Luna Park

What Was Left Over

2008-02-07T17:34:00.000-08:00

ARCHIVES OF THE LUNA PARK BLOG

The updating of the Luna Park blog has been transferred (and, we feel, in a much better format) to the Luna Park website: www.lunaparkreview.com. We will no longer add to these pages here, but will maintain their contents where they are located for archival purposes. If you have any questions, please email our editors at lunaparkreview@gmail.com.

[At right is a page from the original Belgian literary magazine from which our name derives. Novelist and poet, Roberto Bolano mentions the issue that this page is taken from in his story "Vagabond in France and Belgium."]

Luna Park's Brooklyn Launch Event: Jan. 31, 2008

2008-01-14T09:05:00.000-08:00

The premiere issue party is soon. Guest hosts: Mississippi Review and Juked.com. Special readings by: Angela Ball (AWP award winner), Tao Lin, Marie-Helene Bertino, and Claudia Smith. Music by Tin Pan Blues Band. Art by Steven Summer, Ken Weathersby, and TBA.

When: January 31st, 2008. Begins at 9:00pm.

Where: Noo Na (pictured at left), 565 Vanderbilt Ave (corner of Pacific St.), Prospect Heights, Brooklyn, NY. Just a 10-15 minute subway ride from Manhattan--specifically, from the AWP Hilton.

Getting there from AWP Hilton: Walk north on 6th Ave. to 57th. Turn left and walk to the 57th St & 7th Ave. Q stop. Head to Brooklyn. Exit Train at 7th Ave and leave terminal at right. Head down Park Place to Vanderbilt Ave. Turn left and walk 4 1/2 blocks...you’re there.

http://www.lunaparkreview.com/

We're Coming...

2008-01-10T08:49:00.000-08:00

PREMIERE ISSUE OF LUNA PARK: JANUARY 31ST, 2008

Some (possibly) final notes before the first issue release:

Luna Park blog's upcoming review of Hobart will be moved to our first issue, as we recently received a review copy of their latest issue...along with a special gift. All we will say for the moment is the entire package from Hobart was so good we were compelled to give it more attention;
As our first issue launch will coincide with the AWP conference, we are publishing a special essay by Thomas Washington, looking at the conference through a writer's quizzical (and often baffled) eyes;
We have pushed our submission deadline for the first issue back to January 15th, giving reviewers a little more time to pore over their favorite (or most reviled) literary magazines;
And, for literary magazine editors, we are still accepting lit mag ads and excerpts of current issues. Please send these to lunaparkreview@gmail.com;
Finally: we are now accepting submissions of reviews, interviews, essays, and excerpts for our second issue. Submissions are due April 10th to lunaparkreview@gmail.com.

Oh--and this has nothing to do with our upcoming issue, but it is one of the coolest things we have seen in a while: a Kelly Link story/art video on Ninth Letter

Luna Park Spreads the Word in Chicago

2007-12-26T08:53:00.001-08:00

Until 2008, the editors will be in Chicago telling the industrial capital (and everyone at the MLA conference) about Luna Park. One of our editors will be presenting at the conference as part of a panel on journals run by students within university graduate departments (some examples of acclaimed literary magazines in this capacity are Ninth Letter, Willow Springs, and Black Warrior Review).

Remember: submissions for issue one deadline is January 10th. Issue will be put online January 31st.

(Photo: University of Chicago in 1906.)

Preparing for the Park

2007-12-20T11:25:00.000-08:00

The launch is almost upon us, and all of our efforts are being directed to the production of our first issue and our approaching launch event. The issue has had a great response and is filling up with reviews, interviews, and excerpts. Here are a few updates on the production of the Luna Park website, our coming January 31st launch party/fiasco in Brooklyn, NY, and some extraneous comments on and reviews of the lit mag world that we couldn't fit in on the regular blog posts here over the past month:

Website production is running according to schedule. Submissions of reviews, essays, interviews, or excerpts (from editors) for Luna Park issue one are due January 10th. The first issue will be released January 31st at lunaparkreview.com. (This will be roughly the same ongoing quarterly schedule: pieces due the 10th of Jan./Apr./Jul./Oct, and issues will come out at the end of these same months.)
Tao Lin has been added to the list of readers for the Luna Park website launch party this coming January 31st at Noo Na in Brooklyn, NY. Tao Lin is the author of the books Eeeee Eee Eeee and Bed, and also has a book of poems to be published in early 2008. Tao also has the blog, Reader of Depressing Books. We are excited to have him on board. (We are under the assumption that he will be reading from his upcoming book of poetry, but are prepared to be surprised.)
Juked magazine has also come on board for the launch event. (Also look for Juked editor John Wang at the AWP book fair; he will be sharing a table with Hobart.)
As most know, the Chicago Review has published in their recent issue (vol. 53 no. 2/3) one of the more controversial pieces in the literary magazine world in recent years, Juliana Saphr and Stephanie Young's "Numbers Trouble," an essay on the amount of female poetry published in United States' magazines and anthologies. The essay is in response to Jennifer Ashton's article "Our Bodies, Our Poems," from a recent issue of American Literary History [here is an early draft of the piece]. Ashton responds in the issue of Chicago Review to Saphr and Young's rebuttal with her essay "The Numbers Trouble with 'Numbers Trouble.'" And at the end of the issue, the magazine's editors, Robert Baird and Joshua Kotin, provide two charts illuminating the ratio of male versus female poetry recently published in literary magazines. Because of the attention these pieces attracted in the blogosphere and elsewhere, Chicago Review has made all the previously mentioned pieces available in full for free on their website. In November and early December, Poetry Foundation published numerous posts in response to the Chicago Review pieces on their blog, harriet.
A refreshingly new literary anthology, Best American Fantasy 2007, released their first book in mid 2007. Michael Chabon is quoted as calling this first book in the series, "A cabinet of dark wonders, and an important--no, a crucial--map of the richness and strangeness and startling range of the modern American short story." Rather than merely a science fiction or fantasy compilation, the anthology instead includes some of the best and most magically mysterious stories published in magazines online and off, such as from A Public Space, Oxford American, ParaSpheres, Pindelyboz--even The New Yorker. The overall series is edited by fiction writer Matthew Cheney (here's his blog), and guest editors are Ann and Jeff VanderMeer--both highly acclaimed fantasy authors. The 2007 volume includes exciting stories from writers working on the frontiers of the imagination: Kelly Link, Peter LaSalle, Daniel Alarcon, Brian Evenson, Kevin Brockmeier, Chris Adrian, and many others. Quite easily the most electric best of anthology to come out since Eggers' Best Nonrequired series was launched in 2002. Cheney's Best American Fantasy is a more than welcome addition to an often safe and conservative Best of series from Houghton Mifflin (Cheney's series is published by Prime Books). Cheney and editors are looking for submissions from magazines for their 2008 volume--click here for details.

Literature in the Americas

2007-12-06T10:56:00.000-08:00

NEW ISSUE REVIEW: VIRGINIA QUARTERLY REVIEW VOL. 83 NO. 4, "SOUTH AMERICA IN THE 21ST CENTURY"

Literary magazines are often referred to as little magazines not as an insult, but to reflect the usual size of these magazine's readership and circulation. (Paris Review's George Plimpton famously detested the label.) It is a niche audience American publishers of literature must cater to, and this is even more true in the world of literary periodicals. Sure, many people read literary magazines, such as The Paris Review or The Georgia Review. Literary magazines, such as those mentioned, are even nominated for and win national magazine awards, plus they obtain attention from national newspapers. But compared to bigger commercial magazines, such as Time, Esquire, or The New Yorker, literary magazines are a very small affair.

Yet it is existence in this smaller world which allows them to not only get away with their expected diversity of literary content and general emphasis on less well-known authors--but these magazines' greater anonymity and slower publishing schedule also allow them to publish compilations of critical, in depth, and exploratory work, many times resulting in more lasting writing than other, larger, non-literary magazines. There is less pressure, monetarily, at least, in the literary production and editorial world. Some literary magazines take advantage of this fact. They use their medium to engage an issue along a broad array of information, views, and artistic forms. They spend months researching and probing into a topic, isolating particular works from the past and present that best address the issue. And many times the results are more than satisfying; they can even be illuminating.

And then there is Ted Genoways's Virginia Quarterly Review (I say "Genoways's" because under his editorship the VQR is a different, more engaging, and seductive publication than it was previously). VQR doesn't just offer you a literary magazine in the general sense. Genoways's concoction of VQR is like a happy tri-marriage of The National Georgraphic, Granta, and Harper's; a wide-reaching literary-political reflection of the world.

The latest issue of VQR, vol. 83 no. 4, focuses on South America. The United States has (to say the least) a complicated political relationship with South America, from Teddy Roosevelt's big stick policy for relations between the Americas to our prolonged enmeshment in Colombia's drug war to American Presidents' less than amiable relationships with many South American leaders. But it is not an exaggeration to say that most U.S. citizens are unaware of the goings on within our sister continent. As Daniel Alarcon described U.S. knowledge of Peru during the early eighties in the winter 2007 issue of A Public Space, "Peru existed...as a rumor, more or less." (Image at right by Simon Diaz is from that issue of A Public Space.) Much of the job of this issue of VQR seems to be to unpack rumors of South America in the way only literature can, which is with the subtle registering and questioning of a subject through both precise and figurative language.

It is "the literary journalism I guess we are getting to be known for," Genoways has said, describing the editorial direction of the magazine. This type of journalism is not new for the newly restructured VQR. Past issues have included in-depth features on AIDS in Africa, the United States/Mexican border, and the current Iraq war. What is different--and altogether impressive--about this issue is that the entire issue, from page 1 to 322, is focused on South America. In a radio interview available online, Genoways explains that the project of putting together the current issue began nearly two years ago, when VQR managing editor Kevin Morrisey noticed that, every time he opened the newspaper, South America was on the front page. Morrisey and Genoways got in touch then with Peruvian-American writer Daniel Alarcon, a regular contributor to VQR, to co-edit the magazine. Alarcon and VQR worked together with Etiqueta Negra (a high-quality Peruvian magazine where Alarcon is on staff) to get the best South American writers and photographers for the issue. And, eighteen months later: a thick, full-color issue of VQR, filled with 17 pieces, each highlighting a separate, important, and fascinating section of this large southern continent.

J. Malcolm Garcia writes in "The White Train" about a train in Buenos Aires, which transports the imporverished as they lug paper and copper across town to sell. A new translation by Chris Andrews of a novel from Roberto Bolano, "Nazi Literature in the Americas"--a fictional portrait of literature and fascism in South America--is excerpted at length. In "Soy in the Amazon," Pat Joseph covers one of the Amazon's most destructive crops. And much, much more is included in the issue--fearful albinos, transsexual prostitution, blind mayors, and portraits of Incan descendants on the islands of Lake Titicaca (pictured at left). This is the sort of magazine which not only sets a high bar for literary magazines--and for magazines in general--but makes one reconsider the distinction between magazines and books.

[Special note: For the first time in the history of VQR, the magazine has put the entire content of the issue online. "I just really wanted people to see this material," said Genoways. "I think it's a really important gathering of material and I just wanted people to find it." The content is available in the form of an interactive map, featuring current and past VQR pieces on South America and its people. Also included in the map are pieces that didn't make it into the issue. The site is well worth the time, if only to see a new step in connecting print literary magazines to the digital age.]

A Lost Ideal

2007-12-05T09:07:00.000-08:00

Elizabeth Hardwick (1916-2007) died last Sunday evening, December 2, 2007, in Manhattan. A frequent contributor to Partisan Review, Hardwick was well known as an essayist, novelist, and reviewing. Along with her husband, Robert Lowell, Hardwick was one of the founders of The New York Review of Books in 1963, after an 114-day newspaper strike in New York City. An acclaimed novelist and short story writer, Hardwick is most well known for her insightful, passionate essays. Christopher Lehmann-Haupt described her as, "credited for expanding the possibilities of the literary essay through her intimate tone and her dramatic deployment of forceful logic." Hardwick was also a frequent contributor to The New Yorker, The New Republic, and Harper's, where she published one of her most mentioned essays, "The Decline of Book Reviewing." Published in 1959, this essay criticized what Hardwick saw as a lack of criticism in book reviewing--everyone instead all too eager to pass around praise for even the most minor achievement. (Photo at right is of Hardwick in 1983; image from the New York Times.)

Here is a long excerpt of the essay (copied from the Harper's website): "In America, now, oblivion, literary failure, obscurity, neglect—all the great moments of artistic tragedy and neglect—still occur, but the natural conditions for the occurrence are in a state of camouflage, like those decorating ideas in which wood is painted to look like paper and paper to look like wood. A genius may indeed go to his grave unread, but he will hardly have gone to it unpraised. Sweet, bland condemnations fall everywhere upon the scene; a universal, if somewhat lobotomized, accommodation reigns. A book is born into a puddle of treacle; the brine of hostile criticism is only a memory. Everyone is found to have 'filled a need' and is to be 'thanked' for something and to be excused for 'minor faults in an otherwise excellent work.' 'A thoroughly mature artist' appears many times a week and often daily; many are the bringers of those 'messages the Free World will ignore at its peril.'"

[Here is Hardwick in a 1985 Art of Fiction interview in The Paris Review.]

Degenerate Art

2007-11-20T08:29:00.000-08:00

FOUND IN NEW ENGLAND REVIEW VOL. 28 NO. 3: MICHAEL HELLER ESSAY ON THE PAINTER MAX BECKMANN

"Essays, like butterflies, jazz (and God), move irregularly, not linearly," wrote Edward Hoagland in his diaries (originally published in Paris Review no. 162). The best experimental essays--those that, like jazz, do not conform, that are in many ways defined by their resistance--seem to vibrate with a hidden knowledge. Or not knowledge perhaps, but perspective.

Michael Heller's free-form essay "Beckmann Variations" on the German painter Max Beckmann (1884-1950) published in the fall 2007 issue of New England Review (vol. 28 no. 3) is a cogent example of Heller's own ruminations on the function of art. Heller writes, "But then, what does any work of art do but intensify perception by limiting it?" The essay is about Heller and his wife seeing a retrospective of Beckmann's paintings at London's Tate Modern museum, and, like the best essays since Montaigne, it is a perceptive look not only at the subject of the paintings, but also into the slippery mind of Heller viewing the work. Heller's piece seems to argue that one of the most intriguing things about essays is that they allow a reader to watch the mind think. In the essay, he quotes Yeats on this issue: "In Per Amica, Yeats cites approvingly a critic who insists that, 'learning to know one's own mind, gradually getting the disorder of one's mind in order, led to the real impulse to create.'" Reading the essay one realizes that this reviewer's comment could as easily be applied to the painter Beckmann as it could to the essayist Heller.

Mostly widely recognized as a poet, Heller is also well-known as an essayist and memoirist; his 2000 memoir Living Root charts connections between Heller's Brooklyn and Miami boyhood with Poland and WW II. It is hard not to think that in his essay on Beckmann Heller's essayist talents are at their peak. Even in the company of this issue of NER's usual powerfully erudite and imaginative writings, "Beckmann Variations" stands out, not only because of Heller's own provocative rhizomatic interweaving of diverse subjects and themes in order to more effectively approach Beckmann's paintings with language, but also because of the essay's architectural ingenuity, an organic hybridity of poetry and prose--each section of the essay pivots around alternating poetic and prose riffs on the larger subject of Beckmann's paintings (or the even larger subject of our responses to works of art).

One major theme of "Beckmann Variations" is the idea of degenerate art. Heller writes, "Beckmann's work, along with that of most of Germany's modernist masters, was included in the Nazi's display of 'degenerate art,' the 'Entartete Kunst' exhibition held in Munich in July of 1937....Hitler made a speech to the nation about this un-German art. Beckmann heard the broadcast, packed his belongings, and with his wife fled Germany the next morning, never to return." And, eventually, they came to America, where in 1950 he would die of a heart attack on his way to the Metropolitan Museum of Art to see his painting "'Self Portrait in Blue Jacket,' which was hanging there in an exhibition." Would this painting have been considered degenerate by Hitler's standards? One can only hope so. As Heller shows us, much of Beckmann's work was devoted to artistic rebirth, which included a refashioning of modes and genres of painting. As usual, Heller explains in his continually quotable style: "Most serious and important art changes prevailing conceptions in such a way that it only nominally belongs to the species it came from. Beckmann's work was 'entartete,' belonging only to the flora or fauna of pictures then existing; it was already a rebuke to the art culture in which it had been created."

(Pictured above: "Falling Man" (1950) , 141 x 88.9 cm., National Gallery of Art, Washington.)

On Burnside

2007-11-13T06:33:00.000-08:00

NEW ISSUE REVIEW: BURNSIDE REVIEW VOL. 3 NO. 2

Connections between form and content seem to carry more prominence in the art magazine world than in other literary productions. When we shop instead for books, we mostly look for the spine bearing an author's name or an intriguing title. Though books, too, are very often intricately and carefully designed (see Alvin Lustig's gorgeous covers for New Directions books or nearly anything by McSweeney's press). But in the magazine world, design is a greater portion of the product. Not that content relies on form--good writing can and does come in ugly packages--but it is the care and detail taken with the design and production of a literary magazine which carries a great amount of the (at least initial) attraction when perusing the literary newsstand.

The latest issue of Burnside Review (vol. 3 no. 2), a small literary magazine from Portland, Oregon, is approximately the shape of a CD case, with cover artwork resembling a Beatles or Doors record (see image of the magazine's back cover above). The cover has an antique look, faded and sepia-tinted, giving the impression the magazine wasn't found in the new bookstore down the street, but in the dusty bin of a secondhand store, shoved between books without covers and a pair of pleather boots. The production is simply done and beautiful throughout, something both intriguing to look at and easy to handle, satisfyingly combining art for the wall with the literary container of a magazine. And the small size of the issue makes it easy for carrying on the subway or bus, as well as a nice portable shape for the movable readers of the world, those who see bumping into things as hardly an obstacle for the opportunity to read while walking.

And the writing inside this issue is, again like the overall design, a subtle, simple-seeming surprise. Overall, the magazine has a somber tone, like a rock song you listen to alone in the car at two in the morning after dropping all your friends off at their houses, you sitting outside your own dark house, the car running, the song playing on the radio, and it seems you are the only person awake in the world, and though you know the song will end, somehow it seems like it won't, like it'll go on forever. There are powerful new pieces in here by the always fascinating writers Alberto Rios and Ben Lerner, moving work by newer authors such as James Capozzi and Anne Heide, and some alluring prose by young writer-to-keep-an-eye-on Leslie Jamison, who had one of her stories released by Burnside Review as the chapbook The Wintering Barn earlier this year. Though like most literary magazines some of the work in this issue is considerably more powerful than the rest, due to the smallness of Burnside Review's project for this publication--only 74 pages in all, hardly any pieces over two pages long, most of it poetry--there is not really the urge to skip forward. Nothing is rushed.

Instead of quoting at length from many pieces, here is an excerpt of Ben Lerner's stunning prose poem "Ars Poetica" from the issue, a poem strong enough to keep you in the car till the song is over, even in an Oregon January, stuck in the snow in a 1976 VW Rabbit with a busted heater, even then: "A famous novel, difficult to avoid. Its author, now very old, has for many years sequestered himself in a French village, refused all visitors, returned all letters. All my life I have seen people reading this novel. On subways and airplanes, in hotels and hospitals. My wife recently read it in our bed. At first, when people asked what I thought of the novel, I admitted I hadn't read it. Nobody believed me..."

[Click here to see the table of contents and read excerpts of vol. 3 no. 2 on the Burnside Review website.]

