sibley, Juliana Kocsis, J. J. Steinfeld, and 20th Century Ukrainian Poet Pavlo Tychyna translated by Stephen Komarnyckyj; the article “Ecclesiastic: a Font Orphan: Typographer Ed Edman restores a Font” by John Gosslee; prose by Judy Light Ayyildiz, Stephen Wade; art by Clay Witt and Suzun Hughes.

Fjords‘s next deadline for submissions is August 1, 2011

Publications :: Public Knowledge

Public Knowledge Journal is a multidisciplinary, graduate student-run, electronic journal hosted by the Center for Digital Discourse and Culture at Virginia Tech (ISSN 1948-3511). The journal incorporates a variety of communication technologies to sustain a conversation about the topics and questions raised in each issue. The journal welcomes contributions of articles for peer review, as well as book reviews, essays, interviews, and other works using a variety of media.

Public Knowledge Journal seeks articles, book reviews, essays, interviews, and multimedia submissions for Volume 3, Issue 2, on Academic Research. The deadline for scholarly articles and book reviews is September 1, 2011. Non-peer-reviewed and multimedia work will be considered throughout the lifespan of the issue.

NewPages Updates :: June 21, 2011

Added to NewPages Big List of Literary Magazines
Timber – poetry, fiction, creative non-fiction, digital lit
Tulane Review – poetry, fiction, artwork
Caesura – poetry
bottle rocket – haiku, senryu, tanka, haibun
Thoughtsmith – poetry, prose, drama, articles, essays, critiques, photography, digital art
5 Chapters
Doorknobs & BodyPaint – fiction, poetry, essay, reviews
Calibanonlione – online poetry, fiction, art, music, art video
Narwhal – fiction
Tak’til – poetry, fiction, non-fiction, art
The Quotable – poetry, fiction, nonfiction, art, photography
C4 – poetry, fiction, nonfiction, digital art
Entasis – poetry, fiction, nonfiction, art, photography
The White Review – (UK) poetry, fiction, nonfiction, essays, politics, culture, translations
Scythe Literary Journal – poetry
Untitled Country Review – poetry, art, book reviews, interview

Added to NewPages Guide to Independent Publishers & University Presses
Ashland Creek Press
Greenpoint Press
Cy Gist Press
Tiny Hardcore Press
Arbutus Press
Infra-Thin Press
Engine Books
One Peace Books

Added to NewPages Guide to Misc Lit Sites and Blogs
The Monarch Review – Seattle’s literary & arts magazine
Red Booth Review – poetry, photography, artwork

April Family Matters Contest Winners

Glimmer Train has just chosen the winning stories for their April Family Matters competition. This competition is held twice a year and is open to all writers for stories about family. The next Family Matters competition will take place in October. Glimmer Train’s monthly submission calendar may be viewed here. First place: Rebecca Podos, of Brookline, MA, wins $1200 for “The Fourth.” Her story will be published in the Fall 2012 issue of Glimmer Train Stories. [Photo credit: Holli Downs.]Second place: Marjorie Celona, of Madison, NY, wins $500 for “Gladstone.” Her story will also be published in an upcoming issue of Glimmer Train Stories, increasing her prize to $700.

Third place: Clark Knowles of Portsmouth, NH, wins $300 for “Each Other’s Business.” His story will also be published in an upcoming issue of Glimmer Train Stories, increasing his prize to $700.A PDF of the Top 25 winners can be found here.Deadline soon approaching for the Fiction Open: June 30Glimmer Train hosts this competition quarterly, and first place is $2000 plus publication in the journal. It’s open to all writers and there are no theme restrictions. The word count generally ranges from 3000 – 8000, though up to 20,000 is fine. Click here for complete guidelines.

New Managing Editor at Artifice

One of Artifice‘s founding editors, Rebekah Silverman, is leaving the magazine to pursue a position advancement with her job at a nonprofit called Growing Home. James Tad Adcox remains as editor, and Ian McCarty is stepping in as the new managing editor. Apparently “more changes” are afoot, but nothing has yet been revealed.

Chicago Review: New Italian Writing

Chicago Review 56.1 is an issue devoted to New Italian Writing: Poetry, fiction, and criticism translated into English for the first time. Translators include: V. Joshua Adams, Anne Milano Appel, Sarah Arvio, Robert P. Baird, Lisa Barca, Patrick Barron, Jacob Blakesley, Joel Calahan, Maggie Fritz-Morkin, Elizabeth Harris, Chris Glomski, Peter Hainsworth, Laura Modigliani, Dylan J. Montanari, Gianluca Rizzo, Jennifer Scappettone, Dominic Siracusa, Kate Soto, and Paul Vangelisti.

