THE SILVER SWAN
by Elena Delbanco
Other Press, 240 pages
reviewed by Hannah Judd
Elena Delbanco’s father was Bernard Greenhouse, cellist in the Beaux Arts Trio, and in this first novel full of musicians her lived experience brings authority to her descriptions. Her focus is on a father, Alexander, a famous cellist but distant man, and his daughter, Mariana, also a cellist, poised to follow in his footsteps as a soloist but derailed by crippling stage fright and an unhappy love affair. The cello promised to her since childhood, her father’s, is unexpectedly not left to her in his will: the reader is left to grapple with, alongside Mariana, questions of where love, art, and family intersect. What does it mean when a cello, an object, is the center of a story? What myths do instruments carry; and why do we value the old ones so highly? What does it mean when a father loves his career more than his family? How do we recover from blows dealt from beyond the grave? How do we mitigate the expectations of families to pursue our own passions?
The cello that is the focal point of the novel is called the Silver Swan (because of a silver inlay), and it is fictional but compared to the Countess of Stanlein, the Piatagorsky, the Duport, and other ‘name-brand’ cellos of history. This is a quirk of many string instruments; there is a mythos built up in the lineage of famous players, the well-known makers, the year the instrument was built, the varnish, and the age of the wood that makes some stand out. These are the cellos that are played by the most famous soloists and often land in museums; Yo-Yo Ma plays a cello on loan from the Smithsonian, the Piatagorsky cello is currently on display at the Met. Having a cello at the center of her story is an interesting choice because at some point all of Delbanco’s characters fall victim to their obsession with the instrument. Mariana’s father calls the cello his greatest love, and Mariana looks forward to playing it on special occasions. She eagerly anticipates inheriting it, to the point that she becomes irrational and destructive when that is not the case.
ALEXANDRIAN SUMMER
by Yitzhak Gormezano Goren
translated by Yardenne Greenspan
New Vessel Press, 171 pages
reviewed by Justin Goodman
"The Irony of Nostalgia"
From our Modernist forebears came an emphasis on the power of memory (think Marcel Proust). Yet they forgot to mention its overbearing sibling, nostalgia. Overbearing not only because it tends to act as “a screen not intended to hide anything–a decoration meant only to please the eye,” but also because it obscures history. In effect, it fetishizes the past. It makes Alexandria the “strange, nostalgic European landscape” of Yitzhak Gormezano Goren’s Alexandrian Summer (translated for the first time into English by Yardenne Greenspan). One would expect an aestheticizing impulse of, as André Aciman informs in his introduction, a man who “aged ten…left his home on the Rue Delta in Alexandra” and then saw the military overthrow of King Farouk “dissolve all remnants of multi-national life in Egypt.” Alexandrian Summer is nigh a roman a clef, following the arc of the author’s life up to his fortuitous migration from this anti-Semitic cosmopolitan fantasy to Israel to join his brothers. Nonetheless, despite his intimacy with his history, Goren avoids any such pathos. All nostalgic bliss is converted to a mourner’s Kaddish. The novel’s characters are impulsive, obsessive, and repressed; its future is inevitably bleak. Goren confines the mythical, in “this mythical metropolis,” to the telling. “I just want to tell the story of one summer,” the narrator begins the story, “a Mediterranean summer, an Alexandrian summer.”
It’s the summer of 1951 when “a Jewish family [that] came from Cairo…came to Alexandria for a summer of joy.” The summer when the family’s eldest son, “David Hamdi-Ali tall as a toreador, blonde as a Nordic cavalier, elegant like Rudolpho Valentino,” attempts to woo and wed the Alexandrian Anabelle. To an extent, this marriage plot is the narrative locus. All eyes turn to Anabelle to determine if she will take the wealthy and talented jockey.
SUPERMUTANT MAGIC ACADEMY
by Jillian Tamaki
Drawn & Quarterly, 2015
reviewed by Jesse Allen
Awkwardness is the hallmark of adolescence. Teenagers going off to boarding school or college find themselves entering a particularly unstable social realm for the first time. Having mutant superpowers or knowing the secrets of magic can help overcome this awkwardness—or it can exacerbate it. Part Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry and part Professor X’s School for Gifted Youngsters, SuperMutant Magic Academy paints a whimsical, snarky, and heartwarming picture of this period of youth.
The cover of SuperMutant Magic Academy features Marsha, bored and surrounded by the detritus of teenager-dom: her homework, notes, and of course a magic wand, no more special than the pencil she writes with. Characters walk through the halls of S.M.A. hypersensitive or oblivious to dolphin-headed Trixie, super-logical hunk Cheddar, cute and fox-eared Marsha, as well as the performance art antics of Frances or the annoying ploys for acceptance by laser-eyed Trevor. Like many an institutional bubble for gifted youth, S.M.A. is a parallel society where issues of identity, gender, sexual orientation, race, and how-is-everyone-going-to-live-in-the-real-world are played out in between magic classes, football games, regular classes, pranks, and protests. Contemporary youth are immersed in a technological world that renders their attitudes with a seemingly ironic blasé, yet they still play D & D with zeal.
I REFUSE
by Per Petterson
translated by Don Bartlett
Graywolf Press, 282 pages
reviewed by Claire Rudy Foster
The fact is that part of you is always fifteen, and will always be that silly, stunted age, when you had all the answers and your heart was folded as neatly as a napkin. The age when you sampled cigarettes and realized how easy it would be to run away from home, for good. The age when the drink or the drug worked, for the first time, altering the way you saw yourself and the rest of the messy, stimulating world. The fact is that everyone is this way, forever fifteen. We age in place, with our bodies getting older around the skeletons of our memories, which are fixed as the spears of a crystal. The same is true of Per Petterson, who circles the same heavy themes over and over again, as though hoping to divine their meaning. I Refuse, his latest novel, revisits familiar territory: cruel adults, absent parents, the unspoken pact between friends, and an eyeless God hanging over the whole scene like a painted canopy.
