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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!

Magazine Stand :: New England Review – 43.4

New England Review print literary magazine Issue 43.4 cover image

Editor Carolyn Kuebler opens issue 43.4 of New England Review with a reflection on the shift in submissions to the publication throughout the pandemic, how “Covid-19 is no doubt the best documented pandemic of all time” and how quickly the situation changed around us so that in choosing works to publish, “it was more often the defining factor in pieces we did not publish. We didn’t need anyone to tell us how strange this all ways. Something stranger still was already taking place.” Kuebler writes, “So much of this writing felt a few steps behind, even in just a matter of weeks or months.” Recognizing how it has become woven into contemporary works, and also that pre-pandemic writing or writing that does not acknowledge it at all, reveals how “writers are able to fully inhabit, imaginatively, a world that preceded 2020, as well as they can inhabit this new one.”

This issue offers readers a Covid diary by Zoe Valery, Leath Tonino’s defense of the American Outback, a short play by British author Charlotte Turnbull, multi-page excerpts from poem sequences by Sandra Simonds and Diana Khoi Nguyen, new shorter poems by Kim Addonizio, Aumaine Rose Smith, and Josh Tvrdy, explorations into the archives by Michelle Peñaloza and Nicky Beer, first English translations of poems by Meret Oppenheim and Daniela Catrileo, new short stories by Yume Kitasei, Megan Staffel, and J. E. Suárez, and in “Rediscoveries,” Donald Mackenzie Wallace’s excerpt “Revolutionary Nihilism And Romantic Notions” taken from the 1912 edition of Russia, published in London by Cassell and Company. Some content is available for readers to access for free online.

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!

Magazine Stand :: The Malahat Review – Issue 220

The Malahat Review print literary magazine Issue 220 cover image

The Malahat Review Issue 220 features the winner of their Far Horizons Award for Poetry, “Inner Child Work” by Meryem Yildiz, as well as poetry by Chelsea Coupal, Joel Harris, Ana Rodriguez Machado, Richard Sanger, Susan Glickman, Rachel Crummey, Ben Gallagher, Shauna Andrews, Sarah Yi-Mei Tsiang, A. Light Zachary, Manahil Bandukwala, Tasos Leivaditis, N. N. Trakakis, Annick MacAskill, Carl Watts, Camille Lendor, Jérémi Doucet, Erin Conway-Smith, Daniel W. K. Lee; fiction by Rachel Lachmansingh, Susan Sanford Blades, Zilla Jones, Shazia Hafiz Ramji; and creative nonfiction by Gabriel Cholette, Brian O’Neill, and Monica Wang. Readers can find an online interview with Shazia Hafiz Ramji about her story, “Selvon in Calgary.”

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!

Book Review :: Foster by Claire Keegan

Foster by Claire Keegan book cover image

Guest Post by Kevin Brown

Like Keegan’s earlier book, Small Things Like These, Foster is slight in size, but not in emotional heft. This novella tells the story of a nameless girl in the Irish countryside whose parents must send her to stay with neighbors for a summer while her mother is pregnant. The main financial problem seems to be her father who loses cows in card games and has a liquid supper on a regular basis, while her mother has too many children to pay attention to all of them. The Kinsellas, who take the girl for the summer, don’t care much for her father, Dan, and it’s clear he thinks similarly of them. The situation is one of convenience more than care. Or so it seems. The Kinsellas love the girl in a way that neither of her parents do, a care they show in small ways that seem obvious: her new clothes and a bit of spending money for ice cream; a lack of shame when she wets the bed; lessons on how to read and cook. By the end of the novella, the Kinsellas have fostered the girl not only by keeping her for a few months, but by encouraging her, nourishing her, promoting her development, and, most importantly, cherishing her.

Foster by Claire Keegan. Grove Atlantic, November 2022.

Reviewer bio: Kevin Brown has published three books of poetry: Liturgical Calendar: Poems (Wipf and Stock); A Lexicon of Lost Words (winner of the Violet Reed Haas Prize for Poetry, Snake Nation Press); and Exit Lines (Plain View Press). He also has a memoir, Another Way: Finding Faith, Then Finding It Again, and a book of scholarship, They Love to Tell the Stories: Five Contemporary Novelists Take on the Gospels. Twitter @kevinbrownwrite or kevinbrownwrites.weebly.com/.

New Book :: A Fire in the Hills

A Fire in the Hills by Afaa Weaver book cover image

A Fire in the Hills by Afaa Weaver
Red Hen Press, April 2023

In A Fire in the Hills, Afaa Weaver focuses on one of the central threads in his body of work. His ongoing project of an articulation of self in relation to the external landscape of the community and the world and the writing of spirit through those revelations of sublimation of self gives way here to a material focus. The racial references are explicit as are the complexities of life lived as a Black man born in America in the mid-twentieth century. These are poems emanating from an attempt to follow Daoist philosophy for most of his life. Knowledge of other is in relation to knowledge of self, and self is an illusory continuum, a perspective wherein the poet embodies the transcendent arc of Malcolm X’s life as credo.

To find more great books from small, independent, and university presses, visit the NewPages Guide to Publishers as well as the New Books category on our blog. Subscribe to our weekly newsletter to stay up to date!

New Book :: The Naked Room

The Naked Room poetry by Willa Schneberg book cover image

The Naked Room by Willa Schneberg
Broadstone Books, January 2023

Poetry is a form of writing ideally suited to the expression of emotion and the most profound and subtle workings of the mind. But what if that mind is shattered, and those emotions in disarray? Such is the subject explored in Willa Schneberg’s new poetry collection The Naked Room, which draws on her experiences as a therapist to take readers on a journey through the disturbing history of psychotherapy and the treatment of mental illness, and into the current state of the art and state of the world. What keeps this from being a grim undertaking is the sheer beauty and precision of her language, as in this passage from “Tiny Monuments” describing the urns that hold the cremated remains of patients at the Oregon State Hospital (depicted on the cover of the book in a photograph by the poet): “These tiny monuments to the scorned and unknown, / wear patinas of pink, burnt sienna, ocher, aqua, / and if you look closely you will find / moon craters, archipelagos, frozen waterfalls, / Big Dippers and dunes with lone tracks.” The goal of healing that drives her therapeutic practice informs these poems as well, ending in the necessity of love, her closing image that of a long-time couple spooning in bed, “as if we would always / fit that way.” These poems, too, fit that way, a comforting reassurance.

To find more great books from small, independent, and university presses, visit the NewPages Guide to Publishers as well as the New Books category on our blog. Subscribe to our weekly newsletter to stay up to date!

New Lit on the Block :: NĪNSHAR Arts

Ninshar Arts online literary magazine 2022 cover image

If you seek “musings, hallucinations, fantasies, determinations and peregrinations that depart formal structures and do not recognize parameters,” then you need look no further than NĪNSHAR Arts, an open access online publication of poetry, fiction, creative nonfiction, paintings, drawings, etchings, photography, digital art, and sculpture images publishing on a rolling basis.

Continue reading “New Lit on the Block :: NĪNSHAR Arts”

New Book :: TimeLock

TimeLock novel by Howard Berk and Peter Berk book cover image

TimeLock by Howard Berk and Peter Berk
IngramElliott Publishing, September 2022

Reading TimeLock by Howard Berk and Peter Burk is a great way to celebrate National Science Fiction Day (January 2). In the crime-ridden near future where a bold new technology transforms the justice system and challenges America’s moral compass, the President authorizes a hugely controversial program: TimeLock, a cellular acceleration process whereby select prisoners are instantly aged the total number of years of their sentence. In other words – three strikes and you’re old . . . very old. Only one problem—what happens if someone is innocent? When everyman Morgan Eberly is arrested for a murder he didn’t commit, he’s subjected to this experimental new technology. Now 43 and on the run, Morgan teams up with Janine Price, the FBI agent who arrested him, as they embark on a dangerous quest to find out the terrifying truth behind the TimeLock program.

