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EARLY SPRING RAINSTORM by Jacqueline Doyle

EARLY SPRING RAINSTORM
by Jacqueline Doyle

I crouch in the desiccated garden at the side of our house, my knees stiff. The withered tomato plants still have a few small orange orbs clinging to them, but the rest of last year’s plants are stubbly and brown. I’ve finally gotten around to pulling out the tomato cages to return to the shed, and now I wonder whether I’ll plant tomatoes again this spring. Newspaper headlines herald more drought in California. Salmon may not spawn this year. Riverbeds are parched and cracked. We talk about water use and precipitation levels and runoff from the Sierras. We check the weather predictions, hope each day for rain. Unsettled, I survey my dormant garden and hunger for something I can feel but not name.

I remember riding a bike in the rain in Northern New Jersey, many years ago, when I was a teenager. I was miles from home, pedaling with great effort up a long, steep hill, soaked and chilled by the sudden deluge, happy. Trees lined the road, intensely green, their trunks wet and dark. Sheets of water cascaded from the heavens and rushed in turbulent rivers down the stone-lined gutters at the sides of the road. Lightning flashed in the darkening sky. I exulted in every straining muscle as I pushed on the pedals, laboring to make the ascent. When I reached the top, I stood, hands on the handlebars supporting my upper body, feet on the pedals engaging the foot brakes. For a long moment I took in the freezing rain, the gusts of wind that buffeted the tops of the trees, the freshness of the air, the far off rumble of thunder, the flashes of light in the sky. Then I coasted down the long hill, still standing, triumphant, alone.

WOMEN AND LOSERS Jessi Terson

My dad always jokes that I can walk into a bar filled with 99 decent men and one scum-bag, and I’ll walk straight up to the scum-bag. Call it my one magic power. If there’s a loser in the room, I will find him. And even worse, I’ll probably fall madly in love with him.

Most of my ex-boyfriends have been reduced to anecdotes over the years. Bitter stories told over too many beers at closing time. Like my very first boyfriend - now universally known as the “two-stroker.” Because two strokes into losing our virginity to each other, he had a vision of Christ. And of course, immediately dumped my Jewish ass. Mid coitus. Then there’s my physically abusive upstairs neighbor who still likes to flush his toilet when I’m taking a shower. As well as the homeless guy who spent all my money. There’s the gambler who started dating my best friend one week after I got out of the hospital. And the the one who told me he wanted to marry me when we were seventeen. But supposedly he pulled a knife on his mother and got shipped off to a behavioral detention center half way across the country. Oh. And then there’s my most recent ex. I guess the fact that he had once murdered a man wasn’t enough of a warning sign.

Whenever my friends or family start shaking their heads, I tend to shrug my shoulders in retaliation. “What can I say? I suffer from l'appel du vide. You know, the call of the void? That inexplicable urge to jump off a cliff or jerk your steeling wheel to the left?” I usually try to be holding a glass of whiskey when I say this. And maybe wearing all black. “It’s just a bad case of existential angst. Or writer’s block. I’m bored, so I throw a stone into a still pond and look for ripples.” Because really, why else would an attractive, intelligent girl waste her time on such losers?

YEARS IN THE MAKING by Dan Tessitore

YEARS IN THE MAKING
by Dan Tessitore
for Graham Lewis

Frame the landscape with your hands. Pan,
slowly. See how every scene's composed
mostly of the one before? And yet

this scene is unfamiliar. The best
are gone, or else no longer correspond.
The horizon turns its shoulder.

Still, I've always had this idea of myself --
always just a step ahead, in an idea
of a world I'm always just about

to step into. Now I know it isn't true,
that it's only the right hand that moves,
the same scene extended, the dead

BUT INSTEAD HAS GONE INTO WOODS by Lyn Lifshin

BUT INSTEAD HAS GONE INTO WOODS
by Lyn Lifshin

A girl goes into the woods
and for what reason
disappears behind branches
and is never heard from again.
She could have gone shopping
or had lunch with her mother
but instead has gone into
woods, alone, without the lover,
and not for leaves or flowers.
It was a clear bright day
very much like today.
It was today. Now you might
imagine I’m that girl.
It seems there are reasons. But
first consider: I don’t live
very near those trees and my
head is already wild with branches

WHERE YOU END by Anna Pellicioli reviewed by Allison Renner

WHERE YOU END
by Anna Pellicioli
Flux, 299 pages

reviewed by Allison Renner

The trends of paranormal characters and dystopian worlds have played out in young adult fiction, just in time for Anna Pellicioli to step in. Her debut, Where You End, is a riveting work of contemporary fiction that will captivate an audience of both teens and adults.