Released over a month ago, I Refuse is already “selling like a train,” according to publisher Graywolf Press. There are other reviews, by more astute writers in higher places.
BORB
by Jason Little
Uncivilized Books, 96 pages
reviewed by Jesse Allen
Is Borb a graphic novel or comic strip? Packaged as both, the reader is treated to various juxtapositions that jar as well as entertain and enlighten. Illustrated in a style reminiscent of Harold Gray’s Little Orphan Annie, Borb’s main character is out of time. Homeless and alcoholic, he constantly stumbles into mishaps, finding resolutions that quickly fall apart and lead him into more desperate circumstances. But what we know and learn about him is very little, as alcoholism is the main character throughout this tale. He is able to make gains, such as finding food and a place to eat, and yet he sabotages himself through his addictive imbibing. As the story progresses, it is hard to muster pity for the main character.
Rendered in classic Sunday comics’ style, the horrors of alcoholism are accompanied by the bumbling antics of the everyday life of this man. Rarely does he speak, and yet Little is able to capture the humor and sadness in his alcohol-fueled survival and fall. While never pretending to be a “feel good” read, Borb doesn’t come across as a cautionary tale either. Our man finds himself surrounded by bits of chicken bone, pizza boxes, half eaten Styrofoam containers of whatever, and stained cardboard boxes strewn across the ground. While this might appear to be “rock bottom,” his alcoholism causes him to sink lower when his descent moves underground.
TROMPE L’OEIL
by Nancy Reisman
Tin House Books, 352 pages
reviewed by Michelle Fost
Does a good life play out like a well made film? Nancy Reisman has published two excellent books—a prize-winning collection of stories, House Fires (it won the Iowa Award for Short Fiction in 1999) and a novel, The First Desire. Now her second novel, just published by Tin House, Trompe L’Oeil, comes along and almost tricks the eye to thinking it is about a real family, or perhaps about what we can learn from a carefully curated assemblage of painters (descriptive response to their work is incorporated into the novel) including Edouard Vuillard, Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio, and Georges de la Tour. Still, there is something more exciting at play in Trompe L’Oeil than the saga of the Murphy family or the discussion of visual art within the novel. This is a novel that finds beauty and resolution by testing how real life and literary art are like filmmaking.
Reisman can sound like Virginia Woolf, but her experimentation also places her in the company of contemporary film directors like Terence Malick and Richard Linklater. If she has written a love letter to cinema, it’s not a traditional or straightforward letter. I don’t think anyone in the Murphy family ever so much as steps a foot in a movie theater in the many decades that we follow them. We hear about great painters, but no filmmakers, no directors, no actors. Instead, we can understand the Murphy family itself as a stand-in for a film being made. Moments accumulate to form their story, and we read of these moments sequentially.
33 DAYS
by Léon Werth, with an introduction by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
[translated by Austin Denis Johnston]
Melville House Publishing, 116 pages
reviewed by Nathaniel Popkin
There are occasions when a phrase or a paragraph or a book hits the main line and after the dose everything is different.
33 Days arrived in the mail ten days ago, on a Friday. Guests were coming for the weekend. Already, the city was filling with people. The weather was warm, finally; pink and purple and white flowers garlanded the city. Fragrance smothered street corners. Whole neighborhoods were ripe for seduction.
The book, slender and impeccably designed, put itself in my hands. I gazed at it quickly then put it down on the cushion in the old grocery store window where in winter we take turns stretching toward the sun. I picked it back up. I hadn’t heard of Léon Werth. But Saint-Exupéry—we forget Saint-Exupéry at our peril.
IN PRAISE OF MISTRANSLATIONS
On Conversational Translation
by J.G. McClure
We all know Freud talked about the ego and the id. Except he didn’t. What he actually talked about was Das Ich und Das Er, which is to say, “The I and the It.” The words “mean” the same thing, except they don’t. When we translate Freud, we use the Latin pronouns for “I” and “It,” whereas Freud used the regular, everyday pronouns of his German.
It’s the same meaning, sort of, but the Latin “id” is outside our ordinary speech, and so it lacks the disturbingly uncanny mix of familiarity and otherness that “the It” conveys. “The id is made up of our primal desires—inaccessible and constantly influencing our actions, while the ego struggles to keep up.” “The It is made up of our primal desires—inaccessible and constantly influencing our actions, while the I struggles to keep up.” Hear the difference?
I love translating poetry. I’ve done many translations. But it’s my suspicion that translation is fundamentally impossible. As Cervantes said: reading even the best translation is like looking at a Persian rug from behind.
THANK YOU, JUDGE JUDY
by Jen Karetnick
I’m a poet and fiction writer by vocation and a journalist by trade. The first two I learned in school, ultimately ending with two MFA degrees, one in each genre. Journalism I was taught on the job, trained by several editors. But seven years ago, when the economy crashed and the future of print journalism was a serious concern, I took a job in a charter school for the arts, charged with creating and teaching a program for grades 6-12 that included poetry, fiction and creative non-fiction.
For poetry and fiction, I had few worries, but for personal essays and memoir, I had to expand my repertoire. That’s when I began to watch the television show Judge Judy, and found that everything I needed to know about writing and teaching creative non-fiction was an oft-repeated truism that came directly from the Honorable Judith Sheindlin’s lips.
I didn’t come to this conclusion right away. At first, I started to watch the show because it was on when I got home from school. I was so exhausted from my unexpected new career path that I immediately took to my bed, unable to do anything else but gaze in stupefaction at the television.
I settled on Judge Judy because she belittled her litigants so much more than I yelled at my students that she made me feel better. Plus, those who appeared before her were so ill-equipped to deal with the world that it gave me hope for those who came to my classroom each day, even the ones who clearly would never become writers. Or ones who asked me what country we lived in when I taught them how to write self-addressed stamped envelopes. Or who thought they could only use apps like email or Dropbox from their own computers because their parents had set it up for them to open automatically.