Special thanks to Peter Berk for this title which he co-wrote with his late father, Howard. “My dad – Howard Berk – wrote numerous shows, films and novels, with credits including Columbo, The Rockford Files and Mission: Impossible. A few years before his passing, we wrote a screenplay which I later novelized along with several sequels also based on related scripts. TimeLock is the first of five planned novels in the series.”

Magazine Stand :: The Massachusetts Review – Winter 2022

The Massachusetts Review literary magazine Winter 2022 issue cover image

“Disability Justice” is the newest issue of The Massachusetts Review. Guest edited and introduced by Cyrée Jarelle Johnson and Khairani Barokka, the volume presents “writing by disabled authors that pushes back against dominant depictions of disabled people as helpless, minor, or merely as patients and nothing more. . . The work in this issue reclaims the narrative of illness and disability from medical experts and scientists. It centers the wisdom and expertise of those living painful lives, sick lives, disabled lives, neurodivergent lives. It insists that such lives are worth living, are beautiful, are deserving of documentation. It brings our universes into being and our bodies into focus.”

Contributors include Zuo You, Zefyr Lisowski, Claude Olson, Brian Teare, Vivian Li, Lynn Buckle, Djenebou Bathily, Levent Beskardes, Bhavna Mehta, Ally Zlatar, Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha, Saleem Hue Penny, Rosebud Ben-Oni, Michelle Renee Hoppe, Ife Olatona, Panteha Abareshi, Andy Jackson and Gaele Sobott, Adrienne Marie Barrios and Leigh Chadwick, Christine Barkley, Abu āl-`Alā´ al-Ma`arrī, Camisha Jones, Jodie Noel Vinson, Maureen Seaton, Ellen Samuels, Kay Ulanday Barrett, Olivia Muenz, Clare Richards, John Newton Webb, , Travis Chi Wing Lau, Daniel Sluman, Pinka PopsicKle, Ekiwah Adler-Belendez, Kieran Mundy, Joselia Rebekah Hughes, Wakaya Wells, Yi Zhe, Stephanie Papa, and Salma Harland. Some content is available to read free online.

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!

New Book :: Stories No One Hopes Are About Them

Stories No One Hopes Are about Them Short Fiction by A. J. Bermudez published by University of Iowa Press book cover image

Stories No One Hopes Are About Them
Short Fiction by A. J. Bermudez
University of Iowa Press, November 2022

At once playfully dark and slyly hopeful, Stories No One Hopes Are About Them explores convergences of power, privilege, and place. Characters who are ni de aquí, ni de allá—neither from here nor there—straddle competing worlds, disrupt paradigms, and transition from objects of other people’s stories to active subjects and protagonists of their own. Narratives of humanity and environment entwine with nuanced themes of colonization, queerness, and evolution at the forefront. Big things happen in this collection. But it’s also a collection of small intimacies: misremembered names, chipped teeth, and private rituals; unexpected alliances and barely touched knees beneath uniform skirts; minutiae of the natural world; incidents that quietly, achingly, and delightfully transgress the familiar. Winner of the Iowa Short Fiction Award.

Book Review :: The Swimmers by Julie Otsuka

The Swimmers by Julie Otsuka book cover image

Guest Post by Kevin Brown

Julie Otsuka uses shifting points of view to make her books both universal and specific. In her novel, The Swimmers, she begins with the first person plural point of view to give voice to the titular swimmers, exploring the diversity of their reactions when the pool develops a crack, a metaphor for the loss to come in the second half of the novel. Otsuka sets up the idea of memory, collective and individual, she will explore through Alice, one of the swimmers. The reader learns little about Alice in the second half, though Otsuka shifts to the second person point of view to put the reader in the position of Alice’s daughter (who sounds quite similar to Otsuka, from the few hints the reader receives, including her mother’s interment in camps during World War II, one of the memories her mother holds onto throughout much of her deterioration). The reader sees Alice from a distance as one of the swimmers and up close as a mother who is becoming a different person than the daughter remembers. The reader empathizes with the mother and daughter, but knows, as the doctors make clear, there is nothing to do, but to endure the inevitable loss and rebuild a life after that loss.

The Swimmers by Julie Otsuka. Knopf, February 2022.

Reviewer bio: Kevin Brown has published three books of poetry: Liturgical Calendar: Poems (Wipf and Stock); A Lexicon of Lost Words (winner of the Violet Reed Haas Prize for Poetry, Snake Nation Press); and Exit Lines (Plain View Press). He also has a memoir, Another Way: Finding Faith, Then Finding It Again, and a book of scholarship, They Love to Tell the Stories: Five Contemporary Novelists Take on the Gospels. Twitter @kevinbrownwrite or kevinbrownwrites.weebly.com/.

New Book :: Semantics of the World

Semantics of the World: Selected Poems by Rómulo Bustos Aguirre book cover image

Semantics of the World: Selected Poems by Rómulo Bustos Aguirre
Edited and translated by Nohora Arrieta Fernández and Mark A. Sanders
University of New Mexico Press, December 2022

A poet of both the body and spirit, the work of Rómulo Bustos Aguirre often explores the nature of existence at the turn of the twenty-first century–humankind’s relationship to itself and the universe, the meaning or purpose, if any, of human existence, and the daunting task of discerning that meaning. Critics have described his poetry as highly refined lyricism, metaphysical, existential, and at times erotic. Semantics of the World introduces the English-speaking world to the exciting work of Rómulo Bustos Aguirre, one of Colombia’s most celebrated living writers.

To find more great books from small, independent, and university presses, visit the NewPages Guide to Publishers as well as the New Books category on our blog. Click here to sign up for our weekly newsletter to stay up to date!

Magazine Stand :: Rain Taxi – Winter 2022

Rain Taxi Review of Books Winter 2022 cover image

The Winter 2022 Rain Taxi Review of Books is available at bookstands or by membership subscription and includes interviews with poet Dara Barrois/Dixon and multi-genre writer Carl Watson, features on novelist Pauline Melville and poet Susan Lewis, and reviews that will take readers from the classic literature of Stendhal to the contemporary cartooning of Kate Beaton and cover art by Roger Williamson. Check out the complete table of contents of issue 108 here.

Magazine Stand :: Portrait of New England – Volume 2

Portrait of New England literary magazine volume 2 cover image

The Portrait of New England Volume 2 is the first issue back from the publication’s hiatus, which NewPages.com covered in this interview with its new editor, Matthew Johnson, and founding editors Brett Murphy Hunt and Jon Bishop. Portrait of New England is a regional-based online literary magazine that published poetry, fiction, and creative non-fiction from writers with ties to New England – which can include being a current or former resident or attending schooling in the region. NewPages.com is happy to welcome the publication back with contributions from Andrew Yim, Donna Mitchell, Eric D. Lehman, Emily Fabbricotti, Emily Ehrhart, Benjamin Thomas, Ann Taylor, Alexander B. Joy, Ed Ahern, Charlotte Friedman, Cortney Davis, Kathryn Sadakierski, Joanne Corey, Melissa D. Burrage, John Grey, Patricia Peterson, Katherine Gotthardt, Katherine Gotthardt, Gayle Lauradunn, Frank William Finney, Angela Acosta, and Natalie Schriefer. Submissions for the next issue are open from March 1-May 31, 2023.

Book Review :: Demon Copperhead by Barbara Kingsolver

Demon Copperhead by Barbara Kingsolver book cover image

Guest Post by Kevin Brown

In her latest novel, Demon Copperhead, Barbara Kingsolver updates Charles Dickens’ David Copperfield (thus the name of the titular character), moving the story to turn-of-the-millenium Appalachia. This approach tempts those readers who are familiar with Dickens’s novel to play a matching game with characters and events, but Kingsolver’s novel goes much further than a literary exercise that tests readers’ nineteenth-century novel knowledge. Her interest in updating Dickens’ novel is to explore the poverty rampant in Appalachia (as it was in Dickens’s London), a problem made significantly worse because of the opiod crisis. While Dickens’s David struggles through his own forms of exploitation, Kingsolver’s Demon, his friends, and his family are all victims in various ways to the addiction that pharmaceutical companies created in places and people who lacked the means to fight back. As with cases from real life, Demon comes by his addictions innocently, but then struggles with them for hundreds of pages, despite those around him who are trying to help. While Kingsolver shows a community decimated by drugs, she creates characters—as does Dickens—the reader cares about. She puts a face to the headlines many of us have the luxury of skimming over and reminds readers there are too many people whose lives seem destined for destruction, through no fault of their own.