According to the blurb on the back cover, Pellicioli’s book is about a girl getting over a passionate first love. The Library of Congress summary on the copyright page would have us believe it’s about a girl who is blackmailed when she ruins a museum sculpture. Yes, Where You End is about heartbreak and blackmail, but it’s not the best way to summarize the story. The book doesn’t have a simple, common problem to solve with a few dramatic encounters or wrap up neatly with a life lesson. There’s more depth than that.

A seventeen-year-old photographer, Miriam, is caught in emotional turmoil after seeing her ex-boyfriend with a new girl through the lens of her camera. Desperate to do something, anything, Miriam pushes a Picasso statue in the Hirshhorn Museum off its base. It falls and Miriam runs, glancing back to make sure she hasn’t been seen. But a witness follows Miriam to her next destination and asks Miriam to take photos for her, in return for her silence. Miriam gets sucked into the blackmailer’s world and learns that you can’t always know the whole of a person if you’re only on the periphery of his or her life.

THE LAST FLIGHT OF POXL WEST by Daniel Torday reviewed by Michelle Fost

THE LAST FLIGHT OF POXL WEST
by Daniel Torday
St. Martin’s Press, 291 pages

reviewed by Michelle Fost

In Daniel Torday’s debut novel The Last Flight of Poxl West, two first-person tales wrap around each other. This intertwining is in itself fascinating, especially given that one of the strands is an account of a man who repeatedly pulls away from those he feels closest to, seemingly unable to sustain intimate connections.

Torday begins the novel in the voice of Eli Goldstein, a Boston-area teenager who bears witness to the literary rise and fall of his adopted uncle, Poxl West. Eli finds his Uncle Poxl’s success as a writer absolutely thrilling. These two have a special relationship—they greatly enjoy each other’s company, going together to cultural events such as operas and symphonies—and, best of all, afterwards going out to Cabot’s for ice-cream, conversation, and the sharing of early drafts of Uncle Poxl’s writing in progress.

Eli is Poxl’s first and probably most adoring audience for his book, Skylock: The Memoir of a Jewish RAF Bomber. Eli takes a lot of pleasure in following the book’s reception. After the memoir is reviewed in The New York Times, Eli imagines Poxl’s response to the review: “There are some criticisms in there, Eli, sure. Even The Great Gatsby isn’t a perfect book. But my book! Reviewed in The New York Times Book Review. The New York Times!” Post publication, the kid is in for quite a disappointment over Poxl’s failures. Where is Poxl? Why must Eli craft an imagined conversation rather than have an actual, real life conversation with his Uncle Poxl about this book review? Why doesn’t Uncle Poxl send Eli and his parents the promised signed copies of his memoir? To what extent has he misrepresented himself in his memoir? And, most importantly, why does Poxl mysteriously vanish from Eli’s life?

MENDELEEV’S MANDALA by Jessica Goodfellow reviewed by Camille E. Davis

MENDELEEV’S MANDALA
by Jessica Goodfellow
Mayapple Press, 102 pages

reviewed by Camille E. Davis

Jessica Goodfellow was trained as a poet and a mathematician. In an interview with The Japan Times, she admits that as a child she would “recite poems, usually rewritten nursery rhymes, where [she] would change the words to what [she] wanted…but with the rhythm of the rhyme behind it.” However, her family, though never precisely dampening her poetic spirit, pushed her to explore her natural ability in mathematics instead. She came to reconsider her career choice when she found herself deeply unhappy while pursuing a Ph.D. in microeconomics and econometrics at CalTech.

So it is not surprising that Goodfellow is completely at ease when flirting with poetic mathematics. Her first book of poetry, Mendeleev’s Mandala, sprinkles logic equations to the meat of its poems. Goodfellow is interested in the crossroads where mathematical logic and history meet both free verse and more classical poetic forms. Split into five sections, Mandala also feels like a compilation of Goodfellow’s work. The fifth section incorporates Goodfellow’s first chapbook, The Pilgrim’s Guide to Chaos in the Heartland, and thus Mandala feels like a reverse chronology.

A poem in the first section that typifies Goodfellow’s ability to tear down the stereotypes associated with the division of a “left brain” to a “right brain” is “Imagine No Apples.” Within the poem, Goodfellow twists the form of first-order logic. Unlike say, Inger Christenson, whose poetic form in alphabet is structured by using the strict rules of the Fibonacci sequence, Goodfellow uses mathematics abstractly, and not necessarily in form or meter.