ENDING UP
by Kingsley Amis
NYRB Classics, 136 pages
reviewed by Jon Busch
Originally published in 1974, Kingsley Amis’ short novel Ending Up is about five old-timers approaching death in England. It is a startlingly funny work, considering the grim subject.
I was initially apprehensive about this book, wary that my limited knowledge of English culture would hinder my ability to understand an English work of social satire, but happily this was not the case nor should it be a worry for any reader. Amis’ concerns in the book, while presented through British characters, are predominantly human in scope.
The bulk of the novel, with the exception of a few doctors’ visits, takes place at Tuppeny-Happenny Cottage, where the novel’s five protagonists share residence. The cottage, with its off-the-beaten-path culture, is a petri dish of incubating irritation resulting from the character’s declining physical power and loss of mental faculties.
While the plot is inherently tragic, Amis’ dry descriptions, annoying characters, and ridiculous ending argue for the book’s classification as comedy. Satirist Craig Brown, in the introduction, describes the book as irritation raised to the level of art. More succinct words have never been uttered. If there is an aim to this meandering tale of drunkenness, petty arguments, and “long wailing farts” it is to display without remorse the irritations of old age, incontinence and all.
ASHES IN MY MOUTH, SAND IN MY SHOES
by Per Petterson
translated by Don Bartlett
Graywolf Press, 118 pages
reviewed by Rory McCluckie
Ashes in My Mouth, Sand in My Shoes is Per Petterson's first book but one of his last to be translated into English. This isn't surprising; Petterson's 2005 worldwide breakthrough, Out Stealing Horses, triggered a certain catching-up period for translators. Gradually, we readers have been able to consume the bulk of his output but it's only now that we can see for ourselves where it all started for the author. This means that readers are able to bring a context to this work that isn't usually part of the chronological reading of contemporary fiction.
It makes for an interesting exercise. Published in 1987 when he was in his mid-thirties, Ashes in My Mouth, Sand in My Shoes is a collection of stories that launched Petterson on a writing career that followed stints as a librarian, book store clerk, and translator. You could mine the man's biography for years, however, and still not find anything more horrifically arresting than the event that took place on April 7, 1990. Early that morning, while travelling aboard the MS Scandinavian Star, Petterson's mother, father, brother and niece perished along with 155 others when the ferry was set on fire. It would be a hard task to read his post-1990 work without some kind of reference to this tragic occurrence and, sure enough, much of that writing is delivered in a tone that feels like a reaction against this terrible misfortune. Ashes in My Mouth, Sand in My Shoes, however, came before this pivotal moment in Petterson's life and thus naturally seems to pose a very simple but fascinating question; namely, does this early work suggest that, under different circumstances, Petterson would have been a different writer than he is today?
DISPLACEMENT
by Lucy Knisley
Fantagraphics, 168 pages
reviewed by Travis DuBose
Lucy Knisley’s Displacement follows her previous graphic travelogues focused on carefree adventures in Europe with a diary about aging and constriction. In the winter of 2012 Knisley accompanied her elderly grandparents on a cruise through the Caribbean, a vacation that, given her grandparents’ condition—her grandmother was suffering from advanced stages of Alzheimer’s and her grandfather was mentally sharp but physically frail—was, by her own admission, ill-advised and possibly dangerous. As she recounts the difficulties of caring for her grandparents, Knisley ruminates on the role they’ve played in the life of her family. In particular, she quotes from and illustrates selections from her grandfather’s memoirs of the second world war.
THE SEA
by Blai Bonet
translated by and Maruxa Relano and Martha Tennent
Dalkey Archive Press, 178 pages
reviewed by Nathaniel Popkin
Manuel Tur, sixteen years old and confined to tubercular sanatorium, stares out his window at the forested plane. He fixes his gaze on the holm oaks and the olive trees. This is Majorca, the Catalan island, 1942. “To the west,” he says, at the opening of Blai Bonet’s 1958 novel The Sea (El Mar), in the new English version published by Dalkey Archive Press, “the sky is hazy, blue, tender, like an open switchblade above the sea.”
Bonet’s metaphoric language bristles with despair and danger. Tur, says another patient, Andreu Ramallo, “speaks as though bleeding to death.” The dying Justo Pastor has the “glassy, dirty gaze that animals have in the afternoon.” A razor blade in Tur’s hand (for the worst of reasons) has the look of a “train ticket that some invisible conductor has punched.”
The sea itself is the novel’s heavy, so vast and inviolate it’s invisible. Tur, the novel’s protagonist, mentions it at the opening (threatened by the switchblade sky) and then at the end, when the reader comes to understand its power. Nowhere and everywhere, coincidentally we find it even in the first names of the book’s two translators, Maruxa Relaño and Martha Tennent. In their luminous new translation, Maruxa and Martha have returned El Mar to the pantheon of twentieth century Catalan novels available to English readers. Bonet belongs there with Mercè Rodoreda and Josep Pla, like the painter Salvador Dalí so attuned to the dry heat, the crags and pines, the eternal, devastating light of Cataluña. (No book digs more violently into the Catalan earth than Rodoreda’s Death in Spring, translated by Tennent and published by Open Letter in 2009.) “We left the road and entered the parched fields strewn with clods of earth, and our feet hurt from the piercing stubbles,” says Manuel Tur.
THE SCULPTOR
by Scott McCloud
First Second Books, 488 pages
reviewed by Amy Blakemore
Scott McCloud is a mentor. Most first meet him in Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art, where he instantly disarms with his bespectacled, plaid glory, celebrating and clarifying the medium for readers. Witnessing McCloud usher original characters into the world with the same warmth and care in The Sculptor, his new graphic novel, is nothing short of a privilege. Rarely do we find characters presented in a manner I am compelled to call gentle: set down on the page as if being laid into bed, allowed to speak their dreamlike thoughts before sleep. And, like a dream, The Sculptor is equal parts muted and epic: you will notice it in your waking life—you will experience an eerie hum at the resemblance.