Demon Copperhead by Barabara Kingsolver. Harper Collins Publishers, October 2022.

Reviewer bio: Kevin Brown has published three books of poetry: Liturgical Calendar: Poems (Wipf and Stock); A Lexicon of Lost Words (winner of the Violet Reed Haas Prize for Poetry, Snake Nation Press); and Exit Lines (Plain View Press). He also has a memoir, Another Way: Finding Faith, Then Finding It Again, and a book of scholarship, They Love to Tell the Stories: Five Contemporary Novelists Take on the Gospels. Twitter @kevinbrownwrite or kevinbrownwrites.weebly.com/.

Magazine Stand :: The Shore – Issue 16

The Shore online poetry magazine issue 16 cover image

The Shore issue 16 marks the online quarterly publication’s fourth full year of production, and the newest issues keeps to their standard of selecting poems from new and established poets that are “cutting, strange, and daring.” Featured in this issue are works by Ellery Beck, Nasser Alsinan, Ryan Varadi, Michael Goodfellow, John Glowney, Heather Qin, Helen Nancy Meneilly, Mary Simmons, Justin Carter, Michel Agunbiade, Maggie Boyd Hare, Maya C Thompson, Ronda Piszk Broatch, Chris McCann, Margaret M Kelly, Daniel Dias Callahan, Katie Tian, Martha Silano, Marina Brown, Mike WIlson, Anthony Gabriel, Christopher Citro & Dustin Nightingale, Shannon Hardwick, Kevin Roy, Jay Brecker, Lauren Badillo Milici, Grant Schutzman, Monica Cure, Brandon Hansen, Erin Wilson, Lucas Dean Clark, M Cynthia Cheung, Leland Seese, Joey Wańczyk, Kimberly Ann Priest, Joe Dahut, and Vanessa Couto Johnson with haunting art by taylor d waring.

New Book :: The Wandering Radiance

The Wandering Radiance: Selected Poems of Hilde Domin Translated by Mark S. Burrows book cover image

The Wandering Radiance: Selected Poems of Hilde Domin
Translated by Mark S. Burrows
Green Linden Press, April 2023

Hilde Domin is one of the most highly regarded German poets of the 20th century. A poet of the Jewish faith, she fled political developments in Germany in 1932 and spent more than twenty years in exile, first in Italy then the Dominican Republic, which became her self-chosen namesake. Her work was deeply influenced by her time in exile and the loss of homeland. After returning to Germany, she was known as the “poet of return” and received numerous honors for her literary work, including the Carl Zuckmayer Medal, the Nelly Sachs Prize, and the Grand Federal Cross of Merit. Presented bilingually, many of these poems appear here for the first time in English. Read a sample from Under a Warm Green Linden, Issue 13.

Where to Submit Round-up: December 30, 2022

hand holding a pen and writing in a notebook

It’s the final Where to Submit Round-up for December 2022! We’ll see you all in the New Year. How will your submission goals change in 2023?

Want to get alerts for new opportunities sent directly to your inbox every Monday afternoon instead of waiting for our Friday Where to Submit Round-ups? For just $5 a month, you can get early access to new calls for submissions and writing contests before they go live on our site, so subscribe today! Free subscribers get access to the latest submission opportunities on the following Monday.

Continue reading “Where to Submit Round-up: December 30, 2022”

New Book :: What You Wish For

What You Wish For poetry by Ruth Bardon book cover image

What You Wish For by Ruth Bardon
Finishing Line Press, March 2023

In What You Wish For, Ruth Bardon uses a feminist lens to take a fresh look at wishes, witches, magic spells, princesses, sleeping beauties, and 21st century queen bees. Her poems are sympathetic both to hopeful, yearning heroines and to equally hopeful, yearning villains and minor characters. At the same time, they are darkly pessimistic about the possibility of happy endings. With subtlety and humor, these quiet poems radically deconstruct familiar stories. Ruth Bardon grew up in Highland Park, New Jersey, and lived in a number of midwestern cities before firmly settling in Durham, North Carolina. She received an MFA degree from the Iowa Writers Workshop in 1982 and a PhD in English from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 1995. Her poems have appeared in journals, and her first chapbook, Demon Barber, was published by Main Street Rag in 2020.

Magazine Stand :: World Literature Today – Jan/Feb 2023

World Literature Today Jan/Feb 2023 issue cover image

Headlining the Jan/Feb 2023 issue of World Literature Today is Senegalese writer Boubacar Boris Diop, laureate of the 2022 Neustadt International Prize for Literature. Also inside, Emily Doyle interviews R.O. Kwon (“On Sex, Soul Loneliness, and Walking toward Terror”), while Shoshana Bellen, Cleyvis Natera, Ana Ojeda, and Danae Sioziou provide additional conversational exchanges. Further highlights include A.E. Copenhaver’s “Eco-Lit to Read Now” booklist, a new poem by Ted Kooser, and an excerpt i9from Deena Mohamed’s forthcoming graphic novel Shubeik Lubeik (Pantheon, 2023). With more than two dozen book reviews, recommended reading lists, and other great content in the latest issue, be sure to take WLT—your passport to great reading—with you into 2023 and beyond.

Book Review :: Everyone Knows Your Mother is a Witch by Rivka Galchen

Everyone Knows Your Mother is a Witch by Rivka Galchen book cover image

Guest Post by Kevin Brown

In Everyone Knows Your Mother is a Witch, Rivka Galchen uses the story of Johannes Kepler’s mother, whom her neighbors accused of being a witch, to explore how easily people will bow to societal pressures. Katharina is a woman like many in the early 1600s: unable to read or write, but knowledgeable of the natural world. She is also a widow in possession of property. That combination makes her an ideal target for her accusers. Galchen also creates a seemingly innocent bystander—Katharina’s neighbor Simon, who serves as her guardian in the absence of her children—to take down her testimony. The reader watches the world through Simon’s eyes, as well as Katharina’s account of her experiences, and the reader also watches Simon react to the pressures the townspeople put on him. Through Simon, Galchen raises the question of who is willing to stand beside the accused even to their own detriment, as well as exploring what it feels like to be the accused. In her recreation of a time that seems so different from our own, Galchen reminds readers we will all have such moments—both of bearing witness and of standing up for ourselves—turning a time-bound tale into one that is terribly relevant.

Everyone Knows Your Mother is a Witch by Rivka Galchen. Macmillan, June 2021.

Reviewer bio: Kevin Brown has published three books of poetry: Liturgical Calendar: Poems (Wipf and Stock); A Lexicon of Lost Words (winner of the Violet Reed Haas Prize for Poetry, Snake Nation Press); and Exit Lines (Plain View Press). He also has a memoir, Another Way: Finding Faith, Then Finding It Again, and a book of scholarship, They Love to Tell the Stories: Five Contemporary Novelists Take on the Gospels. Twitter @kevinbrownwrite or kevinbrownwrites.weebly.com/.