A Lion Passes

2007-11-12T09:43:00.000-08:00

R.I.P. NORMAN MAILER, 1923-2007

Norman Mailer died early last Saturday November 10, 2007, at 84 years old. With him passed one of the twentieth century's most prolific, important, and controversial writers. Among his many other achievements, Mailer wrote for literary and political magazines from a very early age. Mailer wrote for his high school literary magazine and had a story accepted by Story magazine when he was only 16 years old. As a sophomore at Harvard, Mailer was elected to the board of the Harvard Advocate, the college literary magazine. In 1941 he won Story's annual college writing contest, and the $100 prize money helped convince his family that he had a viable career as a writer. Since then Mailer has published work in (to name a few) Dissent, the inaugural issue of New York Review of Books, The Paris Review, was one of the founders of The Village Voice, and is the subject of The Mailer Review, which printed its first issue in fall 2007. Click here to read two interviews with Mailer from The Paris Review. The world of magazines and writing will certainly be a less diverse and rich place without him.

Begin the Beguine

2007-11-06T20:48:00.001-08:00

Though the experiment continues at an astounding rate, we will pause for these several announcements and appreciations:

-The Luna Park launch party this coming January in Brooklyn, NY will feature poetry read by Angela Ball, who will be reading from her newly released AWP award winning book of poetry, Night Clerk at the Hotel of Both Worlds. Other poets and fiction writers will join her in celebrating our launch.

-We are also excited that the party will be co-hosted by Mississippi Review and Stirring literary magazine's Best of the Net series, with possibly more magazines to join the event. There will also be a small gallery of paintings and a jazz quartet. More information on the party in the forms of posters, postcards, and invitations soon to come. We are, as you can see, very excited.

-We are also excited to announce the addition of poet Raymond Wachter to the Luna Park masthead. Ray has been working his tail off soliciting writers for Luna Park and getting the word out about the site. For a day job, Ray teachers at University of Alabama at Tuscaloosa. Recently he has been quite ecstatic about his recent nomination for a Pushcart.

-In the next few days we will have a review of the new issue of Virginia Quarterly Review, "South America in the 21st Century.

-Soon to follow will be pieces on recent issues of: Burnside Review, Sentence, Hobart, Oxford American, and many more.

-Yesterday the editors received a copy of Tuesday: An Art Project (pictured at right) in the mailbox. We have been so enraptured by the thing, we nearly forgot to vote in today's elections. We haven't eaten or slept since it arrived, just keep opening it, closing it. If you are a fan of books, magazines, literature, art, or origami (you'll see), pick up a copy of Tuesday.

Espresso and Absinthe in Modern Russia

2007-10-23T07:29:00.001-07:00

FROM THE NEWSSTANDS: ESSAY BY JOSIP NOVAKOVICH FROM THE REPUBLIC OF LETTERS NO. 17

The following is an excerpt of Josip Novakovich's piece from the latest issue of The Republic of Letters--which, along with other excerpts from the issue, can be found on the TroL website (excerpts which Luna Park is happy to disseminate because the TroL editors so kindly wrote this). TroL is the third literary magazine co-founded and edited by Keith Botsford and the late Saul Bellow. Begun in 1997 in broadsheet and in bound format in 2003, TroL has released just 17 issues in the past decade, because, according to the editors, the magazine is published "at irregular intervals--that is, when sufficient material of quality is available." Like their earlier collaborative publication, The Noble Savage, Bellow and Botsford have financed TroL themselves in order to allow them editorial freedom and the generosity they see as a necessary part of the literary magazine endeavor. In 1999, Bellow wrote a New York Times piece explaining his reasons for beginning TroL. Issues of TroL can be ordered from your local bookseller or purchased directly from Toby Press.

Five Easy Pieces
By Josip Novakovich

Most Russians don’t get up early. The shops in St. Petersburg open at ten in the morning, and that holds true even of coffee shops. Perhaps the notion of coffee as wake-up drug in Russia hasn’t filtered through the haze of the inimical climates and histories. Sometimes when the coffee shop opens, you can see jaded-looking men and women, literally jaded, a little green and sallow, drinking absinthe. Now that is a way to start the day—(no wonder there is a secretion of the liver contributing to the skin color). You may ask for coffee at 10 AM and the counter clerk, most likely, will look astonished, and ask, Espressa? They tend to turn their o’s into ‘ah’ sounds. Now it may take them half an hour to get the machine working, and in the finest St. Petersburg shop, the espresso machine didn’t work for two weeks during my stay there. But this is not the story of St. Petersburg but Moscow, which though more business-oriented and energetic, still has that late-to-bed, late-to-rise rhythm, and the train schedule seems to reflect that. The express trains from Moscow to St. Petersburg were scheduled to depart between one AM and two. I got the tickets for the two AM, and since I was indoctrinated by the American airport schedules, which in this era of security, demand that the passengers be early and planes late, I wanted to get to the station an hour before departure—to give ourselves margin in case we didn’t get a large cab easily. We were four, the whole family, with an additional member, the cello, with its huge case. We went out with our luggage and stood on the curb, next to an all-night kiosk. A few drunks leaned against the kiosk and drank from cans of beer. A small Zhiguli police car was parked nearby, bestowing the air of security on the block. I don’t know where the name Zhiguli comes from, whether it’s a play on the Italian gigolo, and whether the car is a copy of a Fiat, but there is definitely a second-hand air even in a new Zhiguli, and the cops looked a little second-hand and disinterested. In fact, they drove off. First a small car stopped, and a mustachioed man stepped out and insisted that all of us, luggage and passengers, could fit, and was mightily offended when I said we could not fit. He would not charge much, only one hundred and fifty rubles to the train station. Maybe our luggage would fit sans us. Maybe that was the plan, load up the car and drive off. After a decent amount of shouting, the man left.

Now another mustachioed man stopped with a larger car, a Lada coupe. We all fit, although it was not easy. He had some metal pipes and boxes in the trunk which he took a few minutes to rearrange.

I knew the direct way to the train station, having walked it. Down Koltze, turn left, up a huge boulevard, and that is that, a simple L trip, but apparently, for this man there was no such thing as a simple line. He drove us up Chapin, and there turned right, into a dark and bumpy street. His gas gauge kept beeping. Nice, he’s driving on empty. Maybe there’s a gas station here? Maybe he knows how to time everything? That might be a good scenario, to be out of gas, or to pretend to be, and to stop in an alley where his assistants could take our luggage and work us over. No doubt, such things have happened.

The cobbles of the street made the tires purr in their loud way.

At the traffic light, the man turned off the car, until the green light came back on, and then he cranked on the ignition. “Oh no,” Jeanette said. But the ignition caught. Maybe the corner was not dark enough. On the other side of the corner, diagonally, there was another Zhiguli with policemen. At the next corner there was another police car and a couple of policemen standing outside of it.

“All this police!” shouted our driver. “On every street corner. That is too much.”

And true, wherever we looked there were police cars. For what, I wondered? I hadn’t seen so many police even in NYC after 9/11, and this may have been related, a terror pre-emptive measure.

Our driver was getting more and more incensed at the sight of the police. Why should the police bother him? His being terrified of the police made him suspect. On the other hand, I was never particularly fond of them either, in any country, so his displeasure with the arbitrary executors of the law didn’t incriminate him in my eyes.

Anyhow, he made it to the train station, and I gave him two hundred rubles, as much as he had asked, and it wasn’t that much, six dollars, and he opened up the trunk but didn’t help me unload.

At the curb, a young man with a flatbed wooden pushcart offered to take the luggage for one hundred rubles.

“That’s a lot,” said Jeanette. “If the cab is only two hundred, this should be less.”

“That’s all right,” I said. “He probably needs the money.”

We loaded a large suitcase, and four smaller ones, and Jeanette carried Joseph’s cello.

The porter wasn’t officially attired. He didn’t have the cap. He was a young, somewhat Asiatic-looking man, perhaps from southern Siberia, if there is such a thing. Such a huge region should have a south as well, not only an east. He had a black blazer as though he were a waiter at a fancy hotel and black thin-soled leather shoes which didn’t give him much traction, so as he pushed he slid backward, but he progressed. He didn’t go to the side, where he could avoid the stairs, but directly forward. He couldn’t lift the pushcart over the stairs, and he needed my help. I got the lower, heavier end, but I didn’t mind. It entertained me to see him at work. He huffed and puffed as though his job were horrifyingly hard.

“He’s putting on a show of labor for us,” I said.

“Why, it must be hard work,” Jeanette retorted.

[To read the rest of "Five Easy Pieces" purchase or pick up issue 17 of TroL.]

These Young People Today

2007-10-19T08:56:00.001-07:00

FOUND X 2: THE UP AND COMERS, BENJAMIN PERCY AND VICTORIA CHANG

Journals where these writers' works can be found:
Glimmer Train no. 64
Ploughshares vol. 32 no. 1
The Antioch Review vol. 65 no. 3
The Missouri Review vol. 30 no. 2
The Paris Review no. 180
Tin House no. 31
Salt Hill no. 19

One of the most recognized roles of literary magazines is as publishing venues for new writers. This has been true since at least the beginning of the 20th century, when magazines like Poetry and The Double Dealer were dedicated to locating new talent--which they did in spades, publishing the early writing of such then unknowns as Ernest Hemingway, William Faulkner, Thonrton Wilder, T.S. Eliot, Jean Toomer, H. D., and numerous more. Their position as discoverers of new writers is a portion of their job that literary magazines take much pride in; it is one of the main editorial distinctions separating them from the better circulated and more financially lucrative glossy magazines, who most often cannot risk print space on writers or forms of writing that have not yet proven their audience appeal. Still the literary magazine world's role in the careers of American writers seems a little publicly realized fact (though one much mentioned in these pages). One might wonder, for instance, what number of the many readers of Jeffrey Eugenides Pulitzer Prize winning and best-selling novel Middlesex have even heard of The Gettysburg Review, where Eugenides published his first story. The same question could be posed about the first publications of such authors as Claire Messud, Sara Gruen, Junot Diaz, or Philip Roth. Certainly the literary magazine publishing complex doesn't have the cultural power it had during the height of modernism, with such things as television, the internet, and the general glut of contemporary publishing to compete with, but there are still, in the thousand plus literary magazines out there, much wonderful and powerful writing constantly being discovered and published.

Like in nearly everything, some works stand out above others. There are, at various times, writers whose works are being almost universally acknowledged by editors across the spectrum, everyone seemingly at once becoming aware of a new and exciting artistic talent. Recently, the writing of two stunning and amazingly talented writers appears in just about every literary magazine a reader might pick up (and even some wider ranging, glossier publications): 28-year-old short story writer Benjamin Percy and 36-year-old poet Victoria Chang.

1. The Short Story Writer.

"The blood in his ears buzzes, like a wasp loose in his skull. The rifle kicks against his shoulder. The gunshot fills the world." -from "Somebody Is Going to Have to Pay for This," originally published in The Paris Review no. 180

Benjamin Percy is undeniably the real thing. His stories are some of the most emotionally charged and gorgeously understated pieces found in print today; they seem filled with a barely controlled passion vibrating below the surface of each sentence, like the desperate shaking of a tornado shelter door as the twister passes directly overhead. Like a good Raymond Carver story (whose influence runs through Percy's writing), the emotional climaxes of Percy's stories are never sentimentalized or brooded upon, they simply happen, like things do in this world, and we move on beyond them changed, but as yet uncertain as to how. And aside from Percy's talent for moving character and plot, his language is as nuanced and delicate as the many interlocking gears of an enormous clock, each piece perfectly balancing against another. And his eye for detail is seductive in its selectivity. Here is a brief description of a couple spelunking in an opening beneath their house in Percy's story "The Caves in Oregon" from Glimmer Train no. 64: "Sometimes the ceiling would come loose with a click of stone, a hiss of dirt, nearly noiseless in its descent, but when it impacted, when it slammed to the cave floor, it roared and displaced a big block of air that made them cry out and clutch each other in a happy sort of terror." A silent falling piece of rock nearly crushes them and they cry out in a happy sort of terror, as we all do when we are scared and in love.

Nearly all of Percy's stories are an inspection of working class Oregon, a fertile ground for fiction, covered most memorably in the short stories of Carver and Charles D'Ambrosio. But it isn't only the frontier wilderness of Oregon that Percy depicts in his stories; the enduring theme of all his stories is what repressed pain does to someone, how in keeping our hurts and fears from others in an effort to protect ourselves from further injury, we are also changing ourselves, distorting, sometimes even crippling, our behaviors, perceptions, and desires. Not that Percy seems to argue that this isn't the way we should behave; he simply shows us that, in today's war-torn landscape where the gap between the rich and poor is widening every moment, this is how we live: in a forced repression of violence and fear, seeking (sometimes finding) some love and companionship to remind us we can be happy.

In each of Percy's stories there are elements of violence, either directly acted or only haunting the scenery. In some even, violence is the world's main form of currency, such as in Percy's Plimpton Prize winning story, "Refresh, Refresh," where two boys beat each other bloody every day in order to toughen themselves and make their fathers proud. Even in "The Caves of Oregon," arguably one of Percy's least violent stories, focusing around a couple dealing with a recent miscarriage, Percy begins the piece with a grotesque scene of a couple opening a meat-stocked freezer after a power outage earlier that day: "The sight of it reminds Kevin of the time he had his wisdom teeth removed. His dentist had given him an irrigator, a plastic syringe. Twice a day he filled it with salt water and placed its needle into the craters at the back of his mouth--and from them, in a pink rush, came scabs, bits of food. That is what the freezer looks like when its door opens and the blood surges from it--all down the front of the fridge, dampening their photos, glossing over their magnets, until the front of the fridge has more red on it than white." After seeing this, Kevin's wife, "makes a noise like a wounded bird....A tremble races through her body and then she goes perfectly still."

But, amidst all the violence and hurt in Percy's fiction, there is a constant desire by the characters for some undefined connection with others and an understanding of the self. This is not a conscious need, but instead it is a need the characters haven't conceptualized but just know they want, like an itch. And it is this need for others which drives the stories, this constant struggle of human needs against a violent world. The endings are usually unhappy. Sometimes the characters are allowed to see the calm surface of the world, such as in "In the Rough" from The Antioch Review vol. 65 no. 3: "He imagines he is sitting at the bottom of a pond, his pockets weighed down by golf balls, his words escaping his mouth, buoyant and drifting to the surface where everything is blue and full of sunlight." Other times, the characters aren't even than lucky, and the calm world does not even exist in the life of the imagination. In Percy's enthralling mystery tale "Dial Tone" from The Missouri Review vol. 30 no. 2, we are left only with the stark image of, "The hissing of radio frequencies, the voices of so many others coming together into one voice that coursed through you in dark conversations."

2. The Poetess.

"I wake the next morning, pretending
nothing happened. Pretending this life, this era,
with its cheap housing projects, music that makes
cars vibrate, men pouring concrete and snipping
hedges into shapes of animals, pretending."
-from "The Dislocated Theater," originally published in Salt Hill no. 19

Victoria Chang is making a great success as one of the most prodigious and continually intriguing poets around. But it is not mere ubiquity that makes readers and editors pay special attention to her work. The oeuvre of Chang's poetry asserts its importance through each individual poem's presence--like a loud fingerprint from another planet you can't help but recognize as one of your own. And, like all fingerprints, it is the zeitgeist, the roaming camera, the caffeinated, sound-bite-addled monologue in our heads.

Many of Chang's poems are unbelievably expedient in their delivery, coming at you with the speed of the contemporary, like an email made of sparkling quartz. "Each morning," her recent poem "How Much" from Paris Review no 180 begins, "I put on those shoes, legs,/ nylons, sex, black briefs with texts. Each/ dusk, there were martinis, drinks that said/ Cocktail! No choice." We are thrust immediately into the high sensual moment at Autobahn speeds.

In a recent review on Blackbird, Susan Settlemyre Williams nicely describes Chang's poetry as that which "thinks big, that harbors the best sort of ambitions, not to be acclaimed, but to stretch itself." Chang's poems are not meditations on an abandoned lover or ruminations of a single orchid on a battle-torn embankment; they seem to strive against these singular notions of the contemporary. Chang's poems resemble a sort of string theory of the poetic world, burning with a fever of multiple desires and personalities, with their hands in a variety of ages. In "How Much," the speaker of the poem is not only the victim of a lightning quick mind, absorbing a thousand sensory experiences in a New York minute, but, like ill-fated Cassandra, she can also see into the future. The narration in the poem shifts from place to place (apartments, cars, dinners) and voice to voice (answering machines, excited voices, chilling proclamations), moving from one worm hole to the next until we finally arrive at a less chaotic, taxi-cab- and cell-phone-free future, where "Somewhere in a kitchen, a mother will watch/ the last piece of beef fall off a bone." Beneath the demanding shimmering chaos forever remains the world of meat.

In her two poems from Tin House vol. 8 no. 3, "Seven Infidelities" and "Dear Professor," we again see Chang's amazing ability as a writer to leap about in a myriad of locations/events/voices/ideas in her poems, much as one would flip television channels or surf the net. Yet, just as websites and television channels are all part of one large, complex system, we never feel Chang is not weaving some intricate and important pattern with her imaginative bursts. "Seven Infidelities" discourses on a number of seemingly isolated instances of occasional want and deviance, but in the end everything converges into a thrusting violence as "houses fall into the ocean with all the people/ bumping into sofas" and "the snow falls in the shape of men and women,/ and they collide randomly in the dark." In a nearly opposite poetic representation of isolation in chaos, the landscape of Chang's poem "Dear Professor" is not the world, but the narrator's frictive mind, within which we roam between jolts of memory and ironic assertion: "Drugs are like running, someone said, when I didn't get it./ Never got it. You mean raining. Ruining. Like,/ like, like, not quite. Williams hated similes." Finally, our Chinese Emeritus narrator seems through being the conception of another's desire (the professors?) and
wants "to be Emeritus only,/ so the bullet in another chest does not hurt. So I can sink/ my mouth in, come out with it between my teeth./ So I win. So good enough."

But not all of Chang's poems have this same quality of order in randomness. One of her most powerful poems is also her quietest. "Proof," originally published in Ploughshares vol. 32 no. 1, is a subtle evocation of the almost mathematically precise weave of connections that makes up human civilization, and which seems to be a very common notion of our communal fate: now that the communication and travel have been simplified, we can no longer ignore our relations, no matter how distant, historical, or unexplained. But, if this is the case, that all our fates are linked, what happens to our individuality? Where, in this miasma of unity, is the I to be unified with? "Proof" explores the resemblances between a great-uncle who was killed in China and the narrator who is "standing in the dirt in La Jolla." Though this idea of worldwide interconnectedness is not new, Chang is able to make it intensely unique with a subtle shift from the idea connection to one of parallelity, our lives not as one, but running in pace alongside one another. And so "Our angles are equal, therefore we are parallel./ Then there must be two birds, two shores, two deaths."

The Job

2007-10-12T18:21:00.000-07:00

FOUND IN NEW YORK QUARTERLY NO. 63: EDITOR INTRODUCTION FROM RAYMOND HAMMOND

"He could imagine us rushing around Manhattan in our suits and attache cases."
-from Hammond's introduction for NYQ 63

From the outside, the world of literary publishing can seem rakish and cruel: a world of delays, unending rejection slips, and minuscule monetary rewards, if any at all. On the other hand--usually after reading a magical story or mind-altering book of poems--the same world can seem mysterious and wonderful, the sort of place where you would love to hang out if only you knew the right people, talked the right way, understood how they made such amazing things, how you could maybe get them to let you help.