The issue also includes a comprehensive checklist of recent Italian anthologies and letters by Cole Swensen, Kent Johnson, John Gallaher, and Richard Owens in response to Keith Tuma’s essay “After the Bubble” (CR 55-3/4).

A complete list of contents is available on the here.

New Lit on the Block :: The Newtowner

Based out of Newtown, CT with a focus on the local arts community, The Newtowner is also open to and encouraging of national readership and submissions. The quarterly, trade-sized print publication includes fiction, poetry, creative non-fiction, essays, features, columns, artwork and photography, cartoons, profiles and interviews with local writers and artists, book reviews, “On the Town” – arts reviews of local theatre, dance, music and arts events, “Off Main St” – cultural events and locations of interest outside our local area, “The Newtowner Book Club” – read along and join discussions online, a directory of local arts and literary groups, and a calendar of local arts and literary events.

The Newtowner also includes “Youth Expressions,” a section of the magazine for young artists, poets and writers and visual artists. Currently, The Newtowner accepts creative nonfiction, fiction, columns, poetry, art and photography mediums from high school- and middle school-aged students.

Founding Editor Georgia Monaghan writes: “Newtown has a unique literary, artistic, and community spirit dating back to the philanthropist Mary Hawley, who laid the foundation for Newtown’s excellence in education and the arts. Boasting an inordinate number of literary and artistic residents both past and present, Newtown continues to act as a magnet, attracting established and emerging writers and artists of every kind. How many small-town libraries have a whole section dedicated to their town’s authors and illustrators? How many towns of this size can boast upwards of twenty book clubs within its borders?”

And now The Newtowner itself can be added to those bragging rights!

Full subscription and submissions guidelines can be found on The Newtowner website.

TLR Goes Emo

“Emo, Meet Hole” is the title of The Literary Review‘s Spring 2011 issue. Editor Minn Proctor writes, “Whether or not I associate emo (acute aesthetic sensitivity disorder coupled with a tendency to self dramatization) with poetry because Lord Byron is an oft-cited progenitor or because my ex-poet-boyfriend liked Morrissey too much, the spectre of a brooding young man with wet eyes and disheveled hair looks quaintly over a certain tenor of literature…and exes, too. Much to my poetry editor’s dismay, I called for an emo-themed issue of TLR. My undergraduate interns thought it was hilariously apropos and everyone else thought I was speaking in tongues. And yet we moved forth.”

The result is the current issue, with poetry, fiction, and essays by over a dozen authors as well as a variety of book reviews. Several pieces are available full-text online: Poetry by Michael Morse, “Void and Compensation (Poem as Aporia Between Lighthouses),” and Michael Homolka, “Thirteenth Birthday”; Fiction by Christine Sneed, “Roger Weber Would Like To Stay”; and an essay by Anthony D’Aries, “The Language of Men.”

[Cover art by Carrie Marill.]

Farid Matuk’s Debut Collection Recognized

Letter Machine Editions celebrates the dual selection of Farid Matuk’s debut collection This Isa Nice Neighborhood for Honorable Mention in the 2011 Arab American Book Awards (administered by the Arab American National Museum) as well as the runner-up for the Norma Farber First Book Award by the Poetry Society of America. This September, Farid will be honored at the Awards Ceremony of the Arab American National Museum in Washington, D.C. In anticipation of this event, Letter Machine Editions is offering copies of the book for $10 postage paid until September 1.

New Publication :: Boat Magazine

In the introduction to the inaugural issue of Boat Magazine, Editor Erin Spens writes, “We got a few blank stares when we told people we were picking up our 8-month-old studio and moving it to Sarajevo for a month to make a magazine. We suspected there were a few reasons for the confusion; magazines seem to be a dying art form, moving a brand new business in the middle of a recession is ludicrous, and Sarajevo? Where is Sarajevo? Precisely.”

The concept for Boat Magazine is a fresh one. Travel to “forgotten cities,” dock there for a month and set up a publication studio that pulls together “the most talented people we know; writers, photographers, illustrators, musicians… gave them a blank canvas, and set them loose on the streets” to create a magazine focused on that host city. Sarajevo is their first stop on this new venture.