New Book :: Black Fire This Time, Volume 1

Black Fire This Time Volume 1 Anthology edited by Kim McMillon and Kofi Antwi book cover image

Black Fire This Time, Volume 1, edited by Kim McMillon and Kofi Antwi
Aquarius Press/Willow Books, September 2022

Black Fire This Time, Volume 1 is an anthology celebrating the roots and legacy of the Black Arts Movement begins with a foreword by Ishmael Reed and introduction by Margot Crawford and features the works of over 100 poets and writers, including (in no particular order) Nikki Giovanni, James Baldwin, Amiri Baraka, Amina Baraka, Eugene B. Redmond, Lucille Clifton, Haki R. Madhubuti, Wanda Coleman, E. Ethelbert Miller, Jerry Ward, Tom Dent, Michael Simanga, Quincy Troupe, Margaret Porter Troupe, Dudley Randall, Askia Toure, QR Hand, Jr., Denise Nicholas, Sonia Sanchez and many more. Michigan writer Denise Nicholas’s chapter is based on her true story as a voting rights volunteer from Michigan in 1964, inspired Michigan’s Office of the Governor to issue a Proclamation for an annual Freedom Summer Remembrance Day. Aquarius Press owner Heather Buchanan is a graduate of Wayne State University and UM-Dearborn, respectively. She was a director of the Idlewild Writers Conference and Midwest Poets & Writers Conference. Her press publishes many of the nation’s top poets and writers of color and national laureates, Including Dr. Mona Lisa Saloy (Louisiana), devorah major and Tongo Eisen-Martin (San Francisco) and Lupe Mendez (Texas). If not for yourself, consider purchasing a copy for your local public or school library.

Magazine Stand :: Waxing & Waning – Issue 10

Waxing & Waning literary magazine Issue 10 cover image

For Issue 10 of Waxing & Waning, the editors went with their standard call: “We want what’s on the fringe. Whatever is deep and true. The moon represents this idea: what is dark, what is brooding, what is wild, what is crescent and changing. We want to feed the beast in you, the one buried beneath layers of manners and anxiety and internet induced abyss, repetition, and relative sameness. Work submitted to Waxing & Waning should be honest and well-executed. It should scream coherently; it should bring experiences and knowledge out of us that we have not seen before. It should rip out our black hearts and put them in front of our eyes. Bring us the work everyone else is afraid of. Bring us the work you’re afraid of. Bring us the work that gets at the trueness frightening you out of the routine. In a world blanketed in monotony—we seek to search outside of ourselves so we can better love, give love, and sacrifice for whatever art could bring. We hope to wax in truth and wane into poetics—to shelter ourselves from reality. To bathe in the light of the moon.”

Stepping up to meet this call for Issue 10 are contributions of poetry by A.N. DeJesus, Esme DeVault, Benjamin Green, Marian Shapiro, Taunja Thomson, and Andrew Walker; fiction by Robert Cramblitt, Max Firehammer, Joseph Morice, Chris Motto, Elizabeth Quirk, Eugene Radice, Douglas Steward, and Rebecca Wood; creative non-fiction by Mackenzie Broderick, Christie Green, Joan Halperin, Melanie Reitzel, and Anne-Christine Strugnell; art by Katie Allcorn, Karyna Aslanova, Gianna Sozzi, and Alice Teeple; a play by Paul Antokolsky; and Editor’s Note by Lance Ümmenhofer.

Waxing & Waning is published under the April Gloaming Publishing imprint, which includes a special focus on Southern literature as well as novels, memoirs, poetry collections, and anthologies. Print copies of Waxing & Waning and the Waxing & Waning Presents Series can be purchased here: www.aprilgloaming.com/shop

New & Noted Lit & Alt Mags – December 2022

NewPages receives many wonderful literary magazine and alternative magazine titles each month to share with our readers. You can read more about some of these titles by clicking on the “New Mag Issues” under NewPages Blog or Mags. Find out more about many of these titles with our Guide to Literary Magazines and our Big List of Alternative Magazines. If you are a publication looking to be listed here or featured on our blog and social media, please contact us!

About Place, December 2022
Aji Magazine, 17
Atlanta Review, Fall/Winter 2022
The Baltimore Review, Fall 2022
Blink Ink, 50
Bomb, Winter 2023
Boulevard, 110 & 111
Brick, 110
Cave Wall, Number 17
Communities, Winter 2022
Cutleaf, 2.24
december, Fall/Winter 2022

Continue reading “New & Noted Lit & Alt Mags – December 2022”

New Book :: instead, it is dark

instead, it is dark by Cynthia Hogue book cover image

instead, it is dark by Cynthia Hogue
Red Hen Press, April 2023

Following her husband’s massive heart attack, Cynthia Hogue began writing poems based on dreams and memories that he, born during WWII in occupied France, had as a child growing up in a time of vast postwar food shortages. Hogue embarked on a quest to discover if there were more such memories in her extended family in France. When asked, family members told her never-before-shared tales of parents who were POWs, collaborators, Resistance fighters, and one most vulnerable—of a hidden child. Hogue spent years researching the lives of civilians during war, work crystallized in her tenth collection of poetry, instead, it is dark. The personal is alchemized as Hogue weaves history and present day in poems that explore how there, here, an individual voice in the stark language of lyric poetry, speaks a complex truth and casts a laser light on violence, resilience, survival, and—the heart of this collection—love.

Book Review :: Under My Bed by Jody Keisner

Under My Bed and Other Essays by Jody Keisner book cover image

Guest Post by Olga Montenegro

Jody Keisner’s Under My Bed and Other Essays explores the ritualistic aspect of fear, the summoning of anxiety’s ghosts, and what it means to be a woman living under the promise of male violence. Although Keisner speaks truth to power on what it is like to live with anxiety, it is the exploration of fear and her grandmother that ties the themes of womanhood, illness, and survival. Keisner’s three-section arrangement (Origins, Under the Skin, and Risings) plays an intricate role in how the work is both read and experienced. The reader could interpret the three sections as a balanced academic and creative essay of the Genesis of anxiety, the kinesthetic journey of a disabled body, and the resurrection of Self, which are all ideas Keisner studies deeply about herself.

In “Origins,” the opening essay, Keisner explores her fear as her partner asks, “Why does your mind go down such dark corridors?” This is the premise of the collection of essays in which Keisner, while realizing her own body has an autoimmune disorder, is also realizing that the world is constantly telling women that there is always a threat. Learning how to coexist with this notion, Keisner offers an exploration of female-bodied anxiety through beautifully curated pieces with profound research that both enriches and empowers the reader. Always paying respect to queer and disabled bodies, Keisner unites her voice as part of a symphony of those trying to survive in an increasingly antagonistic world.

To offer a counter point to the deeply embedded fear, Keisner devotes beautiful moments and lyrical prose to speak of her beautifully messy and human grandmother, Grace. Always studying the power behind language, Keisner speaks of her paternal grandmother with admiration and fondness, “My grandmother protected my joy-filled childhood, but to do so, she had to keep a part of herself from me: her pain and suffering.” It is through Grace, ironically, that the readers find a form of respite and the goal that, regardless of how much this world tells us we’re not welcomed, there are ways to not be afraid.

Under My Bed and Other Essays by Jody Keisner. University of Nebraska Press, September 2022.

Reviewer bio: Olga Montenegro is a grad student at Bridgewater State University. She splits her time between Mexico City and Massachusetts. You can find her @ActuallyOlga on Twitter.

New Book :: Chaos, Crossing

Chaos, Crossing by Olivia Elias book cover image

Chaos, Crossing by Olivia Elias
Translated by Kareem-James Abu-Zeid
World Poetry Books, November 2022

In her English-language debut, with a foreword by Najwan Darwish, acclaimed French-language poet of the Palestinian diaspora Olivia Elias probes deeply into the upheavals of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Chaos, Crossing—translated by award-winning translator Kareem James Abu-Zeid—is a powerful chronicle of uprootedness, of times marked by inequality, injustice, and disconnection. These poems—presented here in a bilingual edition—seek the calm at the center of the storm, the still point amidst the chaos. Poet of the Palestinian diaspora, born in Haifa in 1944, Olivia Elias writes in French. She lived until she was 16 years old in Lebanon where her family took refuge in 1948, then in Montréal-Canada, before moving to France. Characterized by terse, laconic language and strong rhythms, her poetry shows a deep sensitivity to the Palestinian cause, the plight of refugees and human suffering in general. Her work, translated into English, Arabic, Spanish, Italian and Japanese, has been published in numerous journals and in anthologies.