The world of the literary object is a mysterious place for the uninitiated, which we all were at one time (excepting the occasional Waugh or Amis, of course). In many ways, this uninitiated world is inescapable even for the most seasoned publishing veteran. The power of fiction and poetry, though to some extent comprehensible, always slips just beyond our rational grasp. Language moves us, we know, and the language we call literature (from comics to Shakespeare to slam poetry) is that which moves us to the greatest extent; it is that which moves us inexplicably. There is a type of secular magic at work in literature (for more on secular magic, see our previous review of Cabinet magazine), and it can almost seem like the people who publish literature are, like people who work at Apple or on Hollywood films, living a life surrounded by this magic. That they are allowed the privilege. That they have a power the rest of us do not, one filled with music filled parties, lunches with artists, and an unending flow of cappuccinos. And that it is the duty of those with such privilege to share their glory, and that it is our right to censure them if they do not.

But, of course, anyone who has worked a real job or takes a few minutes to consider the world, will realize that no such publishing world exists--unless you replace parties with nights alone at the computer, lunches with tuna fish sandwiches at a desk (again alone), and cappuccinos with Folgers. The real world of publishing is filled with papercuts, deadlines, and the same uncertainty and apprehension as anywhere else. And still those who work in it are lucky, though their days be overloaded with work, bills, and more work.

Editor Raymond Hammond discusses this constant relationship between the unending work and the rewards of literary magazine publishing in a refreshingly sincere and engaging introduction to New York Quarterly's most recent issue, number 63. As self-congratulating as such a piece could easily be, Hammond's piece comes off as an immensely readable and unpretentious view of what goes on behind the masthead of one of the nation's top poetry journals.

Hammond wrote his introduction in response to a letter NYQ received from an author whose poems their editors had rejected: "In the letter, the writer was upset that we had not accepted any of his work and added that he was further insulted by the fact that he could imagine us rushing around Manhattan in our suits and ties with attache cases making arbitrary decisions about who gets in the magazine and who doesn't." The great "umbrage" Hammond takes with the letter is not that the writer was upset because his work was not accepted. Instead, what bugged Hammond and drove him to dedicate five pages to illuminating the world of what his job as editor consists of was that the man imagined Hammond and his staff "rushing around Manhattan" in suits making off-the-cuff decisions about NYQ content and, one might infer, having a simply gay old time doing it.

The reality, as one might assume, is quite the opposite. Hammond is hardly the corduroy jacketed literary aesthete one might imagine sitting behind the editor's desk of a literary magazine, but he is most likely closer to the norm than many readers might expect. In his "other life," Hammond is a Federal Law Enforcement Park Ranger at the Statue of Liberty (here is a link to a picture of Hammond "on the job," as it were). Not the job one would expect for a lit mag editor? As Hammond himself puts it, "All of your editors have regular jobs, most of which do not pay very well and most, if not all, of which have nothing to do with magazines, academia, or the arts." Well, maybe he is painting the lit mag world in too broad a blue-collar tone, as some editors jobs are with the academy or the arts, and a few even work full-time as magazine editors, but his point is made. The majority of the work done on lit mags is from the heart and done for little or no pay--some even pay for the opportunity, shelling out money from their own checking accounts to keep the magazine going. (True: some people working in publishing did go to Ivy League schools, were rich, and may have got their positions because they knew someone at the company--but one can rest assured that this is very rarely the case for literary magazines, if ever. It is a more blue collar world down there, as Hammond's piece shows.)

And the introduction to NYQ 63--where Hammond shows us his early poetic career and befriending former editor William Packard (pictured at left)--is only the first section, as we are told that the story of Hammond's "becoming editor will continue in issue 64." If there are more sensitive descriptions of working class New York poets and portraits of the late Packard like the following, then the sequel will definitely be worth the wait: "Afterwards we met up with Bill who was elated that Anna had come. They had not seen each other in years. We walked towards the subway, Doug and I up front, Bill and Anna lagging behind lost in conversation about poetry. I have a vivid image of the night in my mind, the snow had begun to lightly fall through the light of the streetlights overhead and settle on their shoulders as they walked and talked behind us. At the end of the block, Doug and Anna parted and Bill and I decided to sit on the corner pizza parlor and have coffee. He said that he had lost a friend that day. It was January 19, 1997, and I had heard on the news that James Dickey had died. We talked for an hour probably even longer but the time always flew by, as Bill shared memories of James Dickey. When we parted, I ducked into the subway as Bill walked off into the lighted snow. Little did I know that this would be one of my last vivid memories of seeing Bill walk."

Real Illusion

2007-10-06T14:05:00.000-07:00

NEW ISSUE REVIEW: CABINET NO. 26, "MAGIC"

"Cabinet is my kind of magazine; ferociously intelligent, ridiculously funny, absurdly innovative, rapaciously curious. Cabinet's mission is to breathe life back into non-academic intellectual life. Compared to it, every other magazine is a walking zombie."
-Slavoj Zizek, philosopher

One possible regret regarding the vast number of literary and little magazines published today is that individual bright stars could be overlooked due to the overall luminescence, and so not get the attention they so obviously deserve. It would seem all editors need admit that there are a few little magazines out there on the newsstands that are a bit more fantastic, a bit more wow than all the rest (and, in the end, wow is what everyone in the magazine world is going for, even if it is of the more conservative or ruminative kind). When such gems are stumbled across in the little magazine world, they are perhaps more precious than in other areas of publishing because of how few issues of these magazines are produced, how poorly most are distributed, and how short of a life span these magazines tend to have. When one is found that not only seems able to bring more attention and appreciation to itself but also to the general efforts of small artistic magazine production, a reviewer can't help but be a little ebullient.

Cabinet magazine is one of the sharpest little magazines out there, captivating for the most part due to its stunning originality. An issue of Cabinet is similar to a Basquiat or Twombly painting; like these painters who seemingly couldn't paint a boring line, the editors of Cabinet seem unable to produce an issue that isn't unique as a fingerprint. They take great effort to work beyond what is expected of them as a small arts magazine, pushing past the barriers of the newsstand to success in other publishing and performative venues. As a publisher, Cabinet is as diverse as its editorial content. Individual issues of Cabinet are divided into three sections:--columns, main, and a themed section--each issue then structured like a museum, where a reader moves from room to room. Also, in order to reach the maximum amount of readers and bookstores, Cabinet prints and distributes the same exact issues as both magazines and books (British lit mag Granta is another publisher who has successfully done this). Cabinet also publishes actual books on a variety of subjects and they put on Cabinet sponsored events around the globe.

For anyone interested in, well, interesting things, Cabinet magazine is one not to miss--and the entire run is not to be missed (excerpts are available on their website), not just this issue. The first 25 issues of the magazine cover a range of frightfully interesting topics largely unique to the world of little magazines, such as invented languages, pharmacopia, doubles, laughter, and ruins. Cabinet's last issue (26, pictured above and reviewed here) is, among a myriad other things, an eclectic study of magic in our political and social lives. Like a novelist always trying to trump their last work, the editors of Cabinet are not to be outdone by previous releases, but continue with each issue to impress with renewed creative vigor. (The next issue of Cabinet, which shipped to subscribers October 3, contains a themed section on, of all things, mountains--which, like everything else, the editors and writers at Cabinet have been able to make seem absolutely fascinating and original. They have taken Pound's maxim "make it new" more than to heart; they have made it their DNA. The coming issue contains the intriguingly titled articles "Mont Blanc Montage: Up the mountains, in fiction and fact" and "Making Sense at the Movies: Habit and memory by light of the silver screen.")

The subject of the last issue, magic, is a very popular one today on both sides of the Atlantic. True, most thanks goes to the billion-dollar industry of Harry Potter and his fictional magic, but there has also been a Hollywood resurgence in stage magic in the recent films "The Illusionist" and "The Prestige," both originally works of prose fiction. It is this type of magic which is the focus of the Cabinet issue--that is, the illusory magic of the sleight of hand, the levitating body, the woman sawed in half. This magic not of sorcery but of illusion is defined in the issue by Johns Hopkins professor Simon During as secular magic, or "magic that makes no claim to be in contact with the supernatural--it's not calling on hidden powers to act on the world." The same of course cannot be said of Rowling's Potter, whose magic comes from something Potter cannot fully understand or control, bringing about much of the amazement and drama of the story.

The enchantment of stage or secular magic is that it is "dealing with known unknowns....And by displaying the trick honestly, the audience's consciousness of the changeability of the world is reinforced." This definition is excerpted from Ian Saville and Sally O' Reilly's faux interview exploration into the Marxist implications and uses of the secular magic world, "I Can See Your Ideology Moving" (the picture of the ventriloquised Karl Marx is at right). Like many of the writings in the issues, "I Can See Your Ideology Moving" is very postmodern. It is a stylized play script which runs the gamut from a local British festival, to a ventriloquist acting as Brecht and Marx, to questioning the text as performance, to, finally, an argument for magic as a healthy defense against the persuasive ideologies of capitalism. It's a deft, nicely argued, and very humorous work, emblematic of the best pieces published in the issue--they all walk the line between funny and serious, expressive and representational. Form equals content for works published in Cabinet, resulting very often in strikingly illuminating views on previously less complex subjects.

The issue is a salmagundi (also name of one of the original American lit mags) of ideas and art, a well organized grab bag of insight. One can flip open the issue at any page and be impressed, caught off guard. The first article, "Talk to the Hand," is a revealing look at the history and scholarship of gesture, which once had, like composition, its own rules of rhetoric. Next is "A Minor History of Aquatic Ambulism," a timeline of human attempts of walking on water, with the occasional successes. In the middle of the issue is Cabinet's third installment of their collaboration with the London-based magazine, Implicasphere, described as a "unique theme-based periodical." The theme of this installment is stripes (previously they have been nose and salt & pepper). The installment begins, "Stripes appear bold, strident even, wearing their intentions on their sleeve. And yet they are sly shape-shifters that trick the eye," and the issue then continues on to explicate and illuminate the world of stripes, ranging from looks into the New Orleans' red light district, the stories of Rudyard Kipling, skunk stripes, and many more striped exhibits, texts, and occurrences in the natural world.

Like the famous 11th Edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica or seventeenth century cabinets of curiosities (of which Cabinet's own name seems to derive), issue 26 is yet another of Cabinet's disarming exhibitions into the magic of the world's minutae--only this time, they rove not only into the magic of the world, but the world of magic. A world, we come to see, both under appreciated and a part of our everyday lives--from President Bush's photo ops to our television addictions. "At some time or other we have all decided that life is one long disillusionment," wrote magician David Devant in a 1935 essay. "It is a platitude," he continues, "and like all platitudes it seems that each of us discovers it anew." Devant was one of the most popular magicians of his time, and, somewhat ironically, was also the first person to exhibit films in London, and so helped bring about the new dominant medium of the magician: the cinema.

Voices from the Masthead: Editor Joseph Levens On Why He Began Summerset Review

2007-10-01T09:08:00.000-07:00

The Summerset Review is published online quarterly and in print form periodically. This fall, the literary journal is celebrating its fifth-year anniversary and has introduced features believed to be new to literary magazines: Readers are compensated based upon critical comments they contribute. The journal is hoping that this will increase the awareness and penetration of literary magazines in our world and culture.

Joseph Levens is founder and editor of The Summerset Review. His fiction has appeared in Florida Review (Fall 2007), New Orleans Review, AGNI, Other Voices, Sou’wester, Swink, and elsewhere. We asked Joseph why he does what he does. This is what he said.

WHY I DO WHAT I DO

For the past twenty years, it has happened all too often: I’d start reading a story in a literary magazine, and within a hundred words whisper to myself: This is going to be good. Three or five or eight thousand words later, after other whispers and gasps and sighs along the way – Wow, Damn, God – I’d be left with a tear in my eye, knocked dizzy with emotion. I’ve missed train stations, had meals run cold, and been late for a variety of engagements because of stories like these.

A piece causing all this trouble won’t always be one that is terribly heart-wrenching. No, it could have been a happy story, and very often is. The prose is what usually gets me, the little things, those that make you stop dead, think, think of some aspect of life, lives like mine or very unlike mine, places I’ve been to, places I never knew existed, objects, an orange sapphire (weren’t all sapphires blue?), a piano in perfect tune and tone never played by its owner. It’s like ankles in ice skates; it’s like eating peas off a knife.

There’s no anticipating how I am going to react, what I will like, what I won’t, when I open a literary magazine. Things just happen. I’m a sensitive reader and allow myself to be easily manipulated, suspending my disbelief as if it were a helium balloon, floating, hovering, teetering. Almost always, the stories that have the most impact on me are penned by writers I’ve never heard of. They magically appear in these journals for reasons traveling well beyond scientific analysis. How the story got on the page, how the book got into my hands, how the connection is made in my head, these are all things that cannot be explained.

I do what I do because after this happens to you time and time again, you begin to conceive ways of getting more of these stories out there. I’m left thinking that, for every piece having a great effect on a reader, chances are likely another five, ten, twenty stories are waiting, waiting, waiting, never to be set on a page and exposed on a global stage. Why not? That, I suppose, is for another essay, likely to be a bit ugly.

In addition to my role as editor of The Summerset Review, I am a writer myself. My objective, in my writing, is to reach out and provoke that tear I myself have experienced, in as little as one or two readers who may have innocently stumbled across my work, persons I do not know. To the chagrin of some I am sure, the matter is not at all about money. I am assuming I may not be the only writer out there with this sentiment, and so I thought to do my part and create a vehicle others may use to meet similar desires.

This vehicle comes at a cost. The journal receives an average of five submissions a day and we do not solicit. We run no marketing or advertising campaigns because our humble staff of two (including myself) barely have time to give each story a fair shake (sometimes two or three shakes), edit, correspond, copy-edit, and do everything else, all so that we can put out what we believe are five quality pieces each quarter, chosen from the heart. We pay contributors a nominal fee and never look at the magazine as a revenue-generating source; the focus is elsewhere. (It would be remiss of me to not mention the CLMP, an organization I believe truly cares about literary magazines, and does their best to support them.)

I don’t know exactly how well it is working. It’s not the kind of thing you can read all about the next morning in the newspapers. Once in a while I will come across that shining submission, though, a story that would be like one I read in another magazine, ankles in ice skates, peas on a knife, and realize that, no, wait a minute, hold on; I am not reading another magazine. The writer is sending the story to me, understands what I am talking about, has had similar things happen on the train, gotten in trouble just as deeply and as often.

The real reason I do what I do, if you’ve stuck with me this far, is revenge, actually. I’m tired of cold meals, tired of missing my station, once again late for an evening of whatever else. It’s about time this happen to more people. I’m doing my best to see to that.

New Issue Review: Creative Nonfiction no. 31, "Imagining the Future"

2007-09-26T07:29:00.000-07:00

"It requires neither imagination nor acumen to predict that our current conglomerating, lowest-common-denominator, demographically targeted publishing industry will soon achieve its streamlined apotheosis--a single, worldwide, Exxon Mobil-owned literary empire offering a list of seven books twice a year."
-from "The Writers in the Silos" by Heidi Julavitis, editor of The Believer

It is hardly an opinion to say that the future of book publishing is uncertain, what with Apple's recent iPhone release, Google's continual digitization of American libraries, and talk from more and more publishers about serious consideration of print-on-demand technology. Certainly books themselves will be around for some time, but their locations and the amount of use they receive is in question. It seems possible for them to disappear from our everyday lives, to be replaced by electronic paper, or to have their value negated by the next phase of Google's information empire takeover, the physical texts then relegated permanently to some Library of Congress vault forty feet below street level. That this hypothesising increasingly goes on today asserts what we all intuitively or consciously realize: our relationship with printed matter is changing rapidly.

This is the subject Creative Nonfiction tackles in their latest issue, number 31, which became available this past summer (see cover image above). Looking at the issue's unassuming cover and graphic-lite content, a reader may not readily assume the issue contains a wealth of intellectually dexterous and engaging writing about the future of book publishing by some of the most interesting minds in the business, including Heidi Julavitis (The Uses of Enchantment; co-editor of The Believer), C. Michael Curtis (fiction editor for The Atlantic Monthly), Amy Stolls (literature specialist for the National Endowment for the Arts), Philip Lopate (Art of the Personal Essay), Dinty W. Moore (editor of Brevity), and many more. If, say, Tin House or Zoetrope: All Story did an issue on the same theme, the cover would have a futuristic image adorning it, the text, a heavy techo-typography (possibly even embossed), and the inside would be laden with graphics depicting the wild and exuberant world of the near future of books. Something attention getting, to say the least. Creative Nonfiction, on the other hand, has always been more reserved in their public image (and less well funded, obviously, than Mr. Coppola's or Mr. McCormack's magazines). The only thematically revealing aspects of Creative Nonfiction's cover are the two subtitles: "Writing and Publishing in 2025 and Beyond" and "Imagining the Future," which are hopefully enough for readers to locate this find among the mass of newsstand possibilities.

Lee Gutkind, editor of Creative Nonfiction, asked the issue's contributors to imagine the future of book publishing in the year 2025. Though the writers each at least refer to the year at least once in their essays, the content and predictions of the essays are refreshingly all over the map (something always nice to discover in themed issues). The essays could easily have all discussed the usual suspects of book future--the fear of literary digitization, downloadable e-books replacing print books, the distractions of new media eliminating new readers or "real" books, etcetera--but the writers in this issue are able to push down different tracks and explore new possibilities to seek out publishing's future. (Image at left was done by creative studio Little Kelpie; it is one of the many graphics about the future of books the studio created for this issue of Creative Nonfiction.)

Take Heidi Julavitis's essay, "The Writers in the Silos" (recently republished in Harper's readings section). In a subtle high-irony, Julavitis takes us from an Exxon Mobil (yes, the oil company) global takeover of literature, through an elimination of all the world's books, to a final resurgence of literature in an Adam-and-Eve-grassroots like rebirth of reading at--of all things--your local farmers market. "Soon a slogan will attach itself to the phenomenon--'Read Locally,'" Julavitis writes, "and the new AgriCultural movement will begin." In less than three pages Julavitis takes literature from its pessimistic free market destruction to a warm recreation within local communities--a future which, though obviously somewhat comic, contains a nice element of hope.

The rest of the issue ranges from explorations of the possible necessity of gatekeepers in the literary world to cities where digital books are accessible from anywhere 24/7. And the complete issue feels not like an off-the-cuff prediction of an unknown future, but instead like glimpses into publishing's crystal ball explained by the sort of people you think might know a thing or two about the field. The result is both an eye-opening look at the many diverse possible futures of the book world as well as a reaffirming assertion that, no matter where the future takes us, writing is something we will have to deal with--even if, as Lopate amusingly imagines, its "a book-lozenge which dissolved novella-sized works on the tongue, or the book-shot, devised for cultivated diabetics who requested a literary dose with their daily injections."

Found in Boston Review vol. 32 no. 4: Fiction by Patricia Engel

2007-09-20T06:35:00.000-07:00

"You know how it is when you're a teenager. Just when things start getting good your mom calls you in for some urgent bullshit reason like your aunt is on the phone and wants to ask if you liked the crap she sent you for your birthday."
-from "Lucho" by Patricia Engel

"Our intellectual range distinguishes us from any political journal or literary quarterly, while our seriousness of purpose sets us apart from other general-interest magazines....We give due weight both to public reason and the independent life of the cultural and literary imagination."
-from the Boston Review mission statement

Since its founding in 1975, Boston Review has never been known to publish mediocre fiction. On the contrary, they have since the beginning published fiction from the likes of Stephen Dixon, Alan Lightman, and Harry Matthews, along with many more stunning stories from known and unknown authors. As well, BR has supplied readers with exceptional offerings of interviews (with Sontag, Paley, Appelfeld), nonfiction (on Elizabeth Bishop, pornography, and getting out of Iraq), and poetry (by Ashberry, Weir, Brock-Broido). Taken as a whole, BR has had a surprisingly fabulous literary track record for a magazine that--due to their primary and continual engagement with contemporary political issues--could easily be assumed to be a political forum that just happens to publish the occasional poem or story now and again. One need only look more closely at BR to see this isn't the case--to see that their progressive political bent is founded on humanism and literature; the cover of BR's most recent issue is backgrounded by a wash of Nabokov's butterflies.