McCloud introduces David Smith: a character written in the legacy of Doctor Faustus, here reincarnated in modern day New York as a struggling artist who agrees to shorten his time on earth for fantastic sculpting abilities. With a common name, David offers a relatable face for individuals dying for creative breakthrough, a cliché McCloud literalizes by instituting life and death stakes.
GUYS LIKE ME
by Dominique Fabre
translated by Howard Curtis
New Vessel Press, 144 pages
reviewed by Nathaniel Popkin
Dominique Fabre has written a dozen novels, including the 2005 The Waitress Was New, which Archipelago Books brought out in English translation in 2008. New Vessel Press publisher Ross Ufberg attended a reading at Shakespeare and Company in Paris and decided to publish an English edition of Fabre’s next novel, Guys Like Me, in the translation by Howard Curtis. Both novels are narrated by middle-aged protagonists, once married, now single and lonely. “Sometimes you’re so alone you think you’re talking aloud even when you haven’t said a word,” says the unnamed narrator of Guys Like Me, who works in an unnamed office and lives in an apartment in Levallois. Once a week or so he talks to his son Benjamin, who’s finishing university studies, and every so often he meets up with his lifelong friend Marco to talk about Marco’s troubled son Antoine, who has been in and out of jail and rehab. Sometimes they reminisce and the landscape of the Hauts-de-Seine, which holds all their memories, talks back. He trolls Internet dating sites, “a kind of ocean” of loneliness. On Sundays, he walks along the Seine. He is vexed by the aggressive early spring trimming of the plane trees along the boulevards and the quay. But then, spring is coming, and soon the butchered branches will be filled with leaves.
On his way to Marco and Aïcha’s apartment’s for dinner, the narrator of Guys Like Me sits at a bench near the suburban bus junction at Porte de Champerret. He doesn’t want to arrive to early so he waits on the bench until the time dinner is called, 8:30. Then he gets up. “I walked quickly, pretending, the way all guys like me do, that I was a man in a hurry, a man who’d never begged for love or anything like that.” Fabre hoists the phrase “guys like me” as an incantation of group recognition, mutual empathy, and shared desire. The desire must be stifled, however, if it puts too much at risk.
I FOLLOW IN THE DUST SHE RAISES
by Linda Martin
University of Alaska Press, 63 pages
PLASH AND LEVITATION
by Adam Tavel
University of Alaska Press, 85 pages
reviewed by Johnny Payne
On finishing these two books of poetry recently published by the University of Alaska Press, I felt like a smug bigamist who can’t decide between two pretenders for his love, so chooses them both. I don’t regret this lack of choice, for each has its charms, and they can’t be reconciled.
Linda Martin’s I Follow in the Dust She Raises is the kind of poetry that invites the word luminous, so impoverished by overuse it can no longer light the inside of a bulb, much less invoke noonday. Too many blurbs have been attached to a series of lesser books that make the mistake of working nature by subtraction—assuming that an endless wheat field with a tractor in it under an immense Nebraska sky—offer a limned absence that by itself could bring us to metaphysical tears. Borges came closer to the truth when he said, speaking of the pampas, that each object in them was separate and eternal. To simple but potent effect, Martin starts from zero and works by addition.
Yes, Martin’s book does have wheat fields and lines not spare or clean but rather precise and without waste, but they are plants that populate a luxuriant human world.
CROSSING BORDERS IN FICTION
by Ellen Meeropol
The main character in my second novel, On Hurricane Island, is a lesbian. I’m straight. There are also an African-American attorney and a cross-dressing F.B.I. agent in that book, and I’m neither of those. So what right do I have to burrow under these characters’ skin, see the world through their eyes, and write their voices?
It’s an important question and one that has been frequently argued, especially when a white author writes from the perspective of a person of color. Think about Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin, William Styron’s The Confessions of Nat Turner, Nadine Gordimer’s July’s People, and Kathryn Stockett’s The Help. Over the decades, fiction writers have been roundly criticized for appropriating the voices of marginalized groups.
More recently, writers have also been criticized for not writing characters who represent our diverse world.
The opportunity to explore “other” voices – to live lives and tell stories that are not our own personal experience – is, I think, one of the main reasons why many of us write. I want to know how it feels to be a lesbian kidnapped by misogynist national security officers, and what it’s like to be a cross-dressing F.B.I. agent. I trust the combination of research and imagination to take me there.
BANNED FOR LIFE
by Arlene Ang
Misty Publications, 81 pages
reviewed by Carlo Matos
Arlene Ang’s Banned for Life is obsessed with bodies, especially dead bodies. In fact, there is a reference to a corpse in nearly every poem in the first section and in many cases the corpses are literally present. And in the poems that do not have corpses, death is often not far or on hold. In “Mountains,” for example, the subject of the poem is referred to simply as “the body:”
With both hands, the body touched
itself where the physician
lingered with the stethoscope . . .
on that part where everything went wrong.
The “body” of “Mountains” might be the mother figure of the next poem, “To Sweat,” who has cancer. In these poems Ang demonstrates how the ravaging power of a disease like cancer can trap us inside our own bodies or reduce our humanity to its component, material parts.