Magazine Stand :: Southern Humanities Review – 55.3&4

Southern Humanities Review volume 55 numbers 3 and 4 cover image

From the Department of English at Auburn University, this Southern Humanities Review is a double issue and their 2022 Witness Poetry Prize Issue, featuring the winner, “Tulsa Triptych” by Daniel Donaghy as well as poems from finalists as judged by poet Rick Barot. The rest of the issue is filled with nonfiction by Kate Lister Campbell, Gage Saylor, Caroline Sutton, and Justin Jannise; fiction by Talia Lakshmi Kolluri, Rachael Fowler, Max Hipp, John Kim, Greg Tebbano, Neal Hammons, and Stephanie Macias; poetry by Nicole Stockburger, Ashley Kunsa, Tennessee Hill, Desiree Santana, Jubi Arriola-Headley, M. Cynthia Cheung, Jacob Griffin Hall, Julia Kolchinsky Dasbach, emet ezell, Marissa Davis, Cindy Juyoung Ok, Jai Hamid Bashir, Benjamin S. Grossberg, Jamie L. Smith, Helena Mesa, Zoë Fay-Stindt, Julia C. Alter, Aneeqa Wattoo, Adam J. Gellings, B. Tyler Lee, Ajay Sawant, Piedad Bonnett, and Karen McPherson; with cover art by Doris Alexander Thompson.

New Book :: Night

Night by Ennio Moltedo book cover image

Night by Ennio Moltedo
Translated by Marguerite Feitlowitz
World Poetry Books, November 2022

Written during the Pinochet dictatorship but not published until democracy’s return, Ennio Moltedo’s Night is a masterpiece of controlled rage, mourning, resistance, and astonishing humor, and the first of his books to appear in English translation. Moltedo, whom Raúl Zurita called “one of the finest, greatest, most curious and honorable poets of Chile,” is at once lyrical and political, a dramatist, a historian, and a critic. Ennio Moltedo (1931-2012) spent his life in the small Chilean coastal cities of Valparaíso and Viñ a del Mar. Born to Genoese immigrants, he is a poet of the New World Mediterranean: inspired, chastened, and challenged by the ancients, and in conversation with his contemporaries, including Huidobro, Girondo, Neruda, and de Rokha. A revered “poet’s poet,” he published eight individual collections of poetry, as well as an anthology of Romanian poetry co-translated with Neruda, and a chronicle of Neruda’s life (Neruda: poeta del cerro Florida). Longtime director of the University of Valparaíso Press, Moltedo also wrote criticism, journalism, and text for books of visual art and cartoons.

Book Review :: Breaking Points by Chelsea Stickle

Breaking Points by Chelsea Stickle book cover image

Guest Post by Matthew Rodriguez

As fearless as she is creative, Chelsea Stickle reaches deep into her bag of tricks to “wow” her readers with every story in her debut chapbook, Breaking Points. Many of these stories captivate the reader in such a way that it feels criminal that they’re only flash fiction pieces, but it’s beautiful enough to accept them as the art forms they are. The courage to experiment with various styles of writing, including a multiple-choice quiz and a flow chart, reveal Stickle’s hidden genius by telling deep stories in unorthodox ways, one that might even spark the beginning of a writing revolution! A standout piece, “How Mature Are You: A Quiz,” exemplifies the glories of pushing conventional boundaries within flash fiction formatting through its whimsical and ironically hard-nosed approach to storytelling with a choose-your-own-adventure type of beat. These kinds of structures, while puzzling at first glance, expand a reader’s view of how effectively a writer can tell a story without falling into familiar patterns. It would not be surprising to see a wide range of unique, personalized styles born from Stickle’s innovation. Ultimately, this collection is more than just an ensemble of witty tales but a mosaic of brilliant artistry.

Breaking Points by Chelsea Stickle. Black Lawrence Press, April 2021.

Reviewer bio: Matthew Rodriguez is a graduate student at Bridgewater State University pursuing his English MAT (Master of Arts in Teaching) and currently works as a freshman English teacher at B.M.C. Durfee High School.

Book Review :: The Lonely Stories edited by Natalie Eve Garrett

The Lonely Stories edited by Natalie Eve Garrett book cover image

Guest Post by Sam Tarr

The Lonely Stories: 22 Celebrated Writers on the Joys & Struggles of Being Alone is a collection of distinguished and diverse writers gathered in a volume of unifying isolation narratives, a wonderful contradiction illustrating the affliction or privilege of solitude. Editor Natalie Eve Garrett aimed “to summon cathartic personal essays illuminating the experience of being alone” to challenge the shame and the taboo aspect of discussing one’s loneliness. Collected and crafted before and during the worst of pandemic lockdowns, the stories act upon the hard-learned lessons of the times, showing our isolation was not some passing phase.

Writing can be a punishingly lonely craft, so it’s the writers themselves that tie this collection together best. Each entry is a mosaic showing the complex solidarity of feeling alone. It’s in the “utter brownness” of Claire Dederer’s West Texas landscape and in the silenced pain of Yiyun Li, who “disowned [her] native tongue.” We feel the despair of it in Imani Perry’s hospital room, described as “a funhouse of refracted and repeated loneliness,” and the “different texture” of loneliness in the pre-internet era of Lev Grossman’s “Maine Man.”

Each contribution is a flare sent out of the darkness. In their glare, we see the individual reflections of loneliness. In their glow, we bask in the rebuttal.

The Lonely Stories edited by Natalie Eve Garret. Catapult, April 2022.

Reviewer bio: Sam Tarr is a graduate student at Bridgewater State University and writer living in Weymouth, MA. His work has appeared in 86 Logic and The Bridge. 

Where to Submit Round-up :: December 23, 2023

hand holding a pen and writing in a notebook

The weather outside is truly frightful across the country as winter storms sweep the nation. We hope everyone has a safe and happy holiday season. Hopefully you can stay inside safe and sound and work on ending 2022 by hitting the submission goals you set for yourself in January. NewPages is here to help with our Where to Submit Round-up for the week of December 23, 2022.

Want to get alerts for new opportunities sent directly to your inbox every Monday afternoon instead of waiting for our Friday Where to Submit Round-ups? For just $5 a month, you can get early access to new calls for submissions and writing contests before they go live on our site, so subscribe today! Free subscribers get access to the latest submission opportunities on the following Monday.

Continue reading “Where to Submit Round-up :: December 23, 2023”

Magazine Stand :: Waxing & Waning – The Blackout Edition

Waxing & Waning The Blackout Edition literary magazine cover image

Waxing & Waning publishes one print and one online issue per year, along with one special edition contest, the Waxing & Waning Presents Series, that amplifies voices of underrepresented populations.

For the 2022 Blackout Edition, the writers’ prompt was:

“As 2021 draws to a close, George Floyd’s killer behind bars, Breonna Taylor’s still enjoying their time of freedom, and countless other BIPOC people’s deaths still without justice, our humble literary and arts journal is seeking writing and art that exemplifies the BIPOC experience worldwide. In a time of racial unrest, where privileges are being called out and people are being asked to change their behaviors to make the world we live in accountable for its unfairness and injustices, we at Waxing & Waning are looking for creative work that both includes this aspect, but we are also looking for any and all work about the modern BIPOC experience, even outside of race. Give us your poems about sunsets, stories that strike a chord in the human experience, art that screams to be heard. Be deep, true, honest. Here is not where limits lie. We want it all.”

The contributors for The Blackout Edition Prose: Winner Rim Chon, Runner-up Emil Rem, Marian Fredal, Leslie Grover, and Patrice Washington; Poetry: Winner Shamon Williams, Runner-up Glenn Marchand, Biman Roy, and Sabrina Spence; Art: Winner Christina Sayers.