Yet since Junot Diaz became Fiction Editor of the magazine a few years back, the quality and power of the fiction published in BR has moved up a notch on the scale of good American fiction--has gone from good to nuclear. Here is Diaz's own idea of what BR fiction should be, quoted from the BR website: "I’m looking for fiction that resembles the Thirty-Mile Woman from Toni Morrison’s Beloved: ‘She is a friend of my mind. She gather me, man. The pieces I am, she gather them and give them back to me in all the right order.’ Or as Takashi Murakami puts it: ‘We want to see the newest things. That is because we want to see the future, even if only momentarily. It is the moment in which, even if we don’t completely understand what we have glimpsed, we are nonetheless touched by it. This is what we have come to call art.’ I’m looking for fiction in which a heart struggles against itself, in which the messy unmanageable complexity of the world is revealed. Sentences that are so sharp they cut the eye." Diaz is very specific in what he wants: writing so sharps it cuts the eye to read it. His publishing track record so far--electric, pop-off-the-page stories by exciting writers like Vivian Chin, the amazing Ivelisse Rodriguez, Ibarionex Perello, D. S. Sulaitis, and Padma Viswanathan--has been one of the best of any fiction editor in the nation. (BR fiction has also since Diaz came on board taken on a noticeable and refreshing aesthetic of diversity, an aesthetic in many ways representative of the contemporary moment around the global community, certainly in major cities like Boston. Many writers published by Diaz seem to have a decidedly rich and intriguing bi- or tri-national flavor to their work.)

Patricia Engel's first published story, "Lucho," flies off from the BR newsprint and into the reader's own consciousness. Like the best stories, Engel's sad tale of a fourteen year old girl named Sabina's friendship with a sixteen year old boy named Lucho is so richly told and filled with compelling characters that the story is remembered not as words on a page, but rather as an indie film the reader watched or an event heard of in youth. The simplicity of Engel's writing is reminiscent of the American dirty realist authors (as Granta named them) such as Richard Ford, Frederick Barthelme, and Jayne Anne Phillips--but Engel's prose is also suffused with the charm and intelligence of today's best young inner-city authors, a style also found in the writing of Nell Freudenberger, Daniel Alarcon, and Diaz himself. It is a clear, sharp prose at the same time nostalgic and cynical, sentimental and coarse. Engel's narrative seems to accurately capture the hunger and possibility of a youth at once becoming conscious of both injustice and desire.

"It was the year my uncle got arrested for killing his wife," Engel's story begins, "and our family was the subject of all the town gossip. My dad and uncle were business partners, so my parents were practically on trial themselves, which meant that most of the parents didn't want their kids to hang around me anymore, and I lost the few friends I had." The young Sabina--estranged doubly for her uncle's murder charge and her family's ethnicity ("We were foreigners, spics, in a town of blancos")--is soon befriended by Lucho, a new boy in town. Lucho smokes cigarettes "like an old pro," curses constantly, hardly seems to bathe, and is much more sexually aware then Sabina. As Sabina's mother comes to determine, this isn't usually the sort of young man a woman wants her only daughter hanging around with.

But hang around with Lucho Sabina does. And it is this relationship seen through the viewpoint of Sabina (a shy, introverted, extremely bright young girl) that creates the stories emotional impact. We see the enigma of Lucho, the town's gossip, the strangeness of school and parents, and the story's eventual tragedy all through Sabina's eager, confused eyes--which is how we all see everything, though we are accustomed through work, relationships, and social relations to not acknowledge this, to keep our ignorance and joy hidden. To hide our hurt, just as Sabina does. We don't wear out hearts on our sleeves, and much of the work of youth is the taking of our hearts off our sleeves and putting them far away below the chest plate where they will be (we think) protected.

Luckily we have story writers like Engel who reproduce that time in our lives when our hearts are being put away for good, when confusion and desire are so real they can be touched, tasted. Engel tells of this strange injustice we all do to ourselves called becoming civilized, called acting right, which Sabina knows isn't the point. "And I thought of Lucho," Sabina thinks in the end, "and how he'd say that was fucked."

From the Newsstands: Essay on Literary Magazines from Antioch Review vol. 65 no. 1

2007-09-14T09:53:00.000-07:00

The following is an essay on literary magazines by Thomas Washington from a recent issue of Antioch Review, vol. 65 no. 1 (Antioch has already released newer issues, vol. 65 nos. 2 and 3.) We are putting this piece up out of order--cutting in line before previously slated lit mag reviews and commentaries--because essays such as Mr. Washington's are scarce in the publishing landscape, so much that we leap at the opportunity to publish one (interested writers, please take note). Mr. Washington's opinions are, of course, his own, and not identical to ours. Yet we agree one hundred percent with him that literary magazines need to be discussed, as they are as much a form of literature as a book of Chekhov stories or Baudelaire's Flowers of Evil and therefore should be dealt with by reviewers and critics in an equal manner.

Antioch Review is published quarterly from Antioch College--and though the college is on a temporary hiatus, Antioch Review editor Robert S. Fogarty assures us that the review will continue printing as usual. They have been publishing literature for 65 years, and show no sign of tapering off. Issues are $9.50 and can be purchased online at the Antioch Review website or from your local bookseller.

A Quarterly Reader (And Writer)
By Thomas Washington

The first thing I look for when venturing into one of my quarterly subscriptions—I rotate a dozen or more journals annually and decide to retain or eliminate based on numerous factors, which I need not get into just yet—is the editor’s note. Most of the time I don’t find one. This is a sly move. Editors must think the art speaks for itself; they needn’t stand between the artist and the reader like some clingy real estate broker. Except when an editor kicks off a spring issue with an obscure poem or an essay on bee habits, I don’t know about other subscribers, but my seating is sometimes lost within the first few pages, and often I never really manage to get back in the saddle until I arrive in the book review section. I, for one, would like to have my hand held for a moment, at least at the outset, to see where the editor is leading me.

Perhaps this is one of those situations where if I don’t get it, then I don’t belong. I shouldn’t be subscribing. For example, before I knew anything about wine, I used to frequent a wine shop on Chicago’s North Shore. The owner probably didn’t realize it, but I had money to burn back in those days. I had a circle of associates whom I needed to impress and would have gladly walked out of the store with anything the merchant recommended, no matter the price. As things stood back then—I had a circle of associates whom I needed to impress and presenting fine wine at the business and dinner table seemed the best way to go about doing it—I needed guidance from the shop owner. He never bothered with me, however. He either assumed I knew my wines well enough and thought I was beyond the coddling stage, or he was sending me a subtle message to stay away from his shop and go for the grocery store selections instead.

So, if this is the sort of message editors are trying to send dim-witted readers by not including a note on the opening pages, I can understand their position. The quarterly is not about chumminess, after all. A certain standard of intellectual rigor is at stake with each issue. Maybe this seasonal greeting practice is better left to the monthlies or a corporate newsletter. Omitting the introduction note might also be a way of keeping the Yahoos out. Its absence maintains a high mystique. It creates a kind of Skull and Bones quality where those who should know do know.

But pretend for a moment that the literary quarterly reader represents a certain tourist class, not a member of the mindless hordes we see jumping off the coach and scampering up the steps of the Jefferson Memorial, but someone with a more urbane air—museum, lecture, and concert goers, for instance, the sort whose minds are always hungry for another bite of haut culture. And imagine the editor here as a riverboat tour captain. His crew, a coterie of writers and readers, retirees, librarians, the merely curious, or the intellectual hangers on, has boarded ship. They mingle in the stern with a glass of chardonnay in one hand and a tiny plate of cheese squares in the other. (I’m picturing a sunny Thursday afternoon in May, somewhere in the Midwest, home of the eager and unassuming, on the Fox or the Mississippi.) The crew trusts that the captain will navigate the river’s bends, snags, and sandbars without ado and at the same time regale them with the storyteller’s knack for anecdotal river lore. It’s a voice of tender familiarity this tourist class secretly hopes for at launching point, a seafaring authority who can help turn the inevitable shifty current and rocky crag toward gentler shores, toward a place that feels like home.

Yet as soon as the deckhand uncoils the dock line and the paddlewheel churns downstream, the crew is greeted only by silence. The guests split and fend for themselves along starboard and stern. The trip progresses downriver smoothly enough without the captain’s observations. This is not the type of audience who demands a fussing over, after all. But still a fog settles in. Like arriving at a cocktail party without a proper greeting from the host and hostess, without one of them putting a martini in your hand and introducing you to Mr. and Mrs. Miller from across town, the absence of the editor’s note in winter, spring, summer, and fall leaves readers awash in a room of unfamiliar voices.

Whether as a loyal subscriber (The word “subscriber” assumes a charming twist here, the quarterly reader as a kind of invested deputy author, a sub writer.) or a newcomer to the journal, I want to know what the view is like from Florida or Missouri. How many manuscripts floated over the transom this past season? How are we all faring with the apparent imminent demise of readers? Any funny anecdotes from editorial headquarters? Any predictions on what we’re going to see around the next bend in the river? It is not necessarily words of wisdom I’m looking for here, although an aside about our political or spiritual state is always welcome, as it is something that reminds me why I subscribed to your journal and not the dozen or so others that clamor for my attention on the end pages of each issue.

Just about anything goes in the editor’s note, so long as the editor takes the time to welcome the reader into the fold. Consider the editor’s note as a kind of “What’s My Line?” game show where the reader has a boat load of questions for the mystery guest. (And wouldn’t we agree that in this trade, the editors and their team of readers really do work behind a baffling veil of secrecy…all those returned envelopes boomeranging back to the mailbox over and over without so much as a scribble in return, a kind of twisted pen pal correspondence where the writer might be better served penning notes to himself. . . the occasional three or four month lapse between subscribing and the subsequent phone calls that go unanswered until the first issue finally arrives. . . ) The more readers (very often the writer in sheep’s clothing) learn about the editorial mission season after season, the better clue and sense of belonging we have.

If this Love Boat motif outlined above appears silly, then consider one last point about the crucial opening note before I move on. Think of the your opening address as an analogy for leading a group of backpackers (your loyal readers) up the side of a mountain. On the way up, everyone is wheezing, huffing and puffing, wondering why the hell they chose you to lead them. When you arrive at the peak, however, their world transforms. An hour earlier the pack toiled and trekked with their eyes glued to their feet, and now you’re presenting them with a breathtaking panorama, literally a view of your own making and design. In other words, your opening address is where you get out from behind those five-foot stacks of slush piles and take credit where credit is due. This is where you show us, your readers, the artistry behind the issue, how you happened upon such and such a writer among all the other competitors. Just how does the eventual published poem or short story make its way to the top, anyway? Surely, the quarterly is ultimately about the writers’ work, but the reader’s failure to recognize the arrangement behind the final product is like seating oneself at the Thanksgiving dinner table without giving thanks to the powers of creation in the kitchen.

Another mystery in my seasonal reading is the question of why many quarterlies are in fact not quarterlies at all any longer. More and more, they fall under the unofficial name of annuals or bi-annuals. I admire the courageous publications who are staying with the original spirit of the seasonal calendar, even though a handful each year are undraping their spring 2005 issue in summer 2006. The reader can just imagine the chaos here. (Actually, the reader cannot imagine the chaos behind a publishing schedule. If many writers, hell bent on sending another manuscript, were readers, then they would ease up on their submissions.) Under this modern day, shrink-wrapped time schedule that traps everyone in a pinch, we can only conclude the quarterly’s headquarters must operate in perpetual disarray, the same as any other industry operating under a production timetable. Perhaps a team of readers called it quits under the onslaught of submissions. Maybe the guy who works the midnight shift at the printing press tips the bottle at night and confuses the orders. Financing, or the lack thereof, is also a likely culprit. These pitfalls are understandable. Yet editors should remember that what sets the quarterly apart from the commercial pack of weeklies and monthlies is its seasonal ties.

***

While some critics treat the quarterly as some sort of endangered species, perpetually on the verge of falling out of favor unless it learns to strike new ground, I would argue just the opposite. However staid, slack, or retro the quarterly may sometimes come across to others, however much it appears to suffer a decline against the mountains of hypermedia vying for a minute of our attention, the quarterly can hold its own as a model of eclecticism. It is a cultural bulwark in its own right.

The challenge here for the quarterly editor, it seems, has little to do with keeping ahead of the reader with new fangled design, e.g. an online edition, eye popping graphics, or inventing a new literary genre (quiction anyone?) It’s all about defining the tempo. Each season the quarterly reader hopes to find a literary work that illuminates the world’s changing landscape, some poem or short story that is finely attuned to the tempo of our varied experience. In this sense the quarterly editor is a pacesetter of sorts, not necessarily a maverick standing beyond a knoll waving us forth as the prophet leads his flock.

Think of harness racing. The thoroughbreds race under a specified gait, pulling those sulkies around the track. The driver / editor carries the whip and signals the horse (the writer?) by striking the sulky shaft to establish the two-beat gait. Defining the tempo and significance of these changing times (the race) is the editor’s great talent and privilege, not only as an allegiance to the reading community but also to the writers whom they publish.

***

The more I searched for state of the art models, essays on which I could base my own writing aspirations, the more I hoped to identify and feel with the writer in that church pew, the more I encountered sad, isolated voices traversing the fringe. Even when a writer does invite me to witness the exotic, say a trip to La Paz or the Silk Road, I’m unmoved. It sounds as though the writer picked up the psycho detritus from one end of the room—a drug habit, or suburban boredom exported to a street corner in Tijuana—and shoveled it to another. The writer never comes across as more interesting than the story itself.

I was bothered enough by my cold reactions to draft letters to various editors, asking why, as a loyal patron of the journal, I wasn’t coming across more reporting, more stories that kept the narrator out of the picture. I understand this is the beauty behind the craft, the narrator’s insistence on being in on the story’s action (if, in fact, we find a story), except I couldn’t help thinking the reader would be better served if the narrator stayed out of the picture altogether.

The only response I received came from an editor who scolded me with an email message: “Don’t read, don’t subscribe, and don’t bother submitting. This publication is not for everybody. And if I had any further doubts about the quality of the work,” the editor advised, “have a look at the Best Essays series, where you’ll find numerous entries from our publication.”

***

Clearly, quarterly membership is a lonely hobby. This is the idea, I suppose, to be alone with something one enjoys doing. But sooner or later it might be good to exchange stories. In trying to gather a feel for what works, for what editors are looking for among the mountains of incoming submissions, I feel left out, as though I missed out on the first day of creative writing class when the instructor handed out the course objectives and syllabi. Since the acceptance rates in these journals run between one and two percent, I presume the work that does succeed to publication represents a model of excellence. I’ve either got a tin ear for the extraordinary, e.g. realizing that a trip to La Paz or the Silk Road is the essence of exoticism, or these global avenues are so over traveled that the only place for the essayist to retreat is back to that kitchen table, for continued reflection on Cezanne’s table of fruit.

***

I am happy to stay on board with the quarterlies, indefinitely. Sometimes it feels masochistic, all this silence between submissions and between readings, no discernable quarterly club members in my neighborhood, the sometimes cheerless design format, the covers as unassuming as a high school theater program passed out by a student usher.

For all the quarterly’s supposed refinement, its place as a cultural cornerstone, it appears pleased enough to inhabit society’s fringe. Weeks ago, however, I noticed a recent issue of Ploughshares in my high school library. One of our library paraprofessionals assumed it was a circulating paperback instead of a periodical. (The English department normally claims these issues.) She catalogued the issue and slapped a barcode on it, just as we do our fiction and nonfiction shelf items. Then she wrapped it in a shiny book jacket and placed it on the new arrivals shelf, face out on a tiny book stand, alongside Capote’s In Cold Blood and Kunkel’s Indecision.

A student has yet to check out Ploughshares. Perhaps it’s just as well that it remains on display

[To read the rest of Mr. Washington's essay, pick up a copy of Antioch Review vol. 65 no. 1]

From the Back Issues: DoubleTake, Special Edition 2001

2007-09-11T06:08:00.000-07:00

"The reality of 9/11, or the surreality of 9/11, was devouring my invented reality. It wasn't that the city was destroyed; it was the consequences, which I misread. I actually thought it would send the country's efforts not outward, but inward."
-Junot Diaz from the Sept/Oct issue of Poets and Writers

As nearly everyone in the world is aware of, today marks six years since the horrendous New York World Trade Center attacks of September 11, 2001. The days' attacks had such sudden and violent repercussions worldwide in the shapes of the American Iraq and Afghanistan wars that--though they were certainly suffered through and memorialized--it could be argued that the events of 9/11 were not allowed enough time to be sufficiently digested by the American nation. The images were flashed repeatedly on televisions and newspapers. Talking heads worked from behind podiums. Wars were begun.

Literary journals are largely a medium of and for reflection. They traffic in reflexive thought, thought that doubles back on itself, makes statements and reconsiders them. They are not generally the mouthpieces of individual taste (though some certainly have been), but they tend to function more in the vein of F. Scott Fitzgerald's definition of genius: one who can hold two opposing views in their mind at once. Flash and pizazz is not typical of literary magazines, either. Nor are they known for bold or dramatic statements about subjects. And it is much due to this reflexive nature that such magazines are often months, even years, behind the flow of current political events and social discussion. In this sense, they are the opposite of the majority of newspapers and glossy magazines who make it their job to break news--or to at least cover the same stories at the same time everyone else is.

Though such a distance from the "hot moment" can make literary magazines seem culturally behind the times, there is much to be appreciated from such editorial patience, as it is usually only with such patience that publishing venues (and the artists within) are able to get a broader and more complex view of events. When events are covered in the literary magazine world--like Atlanta Review's recent issue on the Iraq War or New Orleans Review's Katrina issue--the result can be a publication rich in considered historical and contemporary detail.

In Decemeber of 2001, just months after the attacks, Robert Coles's photography and literature magazine DoubleTake (which ceased publishing in 2003, but has been recently relaunched as DoubleTake/Points of Entry) did a special edition on the 9/11 disaster that, like every other issue of the magazine up to that point, included succinct and powerful writing from some of the best around. Some writers in the 9/11 issue are Seamus Heaney, Francine Prose, Bill McKibben, Stuart Dybek, and Billy Collins, their writing laid out alongside photography capturing what Coles wanted the magazine to capture overall: "the voices and visions of ordinary folk." Which, in the end, is everybody.

It is commonly thought that horrific events such as 9/11 are historically difficult for art to represent very quickly, as artists require a certain undefined period of gestation before they can produce anything worthwhile. The same might hold true for literary magazines, as they are by definition devoted to aesthetic concerns above political and capital ones. It is understandable then why nearly all the writing DoubleTake chose for their special issue on 9/11 was written before the WTC attacks. Even given this fact, at no time does the issue feel dated or discontiguous. On the contrary, the entire issue reads as though it could have been written the day after the attacks, or many years later, as the amount of exposed emotion and careful reflection--of direct declaration and skillful explication--are evenly balanced throughout.