AnonCHILDREN DANCE ON GRAVES[1] collected by Sir Peter Cotton edited by Sophia Lee In time, he would come to bear great hatred toward the juniper[2] tree. He would hate the soft sheen of its[3] needles and its slender twisting limbs.…
Unknown, discovered by Luis d’Antin Van RootenUN PETIT D’UN PETIT, from Mots D’Heures: Gousses, Rames Un petit d’un petit S’étonne aux Halles Un petit d’un petit Ah! degrés te fallent Indolent qui ne sort cesse Indolent qui ne se…
TESLA: A PORTRAIT WITH MASKS
by Vladimir Pištalo
translated by Bogdan Rakić and John Jeffries
Graywolf Press, 452 pages
reviewed by Rory McCluckie
One of the most illuminating moments in Vladimir Pištalo's biographical novel, Tesla: A Portrait with Masks, comes not when the protagonist is immersed in the electrical discoveries for which he became famous, but when he is translating poetry. Searching for an English equivalent to the Serbian phrase crammed in, he pauses his contemplations to offer an observation: “On the outside, Serbian looks like such a tiny language,” he opines to his collaborator and friend, Robert Underwood Johnson; “but it's so roomy on the inside.” It's a short remark but one that is loaded with significance. Tesla himself was an outsider. A Serbian in North America, a loner in high society, and a genius among men, he was set apart from others his entire life. This outsider, however, possessed an intense inner existence molded by the death of a brother, and a capacious affection for the human race that informed his life's work. When he noted the duality inherent in the Serbian language, the inventor could just as well have been describing something fundamental about himself.
CONFESSIONS OF A FICTION EDITOR
by George Dila
I am the fiction editor of a respectable independent ink-and-paper quarterly literary journal. We publish short fiction of up to 1500 words. I see every piece of prose submitted to the journal. The editor-in-chief has given me sole discretion to accept or reject any piece submitted.
Here are my confessions.
Confession #1: I reject nearly everything. Most work I see should never have been submitted in the first place. It is embarrassingly amateurish. It makes me wonder whether these submitters have even a modicum of critical judgment of their own work. Frankly, I would have rejected much of what I see published in other journals, too.
To the dismay of my editor-in-chief, who probably thinks my standards are too high, some issues of our journal have run with no fiction at all. Other issues have included work that I should have rejected. I accepted them because they were, at least, competently written, and the boss was getting antsy. A few issues have included some real gems of short fiction, and of those I am most proud.
Confession #2: I make up my mind fast. I read few submissions beyond the first paragraph, some not even beyond the first sentence. For some submissions I know my answer by the time I've read the title—still, I always read at least the first sentence or two. From that, I can tell if a writer knows what they heck they're doing, and if it will be worthwhile reading further.
Some writers may find this admission dismaying, even shocking, even arrogant. How do I know the story doesn't really take off in the second paragraph, they might ask. How do I know there isn't some deathless prose within those pages that I will never see because I stopped reading too soon? Who in the hell do I think I am, anyway? Well, I'm the fiction editor, and trust me, I know.
I accept most of the stories I actually read through to the end.
SINGLE, CAREFREE, MELLOW
by Katherine Heiny
Alfred A. Knopf, 224 pages
reviewed by Michelle Fost
In Katherine Heiny’s very funny debut collection of stories, Single, Carefree, Mellow, women seek out a little more love, a little more sex, a little more passion. They have affairs with teachers, bosses, married men, and neighbors. Who can blame them? The comedy of their attachments made me think of the experiments of Konrad Lorenz, the ethologist who showed us how fuzzy little goslings, seeing a man instead of a mother goose after hatching, would naturally treat the man as their mother. These women and their men—as hilarious in their pairings as the goslings trailing behind a grown man, and they have no idea! Such innocents!
Take Sasha in the opening story, “The Dive Bar,” of Heiny’s collection. She’s rattled by a phone call from the wife of her lover. The wife, Anne, whose name Sasha does not recognize, invites Sasha to meet for a drink. “And to paraphrase Dr. Seuss,” Heiny writes, “Sasha does not know quite what to say. Should she meet her for drinks? Now what should she do? Well, what would you do if your married lover’s wife asked you?”
Sasha’s moral compass leads her to walk briskly down a large portion of the island of Manhattan in order to consult with her roommate Monique about what to do. Sasha and Monique agree that they will walk on Broadway, one starting at 106th, the other at 36th, until they meet, and then they will go into the nearest bar to think together about Sasha’s problem. Sasha’s problem has a certain gravity, but they can’t seem to help themselves from making a game of it. And then, of course, they break the rules of their game, choosing a bar that appeals to them more than the Taco Tico they land in front of.
Miriam Libicki, Introduction by Tahneer OksmanTURNING RIGHT ON CASSADY: A Visual Narrative The cover image of Miriam Libicki’s five-page comics essay, “Turning Right on Cassady,” shows an oversized and emptied pair of sandals superimposed on a street map of Columbus, Ohio.…
FRAGILE BODIES
by Danielle Harms
I.
Rosa stands in the coop’s doorway holding a baby chicken in each of her hands. One of the birds is dying. The other is dead. We might have overlooked the body in the bed of wood shavings covering the ground if it hadn’t been encircled by a dozen other chicks, their feathers warm under the amber light of heat Yesterday it was an alive, palm-sized animal, toddling around on legs like twigs. Now, the body is badly decomposed, everything but the beak flattened, the eye sockets pecked clean.
It’s June in Florida. The sun is just rising over the panhandle farm. In this heat, it doesn’t take long for a body to break down. Everything seems to droop and sag.
“Anoche pasado,” Rosa says with a resolved tone, holding up the deflated body. “Problamente,” I agree. As if I know .
THE LIGHTFOOTED THIEVES
by Lucy Ribchester
Midnight, and I can tell it's urgent because the mistress never knocks me this late. I struggle with the bed-jacket that belonged to Harry’s mother. Moths have eaten close to the armpits and it's in danger of splitting, but I don't wear it often enough to warrant mending. The candle in my hand blows a thin ribbon of soot backwards as I hurry to the front door. No sooner than it’s open, air skates in, and with it the howls of the dogs she's woken up on her way.
I feel myself clench; the instinct to soothe the pups. Mistress's brown eyes are aflame. She's hissing, 'It's happened again. I won't tolerate it.' Her voice dissolves on the last word and I widen the door, bring her inside with the cold fizzing off her pinned hair. I know she must be pained to be in such a state in front of me. She prides herself on her fierceness, mistress does; has made a name for herself in the county as ‘the independent one’ after master died and everyone said she should give up ‘that bloody country pile’ for a townhouse.