From the very first stanza of “Imagine No Apples,” Goodfellow subtly upsets stereotypes by stating, “All beginnings wear their endings like dark apples. / A is for apple. B is not for apple. / C, also not for apple. And so on.” In this, she is playing on two givens: the first, of a child’s introduction to the alphabet beginning with “A is for Apple, B is for Boy, C is for Cat” and the second, of formal logic equations that states, in this example, “If A is not B and C is not B, then A is not C.”

RUNAWAY GOAT CART by Thomas Devaney reviewed by Anna Strong

RUNAWAY GOAT CART
by Thomas Devaney
Hanging Loose Press, 80 pages

reviewed by Anna Strong

Early in Runaway Goat Cart, the latest from Thomas Devaney, readers get a found poem of language that has come from a diary found in a darkroom at Moore Women’s College of Art, dated 1972. The writer of the diary is unidentified, though she records the speech of a few of her friends. One of these, Susan, from the haze of cigarette smoke and darkroom chemicals, offers two startlingly clear statements about photography and art that also serve as a guide to reading Devaney’s text. The first, dated November 9:

Susan says it’s forbidden for our pictures to echo
the objects they depict; nothing looks like that,
she said, but it’s allowed, it’s allowed
for the world to look the way it does.
Fine words those.

The second, dated less than a month later, reads:

Prints are not reproductions. Susan said this is a mistaken idea.
What you’re looking at is a photograph: how something looks there.

Taken together, Susan’s sage advice about how to look at a photograph (or take a photograph) tells readers much about how to read Devaney’s poems. So many of the best poems in Runaway Goat Cart take us deep into memory, and on the surface, those memories seem to be rendered exactly: all the names of the neighborhood children recalled, the feel of a baseball bat in the palms, the house fire burned into the mind as though it is happening in front of Devaney as he is committing it to paper.

FIRST YEAR HEALTHY by Michael DeForge reviewed by Travis DuBose

FIRST YEAR HEALTHY
by Michael DeForge
Drawn and Quarterly, 48 pages

reviewed by Travis DuBose

In Michael DeForge’s short, gnomic First Year Healthy, terse declarative prose is set alongside hallucinatory artwork to create a sense of unease and unreality that deepens over the course of the narrative. First Year Healthy is the illustrated monologue of an unnamed young woman describing her life after being released from psychiatric care for an unspecified “public outburst.” The details of the story are delivered flatly, no matter how outrageous or impossible, casting each new revelation in the same terms as the last. In fact, more emotional heft is given to the description of the narrator’s job gutting and packing fish than to her first bizarre sexual experiences with “the Turk,” the man she eventually moves in with.

In contrast to the prose the artwork is vibrant and varied, with the open space of the backgrounds often patterned in abstract shapes and curlicues. It’s increasingly unclear as the story progresses whether what we’re seeing is simply stylized or a representation of the way the world actually looks to the narrator. A Christmas tree bears more resemblance to a haphazard pile of seaweed than to a real spruce, and it is decorated with the same pustule-like baubles that frame the introduction of the Turk’s son. The book’s most frequently repeated image, the “sacred cat” that graces its cover, silently haunts the pages, stalking through backgrounds and peeking in windows. The construction of the characters’ bodies is squat, exaggerating their heads, and the narrator’s body is dwarfed by two massive tufts of hair that cover her eyes and swing out to either side of her.

THE SILVER SWAN by Elena Delbanco reviewed by Hannah Judd

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 reviewed by Justin Goodman

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 reviewed by Jesse Allen

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 reviewed by Claire Rudy Foster

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 reviewed by Jesse Allen

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 reviewed by Michelle Fost

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 reviewed by Nathaniel Popkin

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 by J.G. McClure

J.G. McClure Author Photo

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

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 reviewed by Jon Busch

Ending Up

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 reviewed by Rory McCluckie

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 reviewed by Travis DuBose

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 reviewed by Nathaniel Popkin

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 reviewed by Amy Victoria Blakemore

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 reviewed by Nathaniel Popkin

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 & PLASH AND LEVITATION by Adam Tavel reviewed by Johnny Payne

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

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 reviewed by Carlo Matos

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.

TESLA: A PORTRAIT WITH MASKS by Vladimir Pištalo translated by Bogdan Rakic and John Jeffries reviewed by Rory McCluckie

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

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 reviewed by Michelle Fost

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.

FRAGILE BODIES by Danielle Harms

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

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

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.

CERTIFICATE by Suzanne Cope

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

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.

DOUBLE FEATURE by Ariella Carmell

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?”

Hidden in Plain Sight by Tara Stella

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 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.

POEM FOR TRENDING TRAGEDY by Kathryn Smith

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

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

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 by David Novack and Dylan Hansen-Fliedner

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

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

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

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.

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