The issue opens with an excerpt of Seamus Heaney's translation of Sophocles Philoctetes, retitled by Heaney as The Cure at Troy. "Human beings suffer/" Heaney's translation begins, "They torture one another,/ They get hurt and hard./ No poem or play or song/ Can fully right a wrong/ Inflicted or endured." The poem, written by Sophocles over 2,000 years ago and translated by Heaney in 1991, feels as though it could have been written just moments after the attack, in a direct response to the bloodshed and violence brought onto the people of New York City. Such, Heaney shows us, is the power of literature.

The rest of the issue continues in this manner, with very few mistakes or overstepping of editorial bounds (which near everyone writing was worried about in the immediate wake of 9/11). There is an essay on what we remember about traumatic events by Francine Prose; a handful of eerily fascinating photographs of airports and the people in them by Adam Shemper, a both surprisingly gentle and painful poem about the WTC attacks by James Hart, a piece about Ghandi's peaceful revolution by Bill McKibben, and a spread of evocative photographs taken of Northern Afghanistan from 1999 and 2000 by Robert Sanchez.

One of the most surprising and disturbing pieces in the issue was written in October 1958 by William Carlos Williams, about a child from Paterson, New Jersey playing with building blocks. W.C.W. tells how the child built a tower with the blocks meant to suggest "those huge buildings in New York City where a cousin of his dad's worked." As W.C.W. watched, the child knocked the building down. "What happened?" Williams asked the young boy. "Someone real mean came," the boy says, "and he got his way."

From the Newsstands: Fiction from New England Review vol. 28 no. 3

2007-09-08T08:50:00.000-07:00

The following is a lengthy excerpt of Rob Ehle's heartbreaking story "Not the Ocean" from the new issue of New England Review, vol. 28 no. 3. The journal--one of the crispest designed and consistently fascinating high-quality literary journals around (this issue even includes a piece by Tolstoy)--is edited by Stephen Donadio and published out of Middlebury College in Vermont. Single issues are 8 dollars and can be purchased in bookstores or from the NER website. NER is distributed nationally by Ingram and Ubiquity.

Not the Ocean
by Rob Ehle

The sun had not shown itself for twenty days, and only six of those had been dry. Today it was drizzling. Still, the boys were playing in the back as if it were mid-July. Dan heard their shrieky voices from the front of the house. The voices went from loud to extremely loud, then back to loud again. They had not played in the yard for three days. If he had let them play inside today, he might have hurt one of them. There was a lull, and he began to be able to think again. He looked back down at the checkbook register and then heard a boom—something very large and heavy had hit the back wall. Dan jumped from his chair, which crashed to the floor, but before he was at the back door the boys were already shouting, It’s okay. He’s okay. We’re okay. When he got outside, he saw the aluminum tool shed tipped off its concrete bed, leaning on the house. The boys were already at the opposite corner of the yard, as if it had been an act of God.

Aaron crouched at the base of a rose bush. He was examining dirt. It didn’t look like he’d been doing anything else for at least an hour. His little brother stood in front of him facing the back door, his expression blank with guilt. He held his hands behind his back as if he were hiding something.

“What’d you do, Aaron?”

“We can fix it, Dad. Satch wanted to see the top.”

He didn’t get the checkbook balanced. By the time Cheryl got home he’d barely finished getting the shed back on its foundation, bolted now into the concrete. He had tried for about ten minutes to make the boys pick up and reorganize all the spilled nails and screws, nuts and bolts, mollies and copper wire, until the sheer lunacy of effort was too much for him. Instead he had them clean their room.

“That’s not a punishment,” Cheryl said.

“Have you looked at that room?”

“That’s what they were supposed to do today, anyway. I told them before I left.”

They didn’t eat until seven. Dan had planned on having supper ready when Cheryl got home, but events had again found their own sluice. It was ten before the boys were in bed and as soon as she’d turned out their lights, Cheryl went straight to a bath. Dan thought he might have a drink. When he opened the cupboard above the refrigerator and remembered he was out of Scotch, his desolation surprised him.

“Dan,” Cheryl said from the tub.

He walked down the hall to the back room, out to the yard. The clouds were finally blowing off, and he could see some stars. They were pretty and new, and it had been so long since he’d seen them that it made him think of night in the mountains. He thought he might take a few days with a pack and a bag and just go up, all by himself. He had all the time he needed. It wasn’t the kind of thing he did, ever.

Cheryl called him again. He couldn’t always hear from the back porch, not always, and he took a couple of steps further out. He smelled the wet under the clearing sky and he could feel the rarefied night on his skin. The smell of grass and dirt started to go musky, and he knew a skunk was out somewhere. The smell didn’t fade off. The neighbor’s dog started barking, and Dan went inside.

“Where were you?” Cheryl said when he came into the bathroom. The water was so hot that steam still ribboned off it, and her skin glowed like Christmas.

“A skunk’s outside.”

“I wanted to talk to you about something.”

“What?” Dan said.

“Larry and I talked tonight.”

He finally couldn’t think of anything else to do, so he smiled.

“I think it’s the right time for something like this, Dan.” She looked at the ceiling as she spoke, as if she were practicing. “While you’re looking for something new. Larry’s got an idea—an opportunity. He says if I stay around any longer, I’ll just learn all he knows anyway and then there’s nothing stopping me from setting myself up and competing.”

“Setting yourself up? With your own produce stand?”

“It’s not a produce stand.”

It was a booth in a gutted movie theater. There were about twenty other vendors, selling specialty olive oils, beeswax candles, kites—anything a person could think of to sell (though not necessarily to buy). But Larry’s instincts were good enough, and he’d finally been able to hire some help. Cheryl went in three days a week to relieve him. She hadn’t worked for nine years, and she was flush with purpose.

“It’s a whole store, and business is doubling every two months. Organic is finally mainstream, Dan. People are really into local produce.” Now she looked at him, and he just let her, stared dumbly back. “Larry’s thinking butters and cheeses now.”

“He’s thinking butters and cheeses?” Dan opened the medicine cabinet, took out the box of floss. “Plural?”

“There’s a space opening next to us. The rent’s almost nothing.”

They had just gotten twenty thousand dollars in inheritance from her grandfather. Before that, there had been only the checking account.

Dan slept badly. The smell was finally so rank he knew the skunk had to be under the house. He had the midnight certainty that one of the boys would surprise it early in the morning and get sprayed point blank. Blinded, maybe. The idea finally consumed him, and he had fitful, dreamy thoughts about hospitals and sunglasses. When he woke again, though, he couldn’t smell a thing, and he was so relieved that he got up, put on his robe, and went to check on the kids. To see them, he turned on the hall light. It half woke Cheryl, who sighed a question and rolled back to sleep. All he could see of Aaron was the rough grain of his hair at the edge of the blanket. Satchel lay sprawled and coverless as if he’d just dropped off the ceiling. His breathing sounded like waves. Dan had taken lately to watching his sons sleep the way he’d once sat on the beach gazing at the ocean—emptied, quiet. That his sons were not the ocean, were small and full of love for him, didn’t always soothe him. He bent to put a blanket over Satchel, felt the damp at his hairline and moved the cover down a little. He went back to his room, slipped into bed, and tried not to think about money.

He heard Cheryl on the phone in the morning, talking to Larry. TV noises came from the back room. There was a sliver of sunlight at the baseboard, the first in weeks. It was a minute or two before he remembered what day it was, and when he did, he rolled on his side and put a pillow over his head. A minute later, Cheryl came in and said, “You’re still in bed?”

“Time’s it?”

“It’s nine, Baby. Larry’s picking me up and we’re going to the farmer’s market.”

She had started calling him this after he was laid off. She’d never used the word
before, not even in sex. “Okay?”

“You taking the kids?”

“To the farmer’s market?”

“They like it. Satch likes the . . . things.”

“I’ll be back in a couple of hours. Then we can all do something fun.” She snatched up the blinds, and the room cracked open like an egg. “It’s gorgeous out.”

A minute later she was in the back room saying goodbye to the kids and five minutes after that Satchel was on the bed. “I’m hungry.”

Dan told him to get some Cheerios. “Have Aaron help you.”

“Mom says you’re being a lazybones.”

He pulled the pillow further down over his face.

“Lazy Bones,” Satchel said.

“Mom’s just a crazy bones.”

Satchel laughed and stared. Dan’s eyes were shut, but he could feel Satchel crouching, his nose an inch away. “Lazy Bones,” Satchel said. Dan growled, low and wolfish. Satchel began a quiet squealing, almost inaudible. It got louder as Dan’s hand moved slowly toward him under the blanket. When Dan had him by the leg, he yodeled and thrashed in happy terror.

“Who you callin’ lazy?”

Once Dan was up—that bulwark fallen—he resigned himself to French toast. He knew the boys were sated on television. Aaron broke the eggs and Satchel ground the coffee—something destructive for each of them.

“Watch that griddle. Hospital’s closed Sunday morning.”

“Is not,” Aaron said.

The boys ate at the table while Dan stood at the counter with his coffee, frying his own toast. They argued about cartoons. He tried to tune them out with the morning paper, but gradually he realized it wasn’t the boys who were distracting him. He set the front page aside and picked up the classifieds. GRAPHIC ARTIST needed for 6-month assignment; GUI DESIGNER for dynamic new gaming and VR company; R U a SELF-STARTER? He scanned the columns, circling nothing, until he smelled the burning toast. He picked it off the griddle and threw it in the trash, turned back to the paper.

“Dad!” Satchel said. “You just threw away your French toast!”

Dan was still in his robe when Cheryl came home. She was talking as she opened the front door, and he went to the bedroom to get some clothes on. He heard Larry’s voice, the low slight sway, and Cheryl’s laugh, and bags set on the kitchen table. She said, “Where is everybody?” Aaron and Satchel were playing in the back yard. Dan looked for some jeans.

She had met him in her yoga class. Before the organic produce, he’d been an engineer. Engineering what, Dan wasn’t sure—flexible computer screens maybe, microphones the size of bacteria—things strange and wonderful enough to make him tidy money, which Dan didn’t begrudge him. Larry had paid his dues. Cancer had taken sixty pounds and a kidney off him, and in his eyes you saw the Lazarus wisdom. Dan hadn’t known him before he was sick, but he wondered if he’d looked as good—sallow and wiry, hands that reminded you of Lincoln. He had wrinkles that women would still be falling for twenty years from now. Either way, he now knew what was what. Larry said he hadn’t done the organic thing for his health—coming back from the grave, he just liked being around stuff that grew. He might have been married once, Dan could never remember.

“Hey, farmers.”

Cheryl smiled at him when he came into the kitchen. She held out a carrot: “Carrot?”

Larry stood behind the bags with his hands in his back pockets, shy as a cowboy, and Cheryl took a chomp of the carrot herself and grinned with a full cheek.

“Smells tasty in here,” Larry said.

“Was. French toast with catsup—it’s a House Satchelty.”

Cheryl came up to Dan, aimed the carrot at his mouth, and he opened up. He held it there like a cigar, half-grinning at Larry. Larry grinned back. He had the warmest smile Dan had ever seen—not a grinner, really. (Did that mean that you could trust him with your money, or that you couldn’t?) There was the sound of the door in the back room, and a moment later Aaron walked into the kitchen and opened the refrigerator as if he were the only one in the house.

“Hello, kiddo,” Cheryl said. “What are you up to?”

“Can I have a soda?”

“No.”

He closed the fridge. “Okay,” he said, and he walked back out of the kitchen.

Larry laughed and looked out after him and said, “That’s me.”

The carrot was as sweet as an apple in Dan’s mouth, and he almost mentioned it. Instead he said, “Didn’t look like you.” Cheryl looked over at him and he pretended not to notice.

“That’s what I did all the time,” Larry said. “Asked for stuff I knew I couldn’t have. Then I’d go back out and play.”

He really was a good man. Better than Dan, actually, which was a strange thing to think about.

Sometime in the soggy recent past a trip to Point Reyes had been promised to see the gray whales. Dan didn’t remember. After Larry left, Cheryl started packing some of the fruit and cheese she’d gotten at the market. Satchel had wanted to see whales ever since Aaron had gone with his class the year before and come home talking about flukes. Pretty much everything had been flukes now for about a year. They had a fluke poster in their room, and when he took a bath, Satchel turned on his stomach, lifted his fluke-flared feet and dowsed his head, trying in eight-inch water to make sounding. As Cheryl packed, Dan rummaged through a couple of closets for the binoculars. The closets yielded nothing, and Dan began to fear the binocs were impacted somewhere in a tent or sleeping bag down in the bowels of the house. Twenty minutes later he was rifling and muttering in the space under the basement stairs when Cheryl came down.

“What are you doing, Dan?”

“We have too much stuff, you know that?”

“We’ll have a garage sale. But not right now.”

He knelt on a plastic packing box, peering, the flashlight in his hand no brighter than a candle, when the lid gave way and he slipped. His fist went through the weave of an ancient lawn chair.

“Goddamn it!”

“What are you looking for?”

“I’m looking for the damn binoculars. How are we going to see a damn whale without any binoculars, Cheryl?”

She didn’t answer, and when he looked at her there wasn’t a trace of interest he could see. She sighed and finally said, “We’ll be in the car.” He dug and rummaged for another five minutes, until the boys started yelling. Cheryl pulled out of the driveway, and Dan marched down and got into the car. At the corner, she turned right instead of left and said, “I’m sure Larry has some binoculars.”

“Sure,” he said. As she flipped opened her phone, he said, “You know, why don’t you just invite him? I’ll bet he’s—”

“Really?”

“No.”

“Wait!” Satchel yelled. “I know where they are.”

Back at the house, Satchel ran into the garage and came back in less than a minute.

“We were reading with them last week. Frank and me.”

“The hell?” Dan said under his breath, and Satchel said, “Dollar,” and no one asked any more questions.

As Dan drove through the city, across the bridge, Cheryl and the boys took turns looking through the binoculars. Satchel said he saw a whale, and Aaron told him it was the Farallons. Cheryl kept saying it didn’t matter if they saw whales or not, it was a beautiful day. She was buoyant and chatty. She talked about Marin and free-range chickens and the fascists in Washington. She told Aaron there was definitely a God, no matter what his friend said. At the rainbow tunnel, Satchel and Aaron both sucked in their breath. Just before the other end, Aaron poked Satchel in the ribs, and Satchel laughed and then got mad.

“Not fair!”

“It’s bad for you to hold your breath that long when you’re only five.”

“I can hold it a lot longer than that.”

“You lose five million brain cells for every second you hold it.”

“I do not.” Satchel was quiet a moment. Then he said, “Do I, Mom?”

“Jeez.” Dan didn’t even have to look in the mirror to see his older son rolling his eyes. “You better hope not. You don’t have many left to lose.”

He worried sometimes that Aaron was picking up his sarcasm a little quick. The boy wasn’t even ten. At this rate, how dry would he be by the time he was sixteen? Partly it was having a little brother—a walking bull’s eye for irony. Everything in Satchel that brought out tenderness and delight in his parents was, Dan knew, proof to Aaron that he was the stupidest human in America. Dan had had his own stupid little brother, a man who was now a school superintendent in Oregon. All he wished for Aaron, for a boy so frighteningly like himself, was that he not mistake for stupidity what was actually happiness.

They drove along Bolinas Lagoon past dozens of egrets planted out on the water like pennants. Dan thought briefly what it would have been like if he’d been out by himself.

“Ospreys!” Cheryl said suddenly. “Dan, stop! Look at them!”

He pulled into a gravel turnout. They all got out of the car and followed two of the birds as they flew out over the water. When he got his own chance at the binoculars, Dan could make out the stark face markings and crests of the birds as they flew, their feathered legs.

“They look like Mexican wrestlers,” he said. “Don’t they? Those faces.”

“Strong-Bad!” Aaron said, in a Strong-Bad voice.

The boys got their chances with the glasses, and then Cheryl said, “My turn.” Just as Satchel handed the binoculars up to her, one of the ospreys took a dive. Cheryl gasped. The osprey came up with a fish, turning it in its talons straight on to the wind as it flew off. “Look!” Cheryl whispered. “Look at that!”

But Dan was looking at her, not at the bird. Her lips were just parted. She peered through the binoculars like a child peeking through a keyhole. As a wisp of her blond hair blew back and forth from her cheek to the top of the binoculars, desire hit him like a little gust of wind.

“I am Strong-Bad!” Satchel said, giggling. “And I like . . . fish!”

Larry was not the kind of person to take someone’s wife. Dan knew this. But as he looked at Cheryl now, all girlish and bursting, it wasn’t enough. She didn’t have to have a thought in her head of betrayal. Just the happiness alone felt like it. As weeks went by, then a month, then four months without a job, there was a meanness he couldn’t shed, that he felt doomed and hobbled by.

“I thought they couldn’t fly,” Satchel said.

“Ospreys?”

“Yeah.”

Aaron stared at his brother, and Cheryl smiled and furrowed her brows at Dan.

“You thought ospreys couldn’t fly?”

“Yeah.”

Aaron looked up at the one remaining bird. They all watched a while longer as it kited above the lagoon.

“Ospreys,” Aaron said finally. “Not ostriches.”

[To read the rest of Rob Ehle's touching story "Not the Ocean," purchase a copy of New England Review vol. 28 no. 3 from the NER website or your local bookseller.]

New Issue Review: ZYZZYVA* vol. 23 no. 1

2007-09-03T16:27:00.000-07:00

"For hours, off and on, he gave me kind of stares a child throws Christmas mornings, when he has torn the wrappings from every present and stands waiting for the gift that will never arrive."
-from the story "Exit Wounds" by Charles McLeod

"...For you she builds a body, a list
from hip to waist, a weight in breasts best set to anchor
the architecture of your mouth."
-from the poem "Husbandry" by Jennifer Borges Foster

For the past 150 years, American little and literary magazines have mainly existed to publish new and original writing yet unaccepted by mainstream publishing/reading venues, either because of the writing's form or content, or simply because the name of its author isn't well-known enough (such as the early Sherwood Anderson, Philip Roth, or Miranda July). It was due to just such editorial vision that Emerson and Fuller's ever-copied mid-nineteenth century magazine, The Dial, never amassed more than 300 subscribers. And hardly has anywhere suffered to publish unrecognized quality writing as thoroughly as did Margaret Anderson's The Little Review, its issues packed with experimental new work from Ezra Pound, Malcolm Cowley, T.S. Eliot, Vachel Lindsay, Djuana Barnes, William Carlos Williams, and Jean Cocteau, its famous slogan printed across the later covers: "Making No Compromise with the Public Taste." (Further proof of its publishing temerity: The Little Review was sued by the U.S. government after publishing 4 installments of Joyce's Ulysses; 3 of the 4 installments were burned by the Post Office.) Though West Coast literary magazine, ZYZZYVA, is very different from both The Dial and The Little Review, it is their cousin in its thankfully stubborn insistence to find and publish fascinating new writing by under-recognized, sometimes unheard of, literary authors and artists.

"The last word: West Coast writers and artists," say covers of ZYZZYVA, a literary journal published thrice-yearly out of San Francisco by a staff led by the magazine's founder, Howard Junker. In photos, Junker looks eerily like John Updike (as Junker himself has often pointed out), and one might wonder if some higher power didn't create a renegade literary twin of Updike for the western seaboard, in a zen-like balancing of American letters. Such a thing, in metaphor, at least, is necessary. Though the United States is 3,000 miles wide, the wealth of good writing is considered to be found almost wholly in New York, because the largess of good publishing is found there. One need only look around (which, understandably, takes time and effort) at such literary destinations as City Lights Books, Powell's bookstore, Tin House, McSweeney's, Black Clock, and Zoetrope (just to name a few of the more prominent ones) to see that the western edge of the nation is publishing and selling a considerable amount of the most exciting writing around.