She sits down at the table by the range, perching away from the flaking paint on the chair like it might poison her back. Across the tablecloth my books are strewn, volumes she's teaching me to read; Equality for All; In Favour of the Working Woman; Tess of the d’Urbervilles. Pencils rolling around, for when I underline the hard words.
I'm glad though, that she can see I'm working, and she notices and it flashes on her face that she’s glad too. She takes pride in me; loves to show me off. Last week at the women's club in Chancery Lane I gave a small speech about how education is helping me manage since Harry passed away. My hands were shaking as I told them how much I was enjoying Jane Eyre. Mistress says all workers must be educated, so that our children will have choices. I never bother to point out that I don’t have children.
HOLIDAY
by Kim Steele
I do not feel the Jet Ski as it crashes into my head. Or I do—it is a Jet Ski and it is crashing into my head after all—but it does not register as pain. I feel it only in the way I feel a fly that lands on my thigh or a strand of wet hair on my cheek. I lift my hand to push the Jet Ski away but of course by then I am already spinning down into the lake. The water is cool. I forget for a moment what I am doing down there among the seaweed and the muck and go still. I think I might have forgotten I am even in water. Or maybe forgotten what water is. I am just beginning to remember things like the way the sun rose that morning over the fog on the lake and that my brother’s name is Liam when suddenly something pulls underneath my arms and I am back up in the sun looking at the hysterical face of my uncle.
“Are you ok?” he shouts, treading water, his arms still holding me up. My lips taste like gasoline.
“Yes,” I yell but it comes out a whisper.
The Jet Ski spins back around us and a tan girl in a white life vest screams.
“Turn it off,” my uncle yells and she does.
Tonight the Stars Are Strung Up Like Elegies
I want them for myself,
but you’re right.
It's easier to take a picture
of this heat,
to pick bread crumbs
from a crocodile’s teeth.
Tell me you can follow me to wherever is home.
Find me by the pollen-
yellow paint punctuating
these highway hips.
CERTIFICATE
by Suzanne Cope
The name was the easy part, as was age and date and place of birth. The address provided, it was decided, would be his mother’s, despite that he hadn’t spent more than a night there in the past decade, save for a few nights in the previous few months when he had shown up on her doorstep, unannounced, with no place else to go. Before that he had been in Larchmont or Yonkers, we had heard. Maybe he had moved around, maybe he had stayed in one apartment for years, books on history or pulp spy novels or porn cluttering the closets, stacked at his bedside.
The first time I met him, he ate a third helping of the lasagna I had brought for his mother’s birthday, his eagerness was thanks enough. He stayed quiet otherwise, ignoring the questions about his job, his home, his friends. But his brothers had stopped asking anyway, afraid that he would disappear again if they prodded too much. That night I lay in the guest bed where I could see the blue television flickering, illuminating his profile through the crack between the door and its frame. He watched a news show intently. Later laughed at a late night comic. That was the first moment he had been truly unguarded all day.
THE DUCK LADY
by Jeremy Freedman
In my dreams I see the duck lady,
her profile’s sharp tang,
quack-quacking on Chestnut Street.
Pterodactyls are tame
compared to the rampaging avians
flying past her head, pecking at her,
causing her wracking sternutations.
Remember not to write me duck lady,
you don't owe me anything.
In my complacency, I betrayed you,
betrayed your otherness.
I did not believe in the modern polyphonic style
of your extruded aria on Chestnut Street.
You owe all to yourself and the Blessed Mother
and your home, husband and family.
Your needs are important to you;
they converge in the area
in front of you,
in the two feet of sidewalk
in front of your two feet.
Cheryl SmartHORSES IN THE WRINKLE On an island bigger than Manhattan rests the burned-out remains of the Carnegie mansion, Dungeness. The Gilded Age gilded the Carnegie family, so much so they could buy up pieces of the world to gold-plate.…
DOUBLE FEATURE
by Ariella Carmell
The letters on the marquee jammed against each other: Ingmar Bergman Retrospective, the billing read, words cohered into a smear of black.
Greta’s breath clouded as she waited by the box office. She paced on the balls of her feet, toes pointed upward, arms outstretched. The theatergoers, trickling in like the drops of a leaky faucet, lifted their brows at her. She had seen them all here before, but they had never seen her.
A smile tugged at the corners of her mouth. Her fingers grazed the two tickets, snug within the fleece of her jacket pocket.
Encroached within a glass box, the cashier slid another ticket across the counter. Lara had to work the box to keep her spot in the school’s film society. Today she forgot the issue of Rolling Stone she always had spread about before her, occupying her time during those long lulls. Now she lifted her focus to Greta with raised eyebrows; the girl’s constant strolling back and forth was giving her a headache.
Lara pressed her face to orifice in the glass and yelled out, “Are you going in or what?”
Tara Stella, Introduction by Raymond RorkeHIDDEN IN PLAIN SIGHT: Instagram Photography A century ago, in 1916, American photographer Paul Strand would attach a false lens on the side of his camera so that he could photograph candid portraits of unsuspecting…
YOUR MOTHER SINGS WHEN SHE’S ALONE
by Cathy Ulrich
Your mother loves to sing. She only does it when no one else is around. She says I’ve got a terrible voice, and you believe it. Your mother never says anything she doesn’t think is true.
When you asked your mother why is the sky blue, she didn’t know the answer. She thought she might have asked her own parents when she was a child. She thought maybe every child did it. She said she didn’t know, science maybe, and said a more pressing question was what if my blue isn’t your blue? What if my blue is your purple? How would you know?
Your mother doesn’t know the answers to lots of things. She didn’t realize how stupid she was, she says, until she became a mother. I used to think I knew it all.
She knows lots of things, actually, but they’re all useless, like there’s a kind of bug that can eat toads, or that silent filmmaker D.W. Griffith died in a hotel lobby.