The 2023’s special edition contest will be titled The Pride Edition and will be open to all writers and artists in the LGBTQIA+ population. Submissions for this will open at the beginning of the year.

Waxing & Waning is published under the April Gloaming Publishing imprint, which includes a special focus on Southern literature as well as novels, memoirs, poetry collections, and anthologies. Print copies of Waxing & Waning and the Waxing & Waning Presents Series can be purchased here: www.aprilgloaming.com/shop

New Book :: Trouble Funk

Trouble Funk by Douglas Manuel book cover image

Trouble Funk by Douglas Manuel
Red Hen Press, April 2023

The speaker of Douglas Manuel’s Testify, a book of elegiac interrogations of race in America, returns to divulge his parents’ love story in the forthcoming poetry collection, Trouble Funk. Set in Anderson, Indiana in the 1960s, ’70s, and ’80s, Trouble Funk exposes ways Black Love is thwarted but never destroyed by racism, classism, and sexism. Eschewing the “lyrical I” in favor of a third person omniscient point of view, Manuel exhibits how the latter half of the twentieth century rhymes with our current moment when it comes to political division, the hardships that Black folks face, and the rise of toxic right-wing policies. In many ways, Trouble Funk serves as a prequel to Testify, in which Manuel seeks to better understand and love himself, his family, and his country.

Book Review :: Animal, Roadkill, Ashes, Gone by Emily Pittinos

Animal, Roadkill, Ashes, Gone essays by Emily Pittinos book cover image

Guest Post by Alice Verlezza

In her heartfelt memoir of four chapbook essays, Animal, Roadkill, Ashes, Gone, Emily Pittinos animates familial memories and the personal process of grief. This collection pays tribute, not only to the memory of our passed loved ones, but to the exponential growth of their children in their absence. As we learn the details of her ancestral losses, the narrator weaves in and out of time and space. Through the iterative process of processing her father’s unexpected death we “[become] squires of each other’s grief.” Pittinos’s familiar trauma is rendered stark and bare in this “summary of his body.” 

Our relatable Gen-X protagonist, a wry wit demonstrating vulnerable frankness, reminds us that, “We’ll live in cardboard boxes until we die poor and alone” in the inevitably “promise-less future.” Pittinos’s voice powerfully echoes generational attitudes of frustration and hopelessness without getting bogged down. “Nothing will ever be the same,” and we are “always preparing for the worst,” but these essays gracefully illuminate that “the mind abuses its license to change.” In the face of trauma and loss, the mind finds a way to connect back to its natural state, one of peace, gratitude, and remembrance.

Animal, Roadkill, Ashes, Gone by Emily Pittinos. Bull City Press, November 2022.

Reviewer bio: Alice Verlezza, educator, writer, and mother of two was raised in Rhode Island. An MS graduate of Queens University in Sociology, Alice continues her scholarly work earning an English Masters at Bridgewater State University where she researches gender identity and mental health in narrative.

Magazine Stand :: December – 33.2

December literary magazine issue 33.2 cover image

“A literary legacy since 1958,” December‘s newest issue (33.2) features the 2022 Curt Johnson Prose Award Winners: “Goodnight, Irene” by Miriam Gallou, Fiction Winner; “Slow Dance” by Garnett Cohen, Fiction Honorable Mention; “On Her Waters Summoning Us Down” by Gisselle Yepes, Nonfiction Winner; “Of Cats and Men” by Anjanette Degado, Nonfiction Honorable Mention. Other contributors to this issue include poetry by Joanne Allred, David Axelrod, Nancy Botkin, Mary Crow, Kim Ports Parsons, Ricardo Pau-Llosa, Dan Rosenberg, John Schneider, Steven Schreiner, Heidi Seaborn, Mark Smith-Soto, Carole Stone, Florence Weinberger, John Sibley Williams, Erin Wilson; fiction by Quinn Adikes, Bruce Kilstein, A.C. Koch, Jenna-Marie Warnecke; nonfiction by Jacob Aiello, Jiadai Lin, Neha Potalia; art by Joy Curtis, Basil Kincaid; illustration by Sherry Shahan; and cover art by JJ Manford.

New Book :: Her Birth and Later Years

Her Birth and Later Years: New and Collected Poems, 1971-2021 by Irena Klepfisz book cover image

Her Birth and Later Years: New and Collected Poems, 1971-2021 by Irena Klepfisz
Wesleyan University Press, December 2022

A trailblazing lesbian poet, child Holocaust survivor, and political activist whose work is deeply informed by socialist values, Irena Klepfisz is a vital and individual American voice. This book is the first complete collection of her work. For fifty years, Klepfisz has written powerful, searching poems about relatives murdered during the war, recent immigrants, a lost Yiddish writer, a Palestinian boy in Gaza, and various people in her life. In her introduction to Klepfisz’s A Few Words in the Mother Tongue, Adrienne Rich wrote: “[Klepfisz’s] sense of phrase, of line, of the shift of tone, is almost flawless.” Irena Klepfisz taught Jewish Women’s Studies at Barnard College for 22 years. She is the author of four books of poetry, a collection of essays, and was co-editor of The Tribe of Dina: A Jewish Women’s Anthology. An advocate of the Yiddish language and active in its renaissance in the United States, she has published poetry and essays have appeared in Jewish Currents, Tablet Magazine, In Geveb, Sinister Wisdom, The Manhattan Review, Conditions, The Georgia Review and Languages of Modern Jewish Cultures.

New Book :: In the Current Where Drowning Is Beautiful

In the Current Where Drowning Is Beautiful by Abigail Chabitnoy book cover image

In the Current Where Drowning Is Beautiful by Abigail Chabitnoy
Wesleyan University Press, November 2022

In the Current Where Drowning Is Beautiful, poetry by Abigail Chabitnoy, is a meditation on water, land, women, and violent environmental changes as they affect both the natural world and human migration. The poet reckons with the unsettling realities that women experience, questioning the cause and effect of events and asking why stories of oppression are so often simply accepted as the only stories. Alutiiq language is used throughout these poems that are in conversation with history, ancestors, and an uncertain future, in imagery that moves in waves, returning again and again to the ocean, and a deep visioning of the “current.” Abigail Chabitnoy is a Koniag descendent and a member of the Tangirnaq Native Village in Kodiak, Alaska. Her first book, How to Dress a Fish, won the Colorado Book Award in the Poetry category and was shortlisted for the Griffin International Poetry Prize. She is an assistant professor at UMass Amherst.

Book Review :: Souvenirs from Paradise by Erin Langner

Souvenirs from Paradise by Erin Langner book cover image

Guest Post by Shauna Briggs

Grief and loss in Sin City. Erin Langner’s debut essay collection, Souvenirs from Paradise, hits on the allure and beauty of one of America’s favorite tourist destinations – Las Vegas. The backdrop of the classic Vegas casinos led Langner to receive the Wendy S. Walters’ 2021 Creative Nonfiction Book Award from publisher Zone 3 Press. Weaving in the city’s history – the fabled old strip, various casino myths, and celebrity stories – with her own experiences and emotions are what makes this collection so hard hitting. Langner convinces the reader of all the charm and complexity of Vegas’s most popular casinos, driving us with her when she writes about her first road trip into town. She captures the outsider-moved-in perspective seamlessly while reconciling the irreparable pain of loss: “People had been telling me for years that I would love Las Vegas, but I refused to believe them.” Neon lights, ringing slot machines, musical impressions, mob memories, and painful history. . . what’s not to love? Langner expresses a complicated and scintillating love in brilliant lyrical prose.

Souvenirs from Paradise by Erin Langner. Zone 3 Press, November 2022.

Reviewer bio: Shauna Briggs is an English teacher on Cape Cod and is currently pursuing her MA in English at Bridgewater State University. She lives in Massachusetts with her husband, dog, and two cats.