All this to say that the latest issue of ZYZZYVA is a good a place as any to read outstanding new writing--the kind of writing that will, as Francine Prose once described a good story, feel as though the top of your head has just been removed for a moment. That "ah-hah" feeling. The feeling a reader might get from Charles McLeod's haunting short story, "Exit Wounds," from this issue of ZYZZYVA. "When the buzzing rose up and reached me," the narrator of the story tells us upon seeing thousands of bees rise up from an overturned semi-trailer, "I was saddened; they had named themselves and we had to act accordingly. All around us were cornfields and farther off farmhouses, their porch lights like code on the flatland. The insects pushed on and I kept walking west. The sky was so wide it was startling."

Like McLeod's story, much of the writing published in this and most issues of ZYZZYVA is somehow distinctly western, infused as it is with references to western landscapes, or tinged with aestheticisms reminiscent of the Beats, but mixed with modern doses of cynicism and post-Marquez wonder. Though somehow the magazine on the whole retains a non-regional feel, as though the writers could be from some pueblo in southern Mexico or writing at some coffee shop in Kansas City. While only publishing work by West Coast artists, Junker's ability to publish writing that resonates with all readers speaks highly of his editorial eye. The pieces in this latest issue of ZYZZYVA are as diverse as they come, ranging from Native American memoir (Sarris, "All this Family") to humorous fantasy (Houser, "Piranha-Otter") to the slippery ontology of sexual experience (Howard, "Bolero") to celebrity photography (Fernandez, "Self Portrait with Charles Bukowski") to mixed media art (Mulvey, "Virtual Couch") to a different type of graphic novel (Madonna, "All Over Coffee"). In the diversity of these pieces, Junker continues to map the literature of the West, expanding its borders. That this issue of ZYZZYVA deserves readers is not the question--Madonna's graphic novel and McLeod's story alone are reason enough to drop the 11 dollars for an issue. Instead, the question this and the best issues of ZYZZYVA brings to mind (along with the best issues of McSweeney's and Zoetrope) is to what the future holds for San Francisco, Los Angeles, Portland, and Seattle as bright new cities in the literary geography. New York will not soon fade as the center of literary publishing. But with people like Junker, Ferlinghetti, Winthrop McCormack, and others continually finding a home for writing to equal that coming out of New York, it seems like the landscape is certainly flattening, if not yet shifting.

*Our sincere apologies to everyone at ZYZZYVA for our previous miscapitalization (as Zyzzyva) of the name of their fine mag.

**This review regards the spring issue of ZYZZYVA, while a newer issue has already been released, vol.23 no. 2.

From the Newsstands: Poetry and Fiction from Versal no. 5

2007-08-29T06:38:00.000-07:00

Begun "in the winter months of 2002,...in the cafes of Amsterdam," Versal is the only English language literary magazine in the northern European country, and one of the few in Europe. The magazine publishes an intriguing and highly literary blend of fiction and poetry, along with a good serving of modern art. According to its editors, Versal's name "comes from Shakespeare's cropping of 'universal' in a line from Romeo and Juliet. At first signifying the universal, 'versal' later took on a connotation of the rare and unique." The following are excerpts of poetry and fiction from Versal's fifth issue, which can be purchased at bookstores or directly through the magazine's website: www.wordsinhere.com. (You can read an earlier Luna Park review of Versal 5 by Gregory Napp here.)

"Upon the death of his friend Halszka in 1986, Roman Opalka went back to Warsaw to find his work. After unbelievable complications with customs, the Polish administration only let him take out thirty paintings, thirty drawings, thirty books, thirty etc. His choice made, Roman Opalka destroyed whatever was left in a devilish and sensual rage.

In 1979, Alain Villar threw a small stone sculpture from his balcony. Then he finished it off with a hammer.

Raoul Hebreard carefully sawed up one of his sculptures in 1997. He then made shelves out of it.

In his garden, Simon Hantai buried the gigantic paintings he had made for his exhibition at the CAPC in 1981. Fifteen years later, he dug them up and reused certain bits and pieces which he called The Leftovers."

-from a piece titled "An Inventory of Destruction" by Eric Watier, translated by Simone Manceau

***

"Every train goes to the whisper plain.
On the plain, the bells ring with ten fingers.
Their flutey whispers can be heard in the queues.
The ringing of their wheels is the delicacy
that stitches the wind..."

-excerpt from the poem "Carnival" by Theodore Worozbyt

***

"I.
On our march to the sea we carried bottles of the rarest green glass, each one filled with dreams, the kind of dreams only happy dogs have, with muffled barking under breath and fragile paws running. The streets were full of the ghosts of all our dog dreams. We stuffed them into bottles and marched to the sea to toss them into the waves.

II.

Once, three children sat in a circle, somewhere in the sand, dropping dreams into tin cans full of rusty rain. Speaking backwards to one another so no one else could understand, they took turns telling a story.

III. The Backwards Children's Story of Glass and Dreams, and of Armies
Once, on an island, was another, a smaller island. The first island was Glass, and held the second, the Island of Dreams, within. The Island of Glass was walls and shining, glittering tubes and pipes sneaking their way between buildings holding giant slick machines. The people who lived on the Island of Glass and worked the machines were all eyes to the ground, and spoke only in mumbles and murmuring gasps, as their bodies desperately tried to remember air. And when they slept, which wasn't often, their dreams were caught by a tube which was built into their brains, just behind the eyes, so that no dreamer on the Island of Glass ever saw their dreams before they were whisked out of the dreamer's head, and away from their homes, and over the city, where each person's tube met a larger crystal pipe which sneaked and snaked up and through the walls and onto the Island of Dreams...."

-excerpt from the story "The Backwards Children, and Their Dreams" by Charles Geoghegan-Clements

Writer Grace Paley Dies from Breast Cancer at 84 Years Old

2007-08-25T08:16:00.000-07:00

"This is a hard time for publishers, even the big ones, though every now and then one of them will find it possible to give one a one million dollar advance to a well-known money maker. It doesn't always work. The small and the not-so-small independent bookstores that civilized and improved our towns and cities have disappeared."

-Paley in her introduction to CLMP's 2005/2006 little magazine and press directory

Grace Paley, renowned short story writer (and essayist, poet, and activist) died yesterday(see NY Times obituary) in her Vermont home at 84 years old. Paley published many of her stories in small literary magazines, such as Fiction, The Noble Savage, and the New American Review, just to name a few. She was a master of the craft. (Click here for an insightful 1992 interview from The Paris Review, and here for an interview from PEN America.)

(Paley photo by Karl Bissinger; from book jacket for Paley's book of short stories, Enormous Changes at the Last Minute)

Found in Hanging Loose: Art by Zevi Blum / Poetry by Writers of High School Age

2007-08-24T05:36:00.001-07:00

"During the day
we have impromptu ice cream parties on the screen porch
to catch the sugar while it's frozen."
-from "Summer," by Clare Jones

In a very general sense, what gets published in literary and little magazines (artistic publications with a vision apart from the popular or commercial) are literary and artistic works of the circus--works on the outskirts of the larger culture, in tents along the side of the road, pulling carts full or trinkets and whistles, wearing scarfs and outlandish hats; wanting badly for their fanciful productions to be heard, seen, enjoyed (wanting, really, only to entertain), but content enough to go on performing either way, whether people stop to watch or simply continue on to other, more practical, destinations. Where would we be without such distractions of the spirit, such waylays to the everyday, light fantastic adventures of the imagination?

At least for now, such questions don't have to be answered, as there thankfully exist literary magazines, circuses, street artists, high-flyers, tightrope walkers, and the carnivalesque etchings of Zevi Blum. This month, Blum's work can be found in quality reproductions in the latest issue of Hanging Loose magazine, published in Brooklyn, NY. The issue contains a wealth of work by Blum, whose etchings fill the front and back covers, in addition to more etchings on eight color glossy pages inside.

Blum's colorful etchings (each seemingly composed of a hundred pastel shades) revel in the unusual and unordinary, and in doing so they are satires of the modern world, where the unusual is so hidden that it's oddity is multiplied to an absurd level when it finally reveals itself. The theme of all Blum's etchings is, according to Oxford Gallery's James Hall, "that of human inventiveness gone awry," and so they are cousins to such works as Alice in Wonderland, Rabelais's Gargantua and Pantagruel, and the paintings by Brueghel the Elder or Hieronymous Bosch. They are the sort of works that excite language in the mind of the viewer--words such as fantastic, trippingly, arabesque, vaudeville-- but do not, in themselves, cry to be interpreted. Like the circus itself, the only desire of Blum's etchings is to entertain; to entrance the viewer through humor, mystery, and fantasy; to disorder the mind towards enjoyment. (But, if you still want a lucid and penetrating interpretation of Blum's work, see James Hall's aforementioned essay on Blum's website.)

Blum is a proficient and practiced artist; born in 1933, he has taught at both Ithaca and Cornell and shown his artwork in many galleries. And such training in his craft is evident in the patience and skill it must take to create his intricate and imaginatively detailed artworks. Some artworks give us the opposite reaction; not one of admiring the studied ability of the artist, but instead causing us to marvel over the raw inventiveness of youth. Also in the recent issue of Hanging Loose, is some unexpectedly powerful poetry from young artists in Hanging Loose's ongoing series, "Writers of High School Age." All of the poems featured in this section are moving works filled with touching and absorbing poetic language and unique images. Sure, they might not compare to a "Sailing to Byzantium," but they have their a distinctive flair of charisma and energy that one can only find in the young. The poems seem fresh and internal--internal in that studious unaware quality of monks and artists, a quality that come naturally to the majority of those without yet 30 years into the world.

Above all, the poems of these young writers is memorable. Some, due to their subjects, publish themselves in readers mind more surely than others, such as Naomi Forman's lesbian-tinted prose poem, "Summer Lovin'" ("I shiver in the dry heat of our cruel Arizona July"), or Rosetta Young's poem of youthful compartmentalization, "When We Were Countries" ("The broken kind, with borders like horseshoes"). But none of the poems are as powerful as Clare Jones's piece about the aching humid heat of a Louisiana summer, "Summer."

"The AC shuddered, sighed, and passed out last week," Jones begins her poem, "curled up like a cat in the ducts and died." The writing continues to evoke suffocating feelings of entombment in the unrelenting hot. In her poem, Jones captures a truth about living in a humid southern climate: when the summer heat is at its peak, it saps not only people's strength, but it also dulls the edges of their thinking. Jones writes: "I can't remember--/ about the way you said.../ I've lost it now." There is a stifling quality to the entire poem, as though the voice is trying to make it through the subtle summer madness to the fresh air of autumn. The voice shifts constantly between "we" and "I," as though the narrator is struggling to be heard beneath the communal suffering of the weather. She calls a last time, "wake up," only for the unflinching heat to instantly reply, "dissolve," because, in end, the heat "leaves not a trace behind."

Bernhard DeBoer, Little Magazine Distributor for 60 Years, Closes Down

2007-08-21T08:25:00.000-07:00

The following is a memo quoted in full from Faye Kosmidis, owner of Bernhard DeBoer, announcing that they will be closing:

August 20, 2007

Dear Gentlepeople:

With deep regrets, I am sorry to inform you that the changing economic climate in our industry has forced us to close our doors after 60 years. We appreciate your support and loyalty over the years and wish you luck in your future endeavors.

Sincerely,

Faye Kosmidis
Owner, Bernhard DeBoer, Inc.

In Praise of Pushcart: the 2007 Pushcart Prize XXXI, Best of the Small Presses

2007-08-21T08:15:00.000-07:00

"She's holding a rabbit,
wearing a flowered dress
that melts into a background on flowers."
-from "Portrait of Her Mother as the 19th Century," by Keith Ratzlaff

Here's an excerpt from editor Bill Henderson's introduction to the 25th anniversary of the Pushcart Prize as he reminisces about the Prize's origins: "Twenty-five years ago, Pushcart Press threw a party for the first Pushcart Prize at Manhattan's Gotham Book Mart. All of the 70's literati showed up to sip white wine from plastic glasses and wish us well. I am looking now looking at photographs from that gathering. In one, I am standing near a young John Galassi--now head of Farrar, Straus & Giroux--and poet John Ashbery. In another, Francis [sic] Steloff, nearly 100 years old, founder of the store, laughs with Nona Balakian of the New York Times. Harold Brodkey had just entered the room behind them." All that was 31 long years ago, and times have inevitably changed. The 2007 Pushcart Prize XXXI Best of the Small Presses was released earlier this year. Ironically not long after its publication, the Gotham Book Mart, where Henderson describes the original launch of Pushcart Press has this same year auctioned off its stock of books and shut its doors for what is sure to be its final time.

Bill Henderson. The name means a lot to nearly anyone who has spent a good amount of time writing, editing, or reading little magazines, as his Pushcart Press publications and annual Pushcart Prizes have for over thirty years strived to bring more attention and recognition to the world of little magazine publishing. Something of an everyman's George Plimpton (of similar Plimptonian verve and devotion without the luck of Plimpton's moneyed birthright), rumor has it that Henderson continues putting together each collection of Pushcart Prize in "a small hut in his backyard, heated with a space heater, a testament to his astounding dedication." And, as he states in the introduction to the newest Pushcart Prize edition, Henderson only recently got over a bout of cancer--it's a three page introduction, most devoted to writing, a paragraph to the loss of his dog, Lulu, and only this to his own cancer infection: "I received a diagnosis of cancer, since purged." That's putting literature (and pets) first.

Originally beginning his career as a literary writer (his first novel published under a pseudonym), Henderson soon moved on to publishing a well-received book about self-publishing (including pieces by Anais Nin, Richard Kostelanetz, Gordon Lish, and more), a venture which, in the pre-internet world of the early 1970's, was a much more underground affair. This book on self-publishing--The Publish-It-Yourself Handbook--was Pushcart Press's first book, which in 1978 had already sold 22,000 copies. (The name Pushcart Press Henderson has credited to George Plimpton and his Fifth Avenue Project Pushcart protest, which was an attempt to bring attention to "publisher's ineptitude in getting books around.") It was the enthusiastic reception of the Handbook that led to the development of an annual prize anthology by Henderson: the Pushcart Prize series. As is apparent by the list of some early supporters of the anthology--Anais Nin, Buckminster Fuller, Charles Newman, Daniel Halpern, Gordon Lish, Ishmael Reed, Joyce Carol Oates, Leslie Fielder, Paul Bowles, Paul Engle, Ralph Ellison, and Reynolds Price--such a publication was much desired.

And it still is today. Only last year the Pushcart Prize series was awarded with both the 2006 National Book Critics Circle Lifetime Achievement Award and the Poets and Writers/Barnes and Noble Writers for Writers Prize.

This year's edition of the Prize is another collection of outstanding work by some of the worlds best authors, all published in little magazines and small presses. In its pages are such pieces as: Benjamin Percy's often commended and fascinatingly powerful story "Refresh, Refresh" (from The Paris Review), an homage to Thom Gunn by Philip Levine (from The Georgia Review), a call to environmental awareness by Wendell Berry (from New Letters), a heartbreaking piece about our relationships to pets by David Schuman (from The Missouri Review), and a mournful, and simply described poem by Lisa Olstein (from Crowd). In its nearly 500 pages of writing, Pushcart Prize XXXI continues to be a steady testament to, as Sven Birkets, editor of AGNI, recently wrote, why we need little magazines "not less as time goes on, but more." "Because they are not essentially playing the for-profit game," Birkets goes on to say about the little magazines, "they can hew just a bit closer to their own self-originated standards. They represent literature and opinion in repertory, talents en route, freeze-framed; they are a staking of bets on artists and artistic tendencies by editors who dream of eventual vindication." In many respects, Pushcart was created to be that vindication. And it remains so.

New Issue Review: Versal no. 5

2007-08-16T06:57:00.000-07:00

[Review by Gregory Napp]

For those unfamiliar with Versal, it is a beautiful publication, the brainchild of an active group of poets and writers who found themselves in Amsterdam in 2002. It is Netherlands’s only international literary journal. It is an independent annual, available at select bookstores in major cities around the world, as well as online at www.wordsinhere.com. The editorial team, led by American poet Megan M. Garr, includes Anna Arov, Prue Duggan, Kate Foley, Robert Glick, Terri Hron, Cralan Kelder, Kai Lashley, and Mirabai Lacazette de Monchy.

Versal’s latest volume, its fifth, maintains the consistently attractive design that made the previous annuals so pleasurable. Here, on page after page, work is presented so as to hit the eye directly, barely encumbered by titles and authors, which live on the outskirts of the frame, allowing us to experience the whole according to whim, so that leafing through the issue is like dining à la carte.

That would seem to suit Versal’s objective perfectly. Volume five makes accessible distinctive work by fifty writers and artists hailing from all over the planet--a little taste of a lot of things--heartening success for an international journal that, as editor Megan Garr writes in the issue’s introduction, aspires to the achievement of a “comprehensive (read: exhaustive) literary community...where aesthetic mastery and diversity can exist simultaneously and over a wide (literal/figurative) geography.”

The issue is devoted largely to poetry and includes work from some notable poets who have had limited exposure in English (which is reason enough for some of us to look for a copy) as well as a contingent of more familiar poets, including a number of American and British ones, but about a quarter of the issue is short prose--a healthy dose, even if these authors are not quite as diverse in terms of nationality. Except for Billy O’Callaghan, whose touching piece of Irish experience is, at six pages, the longest work in the issue, the prose writers are Americans.

But, of course, Versal’s geography is both literal and figurative, and the artists, writers, and poets here certainly present a range of styles and concerns of a breadth not attributable merely to nationality.

A glance through the issue reveals a number of translations, the first of which is of a list compiled by French artist Éric Watier, of destructive acts performed by artists against their own works, called “An Inventory of Destruction.” “Raoul Hébréard,” one line reads, “carefully sawed up one of his sculptures in 1997. He then made shelves out of it.”

Another translation, an interior-monologue vignette by Enes Kurtović, a poet born in Bosnia, winds its way among day-to-day concerns and intruding cultural ephemera, all subtly shaded by the speaker’s underlying concern that something in his day, somewhere, has been left undone.

“Four Henrys,” a stark, surreal piece by Tsead Bruinja, takes Henry Kissinger (or, rather, four of him) as its central figure and “our eternally burning world” as its subject, beginning: “four tight-suited henrys lie with their bellies / on a chair swimming through the air.”

And the work done in English is equally various. The contributors’ notes reveal diverse backgrounds, as well as a broad array of publication credits, confirming Versal’s commitment to bringing new voices in addition to more established ones. The work is quality, and its selection indicative of the editors’ keen desire for “work that is urgent, involved and unexpected.”

A tiny sampling reveals songs of objects to other objects, some of them just barely enigmatic; hypnosis; a field guide to lying still; disembodied heads; unaided flight; word experiments. But there is also no shortage of realism. O’Callaghan moves us with his piece on the death of an Irish grandmother, whose songs have made of her a living history; there is “Little Red Books,” a poem where the children must chant, Long live Mao!; and there are others. Fifty contributors.

Fifty contributors in only one hundred and eleven pages--it is another testament to the balance of its design that this volume feels rich but never crammed, but it is also testament to the selection of work. I have been trying not to use the word eclectic to describe the contents of the fifth issue of Versal because I do not want to conjure the idea of a hodgepodge. The issue is eclectic, but it does not feel like a hodgepodge. I have compared it to dining, and it is tasty. A different way of putting it might be to say that in this issue, as in the past, the journal’s lack of formal/aesthetic restrictions, in tandem with its innovative design, has allowed it to express an organic blend of disparate flavors.

Gregory Napp is a fiction writer and editor of the online flash fiction site 971 Menu.