Nobody cares about all that, she says, except for her.
by Kathryn Smith
I am trying to think about the circus collapse.
I am trying to think about the kidnapped
schoolgirls, the extremist who says
they’re his for the selling. I am trying, but celebrity
overrides: Look, the young country star
held at gunpoint. Look, the Instagram
argument, the lip-sync fiasco. Someone else
is talking. Someone other than who
we thought. Not who ought. I am trying
to speak about the convict whose execution
went wrong, to parse the name of the chemical
cocktail, the name of the dead man or the man
he killed. I know what I know
changes nothing. It augurs
TELL-TALE
by Nancy Hightower
I remember hearing the beating of God’s heart. Th-thump, th-thump th-thump. I swore it to be a holy thing. My father held me tight and said let that rhythm guide you, son. Cha-cha-cha. Th-thump, th-thump th-thump. The living room spun into hallejulahs as he swiveled and swayed his hips, hand on stomach, eyes closed. Lips easing into a smile. Lawrence Welk crooned from the television to keep those toes tapping. My father listened, sashayed though life hips, pressed against my mother, my friends, my daughter. It’s a holy holy thing, son. Cha-cha-cha. I shut my eyes, prayed for the beating of God’s heart to drown out all other sounds.
HUSH, PUPPIES
by Catherine Nichols
The vet returned my call as I was rolling the last wineglass in bubble wrap. In counterpoint to my curt hello, he sounded upbeat, even jovial. He explained that when Mags had been spayed last month, the operation had sent her hormones haywire. “That’s why she’s behaving like she’s pregnant,” he summed up. “It’s a textbook case.”
The “textbook case” was curled beside the stove in a cardboard box she had commandeered during my week of packing. She’d stuffed it with laundry from the overflowing hamper. Each time I approach, she whined.
“It’s all in your head,” I told her, shoving the phone into my pocket. “Snap out of it.”
Her eyebrows twitched. Then she sighed, wriggling deeper into the mound of dirty tees, her silky muzzle resting on her paws.
Alex returned with the U-Haul around one. After much hemming and hawing on both sides, I was making the move to his place. I updated him on Mags’ condition. In the several hours since the vet’s call, she had whelped. At her swollen teats were Alex’s favorite Nikes that she’d dragged from under the bed.
FINDING BABEL
A Video Documentary
by David Novack and Andrei Malaev-Babel (Odessa Films)
Introduction by David Novack and Dylan Hansen-Fliedner
Isaac Babel is considered one of the most significant literary figures of the early Soviet Union. A writer, translator, and journalist, he began publishing shortly after the revolution of 1917 with the help of his mentor Maxim Gorky. The older author advised the young writer to go and see the world, incorporating what he saw into his fiction. Babel signed up with the Red Army in the Soviet-Polish Civil War as a war correspondent and began keeping what would become his 1920 Diary. Only 26 years old, Isaac Babel developed a unique literary practice rooted in the act of witnessing.
As a documentarian, Babel captured reality, filtering and distilling it into memorable impressions in his diary. These observations and reports would later be transformed into a collection of short stories, Red Cavalry, which blend fact and fiction into powerful narratives. Red Cavalry thrust Babel upon the international stage. In these stories, Babel wrote under the alter-ego Kyril Lyutov who, like Babel, hides the fact that he is Jewish from his fellow Cossacks, widely known for their anti-Semitism. The intertwining of fact and fiction and the semi-autobiographical meditation on identity became fertile ground for developing a formal and stylistic approach for our film, Finding Babel. With this in mind, we looked even more deeply at Babel’s approach to literature.
QUERENCIA
by Leticia Urieta
The first time my sister Mari lost her baby, only twenty weeks, the doctor assured her that she could try again. “The body is miraculous, it can bounce back from anything,” as though her womb just needed to be cleared of the cluttered, grasping mess inside.
I was recruiting a student for my college, flipping through brochures in her living room. They sent me all over the South west as their official bilingual recruiter. The girl sat next to me and ran her hands over the glossy pictures of the campus. She would be the first in her family to go to college. Her mother, who sat on my other side, peered at the pictures of the dormitories. She paused over the listings of scholarship information and fees accrued over the first academic year and wanted me to assure her that they could afford it, that her baby wouldn’t be so far away. “Unas horas,” I reminded her, showing her the route from I-20 across Louisiana and into Texas. When the visit was over, the mother sent me off to my hotel with arepas wrapped in tin foil. I relished being among these hopeful families, taking on some of their glow.
BEFORE BEFORE BEFORE
by Kallie Falandays
If you were at a dance party and my name rhymed with overalls, would you court me? And then, after we kissed, would you go to your friends to get high fives? If I only wore orange, would you peel me under the blankets like chewed paper falling from the structure of a paper mache elephant? Here, pretend like you’re an air conditioner. Pretend to pull your dick out at a party. Pretend to get reprimanded. This is what your face looks like when it is hurt. This is what your hands look like when they’re bound. This is what it looks like after your house turned into a building. This is what you look like when you’ve discovered yourself the next morning in a city that smells like wet trash. There are two things I’d like to say to you, but I can’t find the correct anatomy. It is like searching for ghosts in November. It is like breaking all the wood in the house because it won’t light on fire. If you were a carnival, you’d be the medicine show.
WILLIE: PREMONITION
by Heather Jones
When Lucy and me go down by the river the moonlight in her long blonde curls. You can’t trust no one near no shining hair like that I tell her no one should touch them long blonde curls. She laughs at me I’d be mad but for the sound of her laugh at night like when the sun and the moon sit in the sky at the same time. She laughs she holds her hair between her lily white fingers she says I can touch it. I want to.
Go ahead go ahead go ahead. Touch it touch it touch it she won’t quit sayin it, I got to look down at the ground No one. No one should touch. If I don’t look she can’t make me touch. My fingers twitch. She says she wishes I. would do. Something. She says it like that stops between her words I hear the air.