The magazine features works by Dave Eggers, Jasmin Brutus, Lamija Hadžiosmanović, Ziyah Gafić, Max Knight, Sarah Correia, Jasmin Brutus, Zoë Barker, Davey Spens, Milomir Kovačević, Danis Tanović, Lara Ciarabellini, Bernie Gardner, Enes Zlatar Bure, Jonathan Cherry, Sam Baldwin, Neno Navaković, Agatha A. Nitecka, and Sophie Cooke.

The Southern Review – Spring 2011

Admittedly, I was a bit tentative when I began reading the latest issue of The Southern Review. When I hear the word “Americana,” its self-proclaimed theme, certain images are conjured—flat beers, hunters waiting in the pre-dawn darkness, the barefoot and pregnant teenage fatherless-yet-sweethearted girl working in a diner on the side of a barren highway—of which I have become a bit tired. Let us call those images shortcomings of my imagination; I had no idea of the depth and variance to the works waiting inside this publication’s pages. Produced by Louisiana State University, it is an engrossing and well-balanced mix of poetry, fiction, nonfiction, and photography. Continue reading “The Southern Review – Spring 2011”

Adbusters – May/June 2011

This issue of Adbusters, subtitled POST—with an Arabic word insertion—WEST, is at first glance an irreverent avant-garde (the publishers probably think using avant-garde is passé) mish-mash of advertisements, graphics, photographs, art, essays, book excerpts, observations, and poetry about economics, capitalism, politics, jihad, revolution, militarism, overpopulation, aquaculture, genetic modification, anarchy, and you name it.

Continue reading “Adbusters – May/June 2011”

Social Policy – Spring 2011

Unless one is a regular reader of Social Policy magazine, there may be some confusion, despite Wade Rathke’s “Publisher’s note.” He says the Spring 2011 issue is “in perfect harmony with the heart and spirit needed in these times, despite the challenges of adversity…and challenges of our…heroic strengths and weaknesses.” If Social Policy is “[the] key site for intellectual exchange among progressive academics and activists from across the United States and beyond,” it would be instructive and helpful to say so in the boilerplate masthead or logo. Their website says, “Social Policy seeks to inform and report on the work of labor and community organizers who build union and constituency-based groups, run campaigns, and build movements for social justice, economic equality, and democratic participation in the U.S. and around the world.” Again, why not say so in the magazine? Its cover does include “Organizing for Social and Economic Justice.”

Continue reading “Social Policy – Spring 2011”

Able Muse – Winter 2010

In the inaugural print edition of Able Muse, Marilyn N. Taylor’s essay on the recent rise of semi-formal poetry, mentions “the poetry wars” between “the shaggy free-verse stalwarts vs. the tweedy New Formalists.” It’s nice to see that the new New Formalist critics published in Able Muse definitely do not write in a tweedy style, as evidenced by Taylor’s piece and Julie Stoner’s review of new books by Maxime Kumin and Carrie Jewell, which begins “After the Revival…reminds me of an after-school snack. I enjoyed the combination of salt and crunch and grease and hellfire and cheese, even if I had to overcome the occasional wave of nausea. (I’m still referring to the book.)” Continue reading “Able Muse – Winter 2010”

Black Warrior Review – Spring/Summer 2011

The Spring/Summer Issue of Black Warrior Review, featuring Graham Foust, Aaron Kunin, Bhanu Kapil, Sarah Gridley, Joshua Cohen, Megan Volpert, and many other fine writers, is difficult not to pick up and thumb through. The ritualistic cover art gets the issue going: two guys, two girls, all with skeleton heads, watching a horse as it is either pulled into the sky or brought down from it. More in this series by Joseph McVetty can be found later in the issue, in the Nudity Feature. Continue reading “Black Warrior Review – Spring/Summer 2011”

Cave Wall – Winter/Spring 2011

In his Editor’s Note, Rhett Trull explains that, while she has “learned the patience, struggle and mercy of a body as it heals,” she recognizes—in the dying of Pita, her 20-year-old cat—that “one day” we will “reach a point past healing.” As a result, “My appreciation for each moment,” she says, has been “reinforced” by the poems she helped select for this issue. The poems, lyric and narrative, feature speakers whose distance from the poets seems slight. Continue reading “Cave Wall – Winter/Spring 2011”

The Georgia Review – Spring 2011

Wow, this issue of Georgia Review is a true literary bonanza! Subtitled “A Home in Other People,” the issue offers a broad retrospective of selected stories and art from 1984 to 2007. This is the second retrospective that the Review has done; the first one came out in 1986, and now the staff is both celebrating the 25th anniversary of that first retrospective, in addition to marking the start of the Review’s 65th year. Continue reading “The Georgia Review – Spring 2011”