Magazine Stand :: Wordrunner eChapbooks – Issue 47

Wordrunner eChapbooks issue 47 cover image

Wordrunner eChapbooks‘ 47th issue, Winter 2022 fiction echapbook, is Death in the Cathedral: A Novella in Five Stories by Malcolm Dixon. These five linked stories immerse readers in the turbulent, disturbing and sometimes hilarious misadventures and rivalries of Catholic schoolboys in late 20th century Liverpool—Stephen Mattimore, the boy who tries to play by the rules, his rebellious and scornful classmates who torment their cassocked teachers, the misfit who runs the campus sundries shop. Death, lurking in the title story, whether sudden or anticipated, alters everyone. Outside the confining Cathedral College flows “the inky black waters of the Mersey, opaque to the point of invisibility, like the dark unwritten page of [Stephen’s] future.” This collection may be read free online or you can purchase an ebook edition for only $2.99. Authors receive 50% of all royalties, it’s a way to support a small press, and they make thoughtful gifts during the holiday season!

Magazine Stand :: The Conversationalist – December 2022

The Conversationalist December 2022 online alternative magazine cover image

If you’re in search of some new media outlets, The Conversationalist is a nonprofit feminist media outlet publishing online journalism focused on a global perspective, from the personal to the political. The Conversationalist is a platform for original reporting and commentary from writers with under-amplified perspectives. The publication takes an empathetic approach to increase media literacy and inspire conversation around sensitive challenges in global affairs. Recent articles include “Made in Pakistan” by Anmol Irfan, “Buffalo and Uvalde, Six Months Later” by Raina Lipsitz, “Russia’s New Anti-LGBTQ Legislation is Just More of the Same Authoritarianism” by Chrissy Stroop, “Freedom to Want” by Melissa Chadburn, “Can We Writer Our Way to a New Word?” by Racel Pafe, and numerous others on topics like adult friendship, climate change, books, travel, community, abolition, food, and more. “Feminist stories. Global Perspectives. Zero BS.” Find more great reading at the NewPages Big List of Alternative Magazines.

Magazine Stand :: Jewish Fiction .net – Issue 32

Jewish Fiction .net online literary magazine Issue 32 cover image

The newest issue of Jewish Fiction .net is its Chanukah issue, which includes 12 stories originally written in Yiddish, Hebrew, and English. This brings to almost 550 the number of works published by Jewish Fiction .net, that were either written in English or translated from 18 languages. Readers can find works by Tsilye Dropkin, Wayne Karlin, Hamutal Bar-Yosef, Peter Alterman, Avital Gad-Cykman, and many more. All available to read free online. And some exciting news: Academic Studies Press will be publishing an anthology of fiction from Jewish Fiction .net – 18 stories, each translated into English from a different language! This book will come out this fall, so keep your eyes open for updates.

New Book :: Steinbeck’s Imaginarium

Steinbeck's Imaginarium: Essays on Writing, Fishing, and Other Critical Matters by Robert DeMott book cover image

Steinbeck’s Imaginarium: Essays on Writing, Fishing, and Other Critical Matters by Robert DeMott
University of New Mexico Press, November 2022

In Steinbeck’s Imaginarium, Robert DeMott delves into the imaginative, creative, and sometimes neglected aspects of John Steinbeck’s writing. DeMott positions Steinbeck as a prophetic voice for today as much as he was for the Depression-era 1930s as the essays explore the often unknown or unacknowledged elements of Steinbeck’s artistic career that deserve closer attention. He writes about the determining scientific influences, such as quantum physics and ecology, in Cannery Row and considers Steinbeck’s addiction to writing through the lens of the extensive, obsessive full-length journals that he kept while writing three of his best-known novels – The Grapes of Wrath, The Wayward Bus, and East of Eden. DeMott insists that these monumental works of fiction all comprise important statements on his creative process and his theory of fiction writing. DeMott further blends his personal experience as a lifelong angler with a reading of several neglected fishing episodes in Steinbeck’s work. Collectively, the chapters illuminate John Steinbeck as a fully conscious, self-aware, literate, experimental novelist whose talents will continue to warrant study and admiration for years to come.

New Book :: apocrifa

apocrifa by Amber Flame book cover image

apocrifa poetry by Amber Flame
Red Hen Press, May 2023

apocrifa imagines a love that sits comfortably at the crossroads of commitment and freedom. The developing intimacy between a lover and their beloved is propelled by a compendium of words for love, romance, sex, relationships, and affection that do not lend to direct translation in English. Serving as both titles and markers of the progression of time, these poetically defined words highlight the growing tension of one who claims “i cannot love you enough / to unlove the wide world” and yet is inextricably drawn to the offer of “a place of sustenance, rest, and my delight in your very bones.” Heavily inspired by the metaphors and structures of Song of Songs (or Song of Solomon), from the Apocryphal books of the Bible, the characters speak to each other with contrapuntal call-and-response while letting readers into their private thoughts through epistles, sestinas, odes, and other poetic forms.

Book Review :: If There Is No Wind by Margaret R. Sáraco

If There Is No Wind by Margaret R. Saraco book cover image

Guest Post by R. Bremner

Margaret R. Sáraco’s solid debut poetry collection, If There Is No Wind, begins with a paean to a once-imposing, now-deceased maple tree, skillfully interweaving emotions and memories: “we sat on the stump remains, holding vigil, wishing her well in the afterlife.” It ends with a poem that transforms her into a seabird, exchanging the anguish of being shut in for the joy of freedom, “swimming in warmth, bathing my afterimage away.” In between are 77 pages of sometimes melancholy, sometimes uplifting, but always affecting, poetry. With a personal bias toward surrealism, perhaps my favorite poem in this collection is the lightly surrealism-tinged “Lifeline,” in which Saraco considers that her life has been spent “seated in a kayak / paddling rivers I’ve never seen.” She is waiting for her turn

To pull the kayak
ashore, climb out
discover what
is buried
in my
dense weeds.

In the next-to-last poem in this book, “Quiet Moment,” Sáraco views a reflected moon in a puddle on a clear night and is waiting “for a message / to tell me what this means.” It is indeed a feeling that many of us have had.

If There Is No Wind by Margaret R. Sáraco. Human Error Publishing, September 2022.

Reviewer bio: R. Bremner has been writing of incense, peppermints, and the color of time since the 1960s in journals and anthologies including International Poetry Review and Climate of Opinion: Sigmund Freud in Poetry. Eight published books and chapbooks bear his name, including Hungry Words (Alien Buddha Press).

New Book :: What Small Sound

What Small Sound by Francesca Bell book cover image

What Small Sound by Francesca Bell
Red Hen Press, May 2023

Francesca Bell’s second collection of poems, What Small Sound, interrogates what it means to be a mother in a country where there are five times as many guns as children; female in a country where a woman is raped every two minutes; and citizen of a world teeming with iniquities and peril. In poems rich in metaphor and music and unflinching in their gaze, Bell offers an exacting view of the audiologist’s booth and the locked ward as she grapples with the gradual loss of her own hearing and the mental illness spreading its dark wings over her family. This is a book of plentiful sorrows but also of small and sturdy comforts, a book that chronicles the private, lonely life of the body as well as its tender generosities. What Small Sound wrestles with some of the broadest, most complicated issues of our time and also with the most fundamental issue of all: love. How it shelters and anchors us. How it breaks us and, ultimately, how it pieces us back together.