[PEACH JUICE COATED THE LIPS SO THAT EACH SONG]
by Jerrod E. Bohn
Peach juice coated the lips so that each song
became removals of pit. Her name was Valerie
(age 10) & her mother always packed an extra
we pretended was my gift
like her tracing the length of my hand she called
my fruit line. My first crush
promised me a sticker as if to suture
if I stopped professing loving her
like reopening a wound. I picked
BROTHER'S KEEPER
by K.C. Wolfe
I broke my brother’s collarbone when he was three and I was seven. We were playing on a playground set in our backyard at the end of a fall day. The set was made of plastic: a short plastic platform set atop a short plastic slide, fit more for his age than mine. What I remember is this: the long shadows of an early fall evening, mild boredom, my brother’s strange self-indulgence; an upwelling of impatience, the boiling up of frustration—then the idea to pick up and raise the slide while he stood on the very top of it. Which I did. I didn’t give it much thought. He fell over like those fainting sheep, shoulder-first, stiffened by shock, and screamed and writhed in the cold grass as I stood over him. I turned him over, saw his face a jumble of red and tears, his glasses broken. I told him to stop pretending. He went to the ER and came home with a sling.
ABC FOR THE CHILD WHO LIVED TWENTY-SIX DAYS
by Deborah Burnham
Air your only appetite, your first food.
Your bones fit, peg in cup.
Creases on your arms.
Down, derry derry derry down your mother sang.
Except for the first cry, you were silent.
Fist-sized head. Fists the size of cherries.
Don’t go. Don’t go. The single prayer.
Half your life, you were too small to hold.
You never said I.
SCALDING
by Jessica Hudgins
She has killed hundreds
of chickens like this.
Their last sight is the pleated
corner-skin of her mouth.
She comes empty-handed,
armed to the teeth.
Later, when she pours
hot water from the cast-iron kettle,
her wedding ring sweats
in the steam.
A LETTER
by Talila Baron
She found the letter in the attic. It was undated but possibly written before World War II. She showed it to him in bed. It was signed “Ashley.” There was no greeting. She was moved by it and asked if he felt the same. He said he did, but wanted to read it again, preferably alone. She rolled away from him and closed her eyes. The summer heat made her dizzy.
“I’ll take it home to read,” he said.
She nodded, eyes shut. “Okay. But I want it back.”
He didn’t know much about her beyond her liking red wine and sex. But she was a romantic and a patriot. She could quote Byron at length and she dismissed claims he was cold and ruthless. Warm and ruthless, she joked to herself. She owned an antique American flag sewn in Alabama. She’d been a competitive figure skater until a few years ago. She hated her mother. She loved him with a kind of wild allegiance, though he was known as a player in certain circles.
He didn’t ask her about herself. They had known each other three months, but had just begun to make love. “Let’s go to bed,” he’d said to her in his casual way.
He didn’t consider himself a romantic, but the letter was romantic, even heart-breaking. Like an ice cube in the bottom of a glass: it made him feel like that.
◊
GEOLOGY
by Patrick Ball
How fast are we moving do you think.
She’d been lying back with her eyes closed and with her sunglasses off and above her head on the ice, nothing between her and the cold bright rays but as I spoke she reached to the glasses and crunched forward at the waist. Her legs pivoted upward a little in reaction then back down and she pushed the sunglasses onto her face. Not far to her left the ice was clinging to rock and in places it was cracked and fissured with slow pressures but to the right the side of the valley wasn’t visible beyond the hump of the glacier and down further at the valley floor, sunk in green and surrounded by trees and heat the house did its fairytale thing. Stacking upward turreted from the land. She brought her knees toward her and hooked across them and peered down the slope.
I don’t know. A half metre a day maybe.
When I touched the ice my fingertips came back dry. It was pitted and uneven and it had had specks of dirt and grit ground into it by footsteps or deeper down by the building layers of snow and looking across it was a mottle of black and pale blue running deep. My hands were pale and I moved them into the crooks of my knees and I squeezed. I listened to the scrape of rocks and the creak of ice and the occasional startling crackle or crash that echoed up to the snowpack. Once there was a crack and a scatter of ice chunks and rocks a little ahead of us down the valley and the crack was loud and extended and the detritus rolled and bounced down into some newly-torn crevasse and above it all the silent flow of the glacier itself.
SELF-PORTRAIT WITH BROKEN NOSE
by Marc Labriola
No one takes you seriously until you start shitting blood. Everyone who knew him was bored of his sickness. Edith was bored of his anger. Bored of his trick bowel. His celestial rages. Bored of his misery. Bored to death of the innumerable symptoms of his enlarged heart. Life had been a waste of breath. It wasn’t until after he started hemorrhaging that his wife took him to Sacred Heart emergency.
End of the day, first day back up on the roof laying brick after he’d gone under the knife. Slit wide open at the umbilicus. Gut inflated with air. To excavate the stones that had been steadily growing for decades inside of the man. Now he was constipated. He wanted to get the hell out of here, get back to Pietrasanta, get back to his life’s work. Arrivederci and vaffanculo, Todd the foreman. And a vaffanculo to you Doctor Schultz. And to you Lady, who smirked at me last night from behind the pharmaceutical counter because you thought I had a girl’s name. No, the Lubiprostone is for my wife. But at this moment in time, all Andrea Bozzetto really wanted was to get the hell off that roof to go to the bathroom.
KISS
by Paul Kavanagh
She called me into the front room and told me to sit down in the comfy chair and then she leaned over and kissed me and then she kissed me again and then she kissed me again and then she kissed me again and then she kissed me again and then she kissed me again and then she kissed me again and then she kissed me again and then she kissed me again and then she kissed me again and then she kissed me again and then she kissed me again and then she kissed me again and then she kissed me again and then she kissed me again and then she kissed me again and then she kissed me again and then she straightened up, took a step back, rubbed her sore lips and then she said: “Now your story has more kisses than all the kisses in the books by Jane Austen.”