New Issue Review: Black Warrior Review vol. 33 no. 2

2007-08-13T06:30:00.001-07:00

"People always look twice when you peel out in a hearse."
-from "Horizontal Accidents," by Michael Salisbury

Black Warrior Review's latest issue (volume 33, number 2) is the most visually appealing issue yet to be published by Tuscaloosa's University of Alabama graduate student run literary magazine. In this and the previous issue, editor Molly Dowd and company have made a turn towards the stylistically hip in their design choices, each issue looking more and more like the cover of a new indie album from The Decembrists. A painted bridesmaid's dress by the endlessly talented Nicole Barrick hauntingly adorns both front and back covers of the issue (shown at right). But it is not only on the outside that this issue is visually pleasurable, but on the inside as well, as it is filled from cover to cover with experimental (in form and content) and emotional new writing--all of it much deserving of all the praise it gets and, as is more likely for literary magazines, doesn't get.

The literary magazine is, by definition, an undefinable publishing venture. It is a large step away from the mainstream, a departure from the expected. It is a thing that "makes no compromise with public taste," as famously announced by The Little Review in the 1930s. Due to the fact that they are not pandering to taste or current assumptions about good writing, some literary magazines can be difficult to parse through, not simply due to their sometimes difficult subject matter, but also because they are most often trying new things, publishing new authors, and willing to publish art and writing in an aim to alter the public's appetite as opposed to solely appeasing it. Then there are some literary magazines like this issue of BWR that not only affect to change the way we read, but to also satisfy our literary appetites with a four-star meal of pure enjoyment.

It could be said as plainly as: this issue of BWR crackles with talent and stunning new writing. Everything in the issue is a pleasure to read, from Chirs Bachelder's postmodern take on the art of adaptation in "Otherwise Faithful," to Lily Hoang's brilliant and eerie channeling of Donald Barthelme, Beckett, and Borges in her story of astronomers, "Personal Equation," to mystifyingly original new fiction by Deb Olin Unferth, to poet Stephanie Bolster's beautiful and intelligent chapbook, "Life of the Mind" ("once there were/places to discover"), to more otherworldly enticing art from cover artist Nicole Barrick (such as Summer Camp at left), to Leslie Jamison's funny, heartbreaking, engaging, and smart essay on and defense of the sentimental, the sacharine, to, to, to....to the entire table of contents. Through an act of assured editing or an astounding array of confident submissions, not a single piece of writing misses.

A rare thing in the little magazine world, this issue of BWR never slackens its pace or level of quality, never tempting the reader to skip over a boring section, never to flip past a stilted poem that maybe made it in because of the author's name, nor to skim through a dry piece of fiction that made it into the issue because it was the best thing the editors received. Through luck, hard work, or both, BWR (and Ms. Dowd) should be recognized for putting out a fine issue that--in the manner of early issues of McSweeney's or nearly any issue of the late Grand Street--extends the exciting and innovative publishing possibilities available in (and perhaps only in) the world of literary magazines.

Found in The Georgia Review: Essay by Albert Goldbarth

2007-08-09T05:20:00.001-07:00

"Everybody's backed by a second narrative. Everybody's nickname is Ace."
-Albert Goldbarth, "Everybody's Nickname"

"We can rig a supernove in a super laptop jiffy."
-Goldbarth, "Budget Travel Through Space and Time"

According to poet Albert Goldbarth, we are double. The spring issue of Georgia Review (vol. 61, no. 1), contains an essay by Goldbarth that is an addictive blend of the pulp science fiction works of Ace Books, Allen Ginsberg's Howl, life in Midwest cities, cognitive neuroscience, and a woman named Gaea. The essay is both a nostalgic reminiscence of Ace Books' double novels and an inquiry into how our lives are always bifurcated--or, as Goldbarth puts it, how they are always "backed by a second narrative." Using Ace's double novels as his primary canvas, Goldbarth paints a convincing landscape of the multiple world in which we all seem to live. (And the essay is sectioned off from the rest of the magazine, printed in full-color, on glossy, and with the essay's own cover page--Georgia Review obviously sees they have something special here.)

From the start, Goldbarth's essay crackles with linguistic vigor and an obvious love of pulp writing. The work begins with quotes from covers of some Ace books: "MAROONED ON A WORLD OF MONSTERS! SHOWDOWN ON THE SUN'S LAST PLANET!" Goldbarth's appreciation for the zany plot manipulations and punchy titles of Ace books is infectious. Along with a penchant for outlandish other-worldly language (also apparent in his book of poems Budget Travel Through Space and Time), the writing of Goldbarth the essayist has, luckily, much in common with Goldbarth the poet--so we still get such lines as "What thin spit and ephemeral synaptic flimmer bind these halves together," metaphors such as, "If she were the earth, then she had two orbiting satellites: my eyes," and nicely extended conceits, such as the driving one of mankind's essentially dualistic life, from brain science to personal narratives to the literature we enjoy.

Reading Goldbarth's essay about these thirty-five-cent sci-fi novels from the early American 20th century--novels unabashedly titled The Dark Destroyers, and with cover blurbs like "NO PLACE ON EARTH TO LIE DOWN!"--it is difficult to tell exactly how serious Goldbarth is being and how much he is just having a good time. Not that it matters, and maybe that is some of what the essay is driving at: it is in such fun-books, genre fiction, tall tales, that we can see much of our own psychosis and narratives written back at us bald and alive.

Goldbarth's main point is compelling and difficult to miss: we lead multiple lives, often unnoticed or unappreciated by us. "The brain is butterflied into its left-right hemispheres:" he writes, dovetailing an appreciation of Ace double novels to the dual nature of the human brain. "Sometimes, in a certain aspect, they work with a uniform will; at other times, these wings have seemingly landed here, each from a different world, and become hinged arbitrarily." Goldbarth mentions often (in relation to himself and others) how we tragically disregard our other selves ("A CHASE THROUGH ALTERNATE WORLDS!"), sometimes at our own peril.

And, on top of such a swashbuckling-wham-banging ride of an essay, Goldbarth also includes an illuminating and fascinating story about how--thanks to Allen Ginsberg and his muse, Carl Solomon--some of the beat writers were first published by none other than Ace Books. Goldbarth describes his own youthful reaction to these long lost gems of pop-literature: "...almost all 262 of the gaudy lilies published as 'Ace science-fiction-doubles' were gilded with lovely, punchy, overly zaftig descriptions. 'PRESENT AND FUTURE CLASH IN A WORLD OF THE PAST!' You betcha. Resistance was futile."

At the end of the essay, there is the sudden desire to wish that this was only a first chapter to a longer book on the world of pulp culture, fiction, and doubleness by Goldbarth. Maybe (hopefully) there is more to come on the subject. For now, we are left with this, engaged once more to see our lives, not only in the canon taught to us in school, but also in those works of fiction which captivated our youth: "I look at that earth, through time and wine and a thousand compounded emotions, and I look until there are many earths, or anyway many planets, zooming amazingly through the skies of those books I used to read for just thirty-five cents. In one, the aliens clobbered us. In another, we emerged triumphant. Whoever the 'aliens' were by then--whoever 'we' were."

From the Back Issues: New York Quarterly no. 59, William Packard memorial issue

2007-08-06T05:29:00.000-07:00

Little Magazines, Little Books
by Travis Kurowski

"The New York Quarterly is an amazing, intelligent, crazy, creative, strange, and indispensable magazine. William Packard surely must be one of the great editors of our time."
-James Dickey

"Civilization is individual," said Ezra Pound. William Packard quoted this phrase of Pound's to end an essay on the state of American poetry, which was republished in the 2003 New York Quarterly memorial issue (pictured right) dedicated to Packard, the magazine's founder and longtime editor. Packard's essay was written largely in reaction to the increasing number of graduate writing programs throughout the U.S., and how these programs seemed to him to be growing more impotent and false. Packard was a creative writing teacher himself, and so certainly did not condemn the entire field. But true, riveting art, Packard asserts in the essay, comes from within. This is certainly true to a great extent, but it is also true that nearly all artistic production in the world is collective; one need only look at art galleries, theater productions, book publishing, carnivals, architecture, and throughout the publishing history of literary magazines such as the New York Quarterly.

When I bought issue 59 of NYQ (Packard memorial issue; cover: all black, three solemn pictures of Packard's face in the center; back cover, only: In Memoriam, William Packard, 1933-2002) four years ago from Powell's Books, I was largely uninitiated in the world of literary magazines (I had maybe flipped through an issue or two of The Paris Review). I did not conceptualize any sort of ontological difference between the magazine I had purchased and the shelves of literature--of books--that filled the next room. Both were literature in the Poundian sense: "Writing filled to the utmost with meaning." It was this issue of the NYQ more than any other other little magazine I can recall that embodies how Jonathan Lethem once memorably described Boston literary magazine, Post Road, saying, "I keep them lined up on my shelf like little books, because that's what they are." Like little books. He could have said, like small gifts, tools, references, companions. What differs a little book from a big one? How do we treat them differently? I treated that issue of NYQ how I treat so many little magazines now--the same as when I was a teenager I kept copies of Hemingway, or how I treated the novels of Philip Roth during those first confusing years just out of college. I behaved towards all these things as though they were something to be prized. For weeks I carried issue 59 of NYQ in my shoulder bag, showed it to friends at parties, lectured my poor friends about it, bought people copies of it as presents, and then, at home, stuck it onto the piles of books which lined the walls. Instead of treating the issue as a magazine, as a compilation of disparate elements, I treated it as a book--which, then, is what it was.

The issue begins with new editor Raymond Hammond writing about Packard's funeral, and, at the same time, he is writing proudly about the future of NYQ (the magazine had folded for a while during the previous years when Packard was sick). Next, is a reproduction of one of NYQ's famous craft interviews, this one with Packard himself. Then more Packard, even some of his poetry ("i am always elsewhere/ always anywhere/ but where i am right now"). What is shocking--what I remember hardly noticing my first read--is how almost seamlessly, with no editorial force, the issue transitions perfectly into the usual NYQ fare: ribald, alive, shouting, moody, cacophonous poetry--which, to a young man fresh out of college (me), seemed a breath of fresh air. A breath of real writing. Of the underground literary world I imagined existed, what Henry Miller called the writing from the streets, and not "literature" as taught in school. The New York Quarterly seemed the opposite of school. The opposite of debt. The opposite of capitalism, checking accounts, petty jobs, rejection slips, and so many often trying things. (I had as a young man a dream of starting my own journal of the "real" writing out there, the stuff that wasn't getting published but was 100 times better than that found in the New Yorker, and this, I thought, thumbing again and again through NYQ's pages, was it. It was already here.)

I have since changed my ideas about writing, literature, youth, age, responsibility--about even the New Yorker. But I haven't lost my initial feelings for this issue of NYQ. Fresh out of college with a writing degree, the issue felt alive in ways some other books feel like, well, pressed paper: useful, but overall inert. There was a life to this issue commemorating a man's death. Holding the copy now, cover scuffed and pages creased, it still feels that way, like it did. Like the sharp end of youth.

Luna Park Goes to New York City

2007-07-30T11:13:00.001-07:00

Luna Park editor Travis Kurowski and managing editor Sarah Lowery White are in Manhattan and Brooklyn this week for our first on the scene investigation of the little magazine world. Our first stop, of course, is New York City, easily regarded as the center of little magazine publishing. Among other things, we will be doing a feature on St. Mark's Bookstore (one of the finest little magazine providers in NYC), the fate of Gotham Book Mart, an interview with editors of the late nineties art journal Hootenanny, and a piece on Brooklyn's "secret best art magazine," Cabinet! We will also be doing our regular new issue reviews, founds, and the rest, so stay tuned for all the exciting things to come from the little world.

My Hebraism to My Hellenism: A Note from Herbert Leibowitz Regarding the End of Parnassus, Cautious Criticism, World Poetry, and the Joy of Editing

2007-07-26T08:00:00.000-07:00

[As many already know (if not, check out the news links in sidebar to the left), Parnassus is, after 34 generous years, publishing its final issue. One of the finest journals of poetry and poetry criticism n American history, Parnassus published some of the most fascinating thinkers of its day, such as Helen Vendler, Guy Davenport, Howard Nemerov, Carolyn Forche, Adrienne Rich, Donald Hall, and Ocatvio Paz, just to name a few. Parnassus editor, Herbert Leibowitz, was also, along with Stanly Lewis, the journal's founder in 1973. The note below, originally published on the journal's website, is both nostalgic and, in its way, incendiary; both mournful and proud. "Belletristic criticism" of the kind published in Parnassus is certainly missed by many writers and readers--by none more, perhaps, than Leibowitz himself. It's a tragedy such a fine journal must cease publishing. When such things need occur, one must reflect upon the state of artistic funding in the United States today. As stated in the Wall Street Journal, "Parnassus will be honored on Dec. 10 in a program at the Poetry Center of the 92nd Street Y." To purchase their final, 30th anniversary issue, go to the Parnassus website.]

Editor's Manifesto
by Herbert Leibowitz

As editor of Parnassus for nearly thirty years, I have stubbornly maintained that poetry criticism is an art, one requiring airtight argument, a passion for style, and even an entertainer’s wit and timing. A reviewer should, needless to say, be erudite and intellectually nimble, but also unintimidated by reputation and quick to point out such flaws as boring syntax and arbitrary line-breaks. Skepticism is all the more crucial nowadays, when books of poetry enter the world wrapped in a caul of blurbs.

Over the last fifteen years or so, as the prestige of high culture has steadily declined, the audience for belletristic criticism—as opposed to the jargon-riddled academic variety—has dwindled. Yet what I find perhaps even more distressing is the reluctance of poets to write honestly about their peers. Some poets, doves by temperament, are not suited to criticism. But many are simply too fearful. Looking warily over their shoulders, they mutter, “If I write a negative review of poet B’s book, he or a former student of his will pillory my own book when it’s published.”

This widespread timidity, this failure of nerve, quashes the frank exchange of ideas; it closes the valves of everyone’s attention like stone, to paraphrase Emily Dickinson. What should be a bracing intramural conversation turns bland, parochial, prevaricating. If reviewers, like a chorus of Pollyannas, hail nearly every poet as being worthy of a laurel wreath, why should we believe them?

Another aspect of this lamentable decline has to do with international poetry. Since the Fifties and Sixties, there’s been a sharp drop in the number of American poets who, falling under the spell of, say, Neruda, Celan, or Akhmatova, embark on a study of Spanish, German, or Russian so that they can read these poets’ work in the original, and perhaps even translate it. (There are, of course, some notable exceptions.) I’m not sure to what this should be attributed. Laziness? Lack of curiosity? I don’t mean to minimize the difficulty of mastering Czech or Chinese. Still, an intimate relationship with another language, particularly its music, can only enrich the poet’s art, as Ezra Pound, the model of a linguistic voyager (and voyeur), demonstrated.

From its first issue, Parnassus has paid close attention to international poetry. The late Donald Sutherland, endowed with an extraordinarily cultivated literary mind, served as our roving ambassador to the courts of St.-John Perse and Valéry, Lorca and Viceinte Alexandre. And we’ve been fortunate, over a quarter-century, to draw on other experts who could interpret, with flair and acute understanding, the poems of Basho, Hölderlin, Tsvetaeva, Cavafy, Apollinaire, and many others.

So when it came time to pick a theme for our twenty-fifth anniversary issue, the choice was easy: We decided on an international number, with a special section devoted to Arab, Hebrew, and Persian poetry—rich, ancient traditions all, and too little known to American readers. We believe readers will marvel, as we do, at the classic verse of the Sephardic poet Shmuel HaNagid, the Persian poet Attar, and the Arab poet Labid. These poems will linger in memory and, I hope, rouse a desire in the reader to investigate such exquisite work more closely.

For me, these years have been like a non-stop, racy, irreverent conversation—and sometimes a quarrel—in the Mermaid Tavern. Friendships have blossomed out of my marginal comments and, on occasion, my hectorings. As a devout letter writer, I’ve delighted in corresponding with writers in Wichita, Strasbourg, Jerusalem, and a thousand places in between. Occasionally the discovery of a good poem in the slush pile has made my day. (We editors all like to believe that had Emily Dickinson submitted her poems to us, rather than to Thomas Wentworth Higginson, we would have spotted and nurtured her genius; such fantasies help divert us from the dirt-in-the-fingernails task of weeding repetitions.) And perhaps most satisfying of all has been watching young writers metamorphose from talented apprentices to brilliant reviewers.

The Joy of Cooking and The Joy of Sex have been perennial bestsellers. A book entitled The Joy of Editing would sell maybe a dozen copies before being rushed to the pulping machine. But I would gladly write it. When I stumbled into the role of editor, I was only vaguely aware that Parnassus is a mountain in Greece sacred to the Nine Muses. I quickly learned that editing was a calling that demanded a steep levy of time, toil, and imagination. Lugging pork up Parnassus has been, at moments, a Sisyphean task, but mostly it’s been an exhilarating challenge, crowned by spectacular vistas. Parnassah, in Hebrew, means prosperity—by editorial prestidigitation, I’ve managed to marry my Hebraism to my Hellenism.

New Issue Review: West Branch no. 60 (30th anniversary issue)

2007-07-24T13:59:00.000-07:00

"I would have to find some way out of this life to trust it entirely,
and how far can you trust the unknown even to stay unknown,..."
-from "Trust," a poem by William Olsen

"The mind can imagine, in fact must imagine in order to know, but imagination can lead to betrayal."
-from "'Darkness Visible': Five Books of American Poetry," a review by Sarah Kennedy

West Branch Celebrates the Age of the Little Magazine

This 30th anniversary issue of West Branch is yet another slim, assured collection of writing from Bucknell University, largely serious in subject matter throughout, but never slipping into morose narcissism or undeserved sentiment. Instead, the writing largely consists of fairly even-handed representations of painful, complex human landscapes.

Editor Paula Buck opens the issue with an interesting comment about us living today, "not [in] the age of the individual writer, but, in keeping with Whitman's democratic vision, the age of the literary magazine--manifestation of a rich, collective multiplicity that is racial, ethnic, aesthetic, intellectual, and political." Certainly there is much to be admired in the lit mag enterprise today and in history. Almost across the board these magazines place artistic and humanitarian motivations leaps and bounds ahead of commercial or capital ones. As Buck herself says, this therefore results in magazines more diverse than mainstream commercial glossies, and therefore perhaps also more of a creative and literary endeavor--one never of individuals talking in the dark to themselves, but instead of conversations, groups, influences, and community. Though one would never demand for every little magazine to be diverse in a politically correct sense (where diversity is forced upon them, rather than found within them), it is heartening to be able to rely on little magazines to represent a diversity of interests. And, what is perhaps most endearing of the little magazine genre and all independent artistic community productions, if a particular interest or voice (or collective interest or voice) is not available, a reader can rest assured that some university writing program or driven young publisher will somehow create extra hours in their day in order to soon make such a venue available in the lit mag world.

This issue of West Branch does not trumpet its 30 year achievement, as many magazines do by publishing old archival letters, essays from writers about the magazine's history, or other such things. It is instead a quiet, considered celebration at West Branch, consisting only of another issue, more good writing.

Beginning with the cover painting, "Jenny's Fan," by Harold Reddicliffe (pictured above), there are many fine pieces in the issue, which will give the reader pause (again, one of the qualities of little magazines: they are mostly enjoyed at a slower pace than the larger mags, every description and brush stroke savored, every photograph and poem pondered over as though foreign riddles). The most stunning is James Doyle's poem "Looking Forward to the Twentieth Century," a dryly comic musing on the future and our lemming-like reaction to its approach. Yet, one must make it to the center of the issue to find the poem (page 59, to be exact), where many of the issue's finest pieces are to be found. This brings up the question of publication order when it comes to putting together the issue--as a slow, but beautiful piece of writing by Pablo Medina and some other less captivating poems keep a reader from coming sooner to these more powerfully engaging works, to such lines as "He is an artist of loneliness," or "The sand/ a little queasy under all the tripods/ that snap impromptu farewell pictures."