Book Review :: Borealis by Aisha Sabatini Sloan

Borealis by Aisha Sabatini Sloan book cover image

Guest Post by Alexandria Machado

In Borealis, a stunning long form essay published by Coffee House Press, Aisha Sabatini Sloan reckons with the vast expanse of nature, simultaneously negotiating her relationship to queerness, blackness and the Alaskan landscape. Written lyrically with the use of white space as a conduit for understanding solitude as a person of color in an overwhelming white population, Sloan wonders “when there is no Black figure, what am I supposed to like looking at?” She artfully explores interactions as intimate collisions and reconciliations, whether that be a lover or the way color displays in the sky; all experiences are showcased as this prismatic aurora. Sloan paints her images with dazzling natural light, calling us to take a moment to look and listen to the world around us. Borealis is one great luminous moment, a meditation of self-reflection in contrast to the wilderness. What is similar and what is starkly different becomes resigned to the mystery of images, the way they mimic and shift: “The fog has lowered itself like haunches over a toilet across the tops of mountains.” This essay is as concerned with music as it is silence; we hear “The opening strains of Bjork’s ‘Bachelorette’ play as a bald eagle opens its wings above a lamppost on the spit,” or how “Beaches tend to mean your ear hurts a little; the wind is loud.” Lists give way to observations and letters to a nephew in jail expose how captivity is not just the body in a physical place. Sloan creates collages of color and revelations, “Now I think crying is like touching time. A half-hearted attempt to crash into now.” Sloan’s essay encourages readers to spend time with nature in a way that is patient, humorous and imaginative, with the reminder to not look past any moment, as there is magic and horror everywhere.

Borealis: An Essay by Aisha Sabatini Sloan. Coffee House Press, November 2021.

Reviewer Bio: Alexandria Machado is a graduate student studying English at Bridgewater State University and a writer living in Providence, RI. Her poems, essays and reviews have appeared or are forthcoming in Boshemia, Vagabond City, The Merrimack Review, 86 Logic and other publications.

Magazine Stand :: The Iowa Review – Double Issue 2022

The Iowa Review double issue summer 2022 cover image

The Iowa Review Editor Lynne Nugent introduces contributions to this 2022 double issue as diverse, including “an ode to a drag queen, an account of growing up with a Chinese last name in small-town Minnesota, and a meditation on a cane used as a mobility aid.” Nugent emphasizes The Iowa Review‘s evolution while also acknowledging its inheritance: in their first issue, The Iowa Review featured Donald Justice’s poem “ABC”; this issue features his letters, edited by Jerry Harp. Though that first issue was made up entirely of white, cisgender, heterosexual men (“brilliant men, mind you,” Nugent reminds us: “Donald Justice, William Stafford, Robert Coover, Galway Kinnell”) to her, Justice’s “poem reads like a manifesto for TIR. To launch a literary magazine in 1970 meant asserting against larger cultural forces the value of syllables, words, stanzas. Each of the diverse array of writers in this issue takes up the same cause. A, then B, then C, and building a new world from there.” Works in this issue include fiction by Pallavi Wakharkar , Serkan Görkemli, Rajnesh Chakrapani, Ernesto Barbieri, Kenneth Tanemura, Nikki Ervice, Lindsey Drager; nonfiction by Alison C. Rollins, Lisa Argrette Ahmad, Xujun Eberlein, Christopher Kempf, Michael M. Weinstein, Jonathan Wei, Michaela Django Walsh; poetry by Donald Platt, Sarah Heston, Alisha Dietzman, Samyak Shertok, Derek A. Denckla, Alisha Acquaye, Gunnar Wærness, translated by Gabriel Gudding, Meghan Maguire Dahn; and artwork by b. Robert Moore. Some content is available to read free online.

New Book :: Secret Waltz

Secret Waltz by Karen Lee Boren book cover image

Secret Waltz by Karen Lee Brown
Flexible Press, June 2022

Secret Waltz by Karen Lee Brown follows the coming-of-age journeys of three teens whose lives are turned upside down by the secrets they keep. Four best friends, Will, Kirstin, Leo, and Emelia, are growing up together, finding themselves and what it means to be a budding adult. They do all the things teens do—hang out at the pool, bike everywhere, and discover their bodies. But this growing up thing is hard. On her 16th birthday, Emelia receives stunning news from her aunts who raised her. Seems they’ve been keeping a secret from her for her entire life, one that forces Emelia to re-evaluate everything she thought she know about her family and herself, sending her on a journey of discovery with few tools and no idea what she might find along the way. Meanwhile, Leo is struggling with his abusive father, who leads a polka band, drinks too much, and cheats on Leo’s mother. Leo plays the guitar. He’s good, too. But his father wants Leo to stay away from that so-called music of rock and roll. Their relationship is complex: Leo both looks up to and hates his father for the control he has over his music and his life. All that is hard enough, but then Leo and Emelia and their friends Will and Kirstin stumble across Sonya, someone they’ve seen at school but don’t really know, doing what to them is an inexplicable and horrifying act. What should they do? What can they do? This begins a chain of actions that escalate and spiral out of their control. In the end, Secret Waltz asks, what does it mean to be a “good girl” or a “good boy”? If you have a secret, do you get to still be “good”?

Book Review :: I Am Jonathan Scrivener by Claude Houghton

I Am Jonathan Scrivener by Claude Houghton book cover image

Guest Post by Colm McKenna

Orphaned from the age of 19, James Wrexham finds himself employed in a dreary office. Without friends or family, he is merely “a spectator in life”. James’ humdrum existence comes to an end after being hired as secretary to Mr. Jonathan Scrivener, an independent gentleman soon leaving England. He is set to receive a lavish salary and live in Scrivener’s flat while he is away. Scrivener remains a shadowy figure throughout; details about him come from a cast of his friends who in turn come to know James. Initially, they are all unaware of each other, and all describe Scrivener as a completely different person.

I am Jonathan Scrivener revolves around two central themes, the first being the existence of an untapped potential in the men and women of inter-war Britain. Instead of painting his characters as gloomy hollow men (seemingly well adjusted and successful people, yet spiritually bankrupt), Houghton is more optimistic. Wrexham writes countless formulaic job applications, but what he submits to Scrivener is a long epistle about himself, which he doesn’t reread. There is something in Wrexham that Scrivener appreciates, even if he is blind to it himself.

Houghton protects his characters from material constraints, because “leisure reveals us”. Work and physical necessity don’t allow us to understand ourselves: “of course people behave themselves on a treadmill; what the hell else can they do?” Wrexham was a shell of a man before being hired by Scrivener. The job he is hired into plays a minor part in the story. It simply functions as a springboard to leisure, the realm in which introspection begins, as well as life’s “real” problems. Though no doubt controversial, it is a profound thesis.

Although Valancourt Books have republished six of Houghton’s novels, there remains a dearth of content out of print. He wrote essays, theatre, poetry and plays; reprinting these would be a good way to show a newfound audience the other strings to Houghton’s bow. Many of his works are nearing their centenary; as the copyright is coming up for some of his underrated pieces, hopefully someone will resurrect them.

There is no biography on Houghton, and little else remains to pad out his life beyond a brief interview given to a writer’s directory in 1950. I Am Jonathan Scrivener was eventually dramatized in 1953, but this was 22 years after the book’s release, and by then Houghton’s fame had already begun to dwindle. He shared an agent with F. Scott Fitzgerald, Agatha Christie and William Faulkner (to name a few), and had a host of celebrity admirers. Whatever the reason for his lost fame, it will be obvious to his readers that it has nothing to do with literary merit.

I am Jonathan Scrivener by Claude Houghton. Valancourt Books, April 2013.

Reviewer bio: Colm McKenna is a second-hand bookseller based in Paris. He has published and self-published an array of short stories and articles, hoping to eventually release a collection of stories. He is mainly interested in the works of John Cowper Powys, Claude Houghton and a range of Latin American writers.

Magazine Stand :: Topical Poetry – December 2022

Topical Poetry December 2022 cover image

Topical Poetry contributors share poems based on a recent public news/event, preferably from the previous or current week. Editors select the best ones and publish them on the website twice a month, on every other Sunday. “Poetry on current events can be transformational, thought-provoking, and everlasting.” Recent works include “Always” by Dustin Brookshire, “Carrier of Souls” by David Chorlton, “None of This Had to Happen- Channeling Jane Hirschfield” by Lynne Kemen, “A Tale of Black Friday” by Lois Perch Villemaire, “On the Many Shades of Protest (& Prayer)” by Jen Schneider, and “The Pen” by Bänoo Zan. All content is free to read online.