But none of the issue is lacking in achievement; every piece is proficient and well-crafted. Unexpectedly perhaps, some of the best writing in this issue comes at the very back of the book, in two poetry reviews by Matthew Ladd and Sarah Kennedy. Both reviews have a common theme: poetry's response to human suffering. Ladd takes on political engagement in contemporary poetry and Kennedy looks at the serious turn American poetry seems to have taken. Each review is an insightful look into the nature of poetry and its engagement with today's violent world. Though poetry literally makes nothing happen, as Auden said, Kennedy and Ladd look at just how much poets struggle with the world's misery and their possible powerlessness to change it. But, our reviewers seem to say, poetry can still inform and move us. While discussing Aleda Shirley's book, Dark Familiar, Kennedy writes, "It is a right conclusion for this book, but readers who are faint of heart about the condition of our country and our world should enter it with caution."

From the Newsstands: Memoir from PMS poemmemoirstory no. 7

2007-07-18T21:30:00.000-07:00

The following is an excerpt of a memoir from the most recent issue of PMS poemmemoirstory, a literary journal based out of Birmingham, Alabama that publishes only writing by women in the three genres of its title. Though fairly young (now on their seventh year), the journal has so far been quite successful, and it is often excerpted for the Best American series. All seven of the journals covers have the same haunting monochromatic design as the most recent issue's cover (at left), done by Caroline Davis. Issues are 7 dollars, are distributed by Ingram and DeBoer, and can be purchased on Amazon.com. More information is available at the journal's website: www.pms-journal.org.

Patricia Brieschke

Cracking Open

Four decades ago, when I was young and stupid and didn’t know a baby from a wormy kapusta, according to my Polish mother, I gave birth to a tiny damaged boy on my kitchen table. Just out of high school, I was working in a fertilizer factory, going to night school, and writing frantically in my spare time to reshape myself in the image and likeness of George Eliot. But she never had children. Nevertheless, I figured since an infant is small and portable, it wouldn’t interfere with my plan for the contemplative literary life. The day I decided to go off the pill, John Lennon and Yoko Ono staged a bed-in for peace in Amsterdam. One thing I knew with missionary clarity: This baby was my olive branch to the universe. Unlike my mother, who produced misfits who could only hobble and crawl, my child would be so loved he would soar. Our bond would heal every rift, every schism, every abuse. My husband, Matthew, an Irish boy who had been dismissed from his religious order at age 20 for chugging brandy in the Christian Brothers winery, was another hobbler and crawler. He wrote me poems, I gave him sex—an elegant but sparse compromise.

I registered at the Chicago Maternity Center for prenatal care: two rooms over a store facing the Maxwell Street Market. Toward the end of the pregnancy, I made weekly bus trips to the Center, where a volunteer palpated my belly to the crooning of Muddy Waters. I prepared my supplies for the time of delivery: a two-foot-high stack of newspapers, a large plastic sheet, a dime for calling the Maternity Center, a strong electric light, and a kettle for boiling water.

Giving birth was like my first accordion lesson. When they put the bellowy instrument in my lap, I didn’t know where to put my hands, how to hold it. I had no idea how to have a baby, so I sat on the beat-up couch in our third-floor flat on Ainslie Avenue, crossed my legs and asked Bernie, a pink-faced intern, “Okay, what do I do?”

“Maybe we should have read a book,” Matthew said, gathering up empty beer cans from the coffee table.

Bernie took one of Matthew’s poems that I had framed from the wall. I read a few lines before he hung a makeshift IV from the nail. A small bright delighting thing / A dark deep beckoning / Embodied twilight turning day to night. My baby, a small bright delighting thing, felt huge inside me: a nuclear fission ready to break upon the world. I pressed my thighs together to hold back the dribble of green water that had been leaking for a couple of days. The baby was still head up and had no intention of turning and preparing for descent.

Oxytocin dripped into my veins. Bernie’s partner, a small Filipino woman, boiled water, spread my stack of Chicago Tribunes over the kitchen table and floor, and swung a 100-watt bulb from an extension cord above the table. Matthew tamped his pipe, composing a poem in his head. “Change into something comfortable and crawl up on the table,” Bernie said, as he unpacked his doctor’s bag on the kitchen sink, clanging shiny tools on paper towels. I grabbed an oversized Beatles t-shirt. The Filipino woman helped me maneuver the IV tubing as I hoisted myself up on the table. Earlier, I had been paying bills there, flipping a penny to decide who would get paid—Con Ed or Ma Bell. Envelopes scattered on the floor. Would Bernie and the Filipino woman ask for money?

Perfect control. Nobody will see me flinch. I lay on newsprint, naked from the waist down. Not a telltale sound or revealing grunt. My belly heaved. Muscles closed around the baby like a slow glacier. I controlled the pain by imagining an advertisement for a Burberry raincoat permanently affixed to my back thigh. Finally, I began to crack open: one centimeter, two centimeters...six, seven. After several hours and a few choruses of “don’t push, don’t push, don’t push, okay push,” two little legs dangled out of me. “Where’s his head?” The kitchen was eerily quiet. I heard the baby cry inside me. He didn’t want to be born.

“You must move bowels in 24 hours,” the Filipino woman said, lecturing me about hemorrhoids and sitz baths. Bernie called for backup to figure out how to get the rest of the baby out.

My son wasn’t exactly what I had expected. A blob of protoplasm, shiny and translucent. But he was my first wonder of the world, my Grand Canyon. When Bernie cleaned him off, his skinny legs twisted around themselves like Gumby. He looked more poultry than baby, but the most exquisite chicken I had ever seen. For a moment, I thought there must be something wrong with him. But what did I know. The only baby I remembered clearly was my youngest brother, and I never really looked at him, just plotted how to dispose of him. My baby was perfect, if a bit crooked.

In the days that followed, I became sweet with curiosity about this new little being, in the larger scheme of things nothing but a speck of dust on the earth, but for me, a reason for living. I nuzzled his swollen belly against mine, cooed over his soft crown and doll fingers, drank in the perfume of yellow diapers. Little caterpillar. It was now my life’s work to protect, honor, and celebrate this delicate creature. Snail without a shell. After two weeks, I was in love. We were a team: I gave him life, he gave me breasts.

The name on his birth certificate was Beckett. Matthew rejected my choice, which was Oliver. Reminded him of olives or liver. But it didn’t matter what anybody else called him. Ollie and I formed a secret bond. At night in bed when he whimpered, I whispered his name. His fish mouth, heat-seeking and hungry, clamped on to me. My mother called in her blessing: “Now you’ll know heartache. May your child do to you what you did to me.” You had only weak tea in your breasts; mine are filled with crème fraîche. I would do motherhood right, and love my Ollie better than all the Polish mothers of the old neighborhood, stuffed into their Goldblatt housedresses.

During our two-week checkup at the Maternity Center, I ran into Dvorah, whose prenatal visits had coincided with mine. “He’s beautiful,” she said.

“You don’t think he looks like a chicken?” Ollie and I were so tightly swaddled in my Madonna and Baby Jesus fantasy that I half wanted a reality check.

“All babies look like chickens.”

When the doctor held him up, his legs didn’t uncurl. “Dislocated hips.” There’s nothing wrong with my baby. Maybe he looks a little funny, but Matthew and I aren’t exactly centerfolds. A common mixed-breed girl: Irish milk skin dinged with acne, Germanic chin, and Polish thighs, too lavish for their petite frame. A dreamy Irish boy, bone skinny and delicate. Ollie’s one of us. “Take him over to Children’s Memorial,” the doctor said. “They’ll snap his hips into place, and he’ll be good as new.”

I zipped Ollie inside my jacket, snuggling his tiny ear to my heart, as the bus dodged potholes down Lincoln Avenue. My mother cautioned me: “When I was eight, Pa took me for my first streetcar ride. I woke up in Cook County Hospital without my tonsils. My sister Josie was supposed to get the operation, but she run away.” A few years out of Poland, they believed they’d be kicked off relief if someone didn’t show up. Does Ollie’s doctor need to fill a spot on his docket? Get a grip, you’re not an immigrant. I was clumsy at nurture. He was my practice case, and I might as well have been in a foreign land....

(for the rest of Brieschke's story, check out PMS poemmemoirstory no.7)

Found in Ninth Letter: Poems by Wayne Miller

2007-07-16T13:17:00.000-07:00

"the men repaint the chapel ceiling,
and I imagined they were painting

the ceiling of civilization, imagined
their work would fill in the blue"
-Wayne Miller, "The City, Our City"

More and more, cities define us. More and more, in books and magazines, one can read pieces on the new urban sprawl, the conflagration of slums, the mallification of America--of megacities and concrete jungles. Since the industrial revolution, we have to a greater extent pumped ourselves into these gridded landscapes; abandoning our rustic rural homes we romanticized in Pastoral and Georgic poetry, we added ornamentation and life to these urban dwellings.

Long has the literary mind been attracted to urban spaces. Baudelaire, most famously, saw worth in wandering aimlessly about their streets and alleys--even going so far as to create for Paris its own poetry, rougher and more explicit than those which came before, illuminating the unique and yet uncharted experience of city living.

In four new poems in the newest issue of Ninth Letter (vol. 4, no. 1; spring/summer), Wayne Miller expresses the both attractive alienation and nostalgic longings that modern and historic cities can provide. "I arrived on the City's/ surface," the second poem, "The City, Our City (X)," begins, "as a freckle arrives/ on one's skin." Miller's poems are gorgeous, magically brutal depictions of "The City." The City of Miller's poems is not New York, Chicago, London, Paris--or if it is any of these cities (perhaps Berlin?), or any city, the location is well shrouded in specificity, antithesis of any generally labeled location (such as the label of "Baghdad" to the average American voter). It doesn't particularly matter which city The City is, as it encompasses the human questions and observations found in the inhuman immensity of any city: "who/was there in the room behind me,/ and what did they see through me?" And, from within the city, there is constant ruminating about what lay beyond--the churches, wandering cows, pickups revving their engines. These things beyond the city seem half understood by the people in Miller's poems. While inside, "they loved the City for its details/ more than for its Grand Design."

These four poems--"The City, Our City (VIII)," the aforementioned (X) of the same series, "I've Heard That Outside the City," and "The City, Our City (XIII)"--are like small, personal essays of a city by a narrator who is able to feel every sidewalk, shop door, and eave of the place, "like an empty sportsfield/ sprouting wings." It is a haunted place, filled with a history of violence alongside pedestrian activity. We are attracted to it, Miller seems to say. We are caught up ceaselessly in its endless machinations. And, outside the city? "Out there, the cupped light/ of a house, or a bar, is the light/ of the entire world."

The Big List: Literary Magazines, part 1

2007-07-14T12:29:00.000-07:00

Luna Park Big Lists are theme-focused lists of little magazines. Some examples of future Big Lists could be: literary reviews, poetry only journals, little magazines beginning with the letter W, literary magazines based in New York, American literary magazines based anywhere but New York, art zines, online humor magazines, etcetera. Our Big Lists are an attempt to get magazine names out there, as well as to find new ways to look at the little magazine world.

Our first big list covers literary magazines--little magazines that primarily publish creative writing. It will be in posted installments, as the information keeps rolling in, and as we devote more time to research the nooks and crannies of the genre. (Will it be 3 installments? 5? Don't know. Please check the sidebar for updates.)

Now, there are already a number of websites online that serve as databases for writers to find out what magazines they can submit to, and there are even a few (though not many) that seem tailored to readers looking for a new read. What hopefully differentiates Luna Park's Big List of literary magazines from those is that we only want to revel in the sheer amount of literary magazines being published. To revel and enjoy, even in the titles: Apple Valley Review, river styx, Tin house, Zyzzyva. We hope you enjoy all the similarities and differences in the magazines that follow--the great catholic world of literature, come one, come all.

(Please click on a name below in order to link to their site, or, if a site is not available, to other information regarding that particular magazine.)

Big List #1: Literary Magazines, part 1

(Sub-title: All the Lit Mags We Could Hobble Together During Our First Week Online)

971 Menu
AGNI
Alaska Quarterly Review
Alligator Juniper
American Short Fiction
Analecta
Antioch Review
Apple Valley Review
A Public Space
Arkansas Review
Ascent
Atlanta Review
Beloit Fiction Journal
Beloit Poetry Journal
Blackbird
Black Clock
Black Warrior Review
Boulevard
Brick
Burnside Review
Callaloo
Carousel
Chicago Review
Chelsea
Cincinnati Review
Clackamas Literary Review
Colorado Review
Columbia
Copper Nickel
Cream City Review
Cutbank
descant
Descant
dislocate
Divide
Ecotone
Epoch
Eyeshot
Fence
Fiction
Fiction International
Five Points
Florida Review
Frank
Georgia Review
Georgetown Review
Glimmer Train
Granta
Gulf Stream
Hanging Loose
Harvard Review
Hayden's Ferry
Hot Metal Bridge
Hunger Mountain
Idaho Review
Indiana Review
Iowa Review
Iron Horse Literary Review
Juked
Kalliope
Kenyon Review
KGB BarLit
Knock
Kwani?
Laurel Review
Lilies and Cannonballs Review
Louisiana Review
Manoa
Marlboro Review
Massachusetts Review
Matchbook
McSweeney's
melee
Mid-American Review
Midway Journal
Minnesota Review
Mississippi Review
Missouri Review
n+1
New England Review
New Delta Review
New Orleans Review
new renaissance
New York Quarterly
Ninth Letter
North American Review
Notre Dame Review
One Story
Opium
Paris Review
Parnassus
Phantasmagoria
Pindeldyboz
Pleiades
Ploughshares
PMS poemmemoirstory
Poetry
Poetry East
Portland Review
Post Road
Quarterly West
Quick Fiction
river styx
Sable
Saint Ann's Review
Snata Monica Review
Seattle Review
Sentence
Sewanee Review
Small Spiral Notebook
SNReview
Southeast Review
Southern Quarterly
Southern Review
Stirring
Story Quarterly
subtropics
Swink
Tar River Poetry
The Journal
The Literary Review
The Little Magazine
The Little Magazine (Asia)
The Pinch
Threepenny Review
Tin House
Town Creek Poetry
Triquarterly
Tuesday: An Art Project
Virginia Quarterly Review
VOX
Washington Square
West Branch
West Wind Review
Willow Springs
Yale Review
ZYZZYVA

[Did we miss your magazine in this installment? Our apologies. But that's why this is only part 1! Please send your magazine's information to lunaparkreview@gmail.com, or go ahead and send a copy of your magazine to the address above left (so we can have a chance to review it in the future) and we can then put your magazine in Literary Magazines, part 2, coming soon.]

From the Newsstands: Poetry from VOX no.3

2007-07-13T13:46:00.001-07:00

The following is a prose poem from the third issue of VOX, a journal from Oxford, Mississippi dedicated to "the new avant garde." As journals go, VOX is relatively new--only first appearing online in March 2005 and in print in April of the same year--but the content is more than competent, sometimes even stunning. Overall the issue reads like a collaborative modern re-envisioning of late 19th century French Modernism. This latest issue of their journal even begins with a quote from the last page of Rimbaud's Season in Hell, seemingly to express something of the journal's aesthetic vision: "One must become absolutely modern." VOX is a nice new addition to the world of literary magazines. The editors of VOX are Louis Bourgeois, J.E. Pitts, and Max Hipp; cover price is $6; issues are distributed through Bernhard DeBoer, or can be purchased online directly at voxjournal.com.

The Feast of Holy Innocence

by Mitch Cohen

The meal, we were told, would be glorious; each course brought tableside on the backs of bent and naked Africans. Under domes of gilded silver easily matching any of Europe's cathedrals in brilliance lay the smallest and rarest of creatures, slaughtered in their infancy and grilled to perfection; these, we understood to be delicacies. Wine flowed mercilessly and laughter, affected and glaring sharp, grew and leapt in the hall, resplendent and lit as it was by tallow and spermaceti candlelight, a thousand flickering points of light. The meat tasted well of death on my tongue, but I chewed on regardless, as did those on my either side, forcing our throats to swallow and partake in these riches.

When once the floorshow was long done, dancing girls clearing pancake from bruises behind the thick velvet boundary and hidden from our view, the maniacal ringleader uncapped and pissing in pain in a pot past the stones which slowly killed him, the pathetic clowns succumbing to their own brokenness, and sweet, pungent, tobacco smoke rose to heaven from mouths and pipes and cigars as from censers, the lights came on and it was time, they said, for all of us to go.

Outside, in the biting cold, despite a thousand years of protocol, there was no one to bring around our cars, and flames just over the wall somewhere lit the night sky like pyres. I feared for my life. While no one in the group—standing in the unforgiving wind, carrying upon it the burning stench of flesh—was surprised, the sense of shock amongst us was palpable. How could it be, how in Heaven’s name, we cried aloud to one another, how in the Name of God and Heaven and all that is Holy could this ever be?

Commentary: Big Postage Increase for Little Magazines

2007-07-11T11:55:00.000-07:00

According The Nation president, Theresa Stack--as well as according to about half a dozen other emails Luna Park has received from U.S. editors and publishers--the July 15th United States postage rate increase will aversely affect small magazine publishers. Below is a letter she wrote for the May 7th issue of The Nation, and which has been (as she seems to have wanted) already disseminated widely across the internet. Stack's letter is signed by many of the most well-respected people in publishing, and was sent to the Chairman of the Postal Board of Govenors, James C. Miller III.

In addition to the letter, you can listen to a July 9th NPR piece on the rate increase (which often quotes from Stack). The NPR piece seems to takes an unbiased look at the rate increase. Along with showing USPS's need for the increase, it also explains that the increase was drawn up--not by the USPS--but by Time Warner, and that Time Warner's plan will cause small print run magazines such as the American Poetry Review to suffer larger rate increases than large print run magazines.

NPR also reports that, due to such concerns as Stack's, a hearing on the rate hike may happen, but possibly not until October--months after the July increase goes into effect. Please read on...

"Disseminate Information, Protect Democracy
by TERESA STACK
[posted online on May 8, 2007]

NOTE: The following is a letter drafted by Nation President Teresa Stack and signed by her and her counterparts at more than a dozen independent journals to protest a sharp increase in postal rates that will adversely affect small publications. To learn what you can do to help, go to www.stoppostalratehikes.com.

The Honorable James C. Miller, III
Chairman, Postal Board of Governors
U.S. Postal Service
475 L'Enfant Plaza, S.W.
Room 3436
Washington, DC 20260-3436

April 18, 2007

Dear Sir,

We write to you today on a matter of great urgency. The recent decision of the Postal Service Board of Governors (BOG) to accept the startling periodical rate recommendations of the Postal Regulatory Commission (PRC) undermines the historic foundation of our national mail system. These new rates will have grave consequences for disseminating the very type of information our founding fathers strove to protect and foster when they first established the public postal service.

As the publishers of small magazines that focus primarily on politics and culture, we share a common mission of providing the information necessary to a flourishing democracy, whether from the left, right, center, religious or secular point of view. We struggle, many of us on a weekly basis, to inform the national dialogue in a way the founders believed absolutely essential to the health of this country. As journals of opinion and ideas, we do not do it for the money--there are far more lucrative businesses--we do it because, like the country's founders, we believe it to be a public good (unlike the mass circulation glossies, which are the primary supporters and beneficiaries of the new rate design).

As you know, the United States Postal Service (USPS) had proposed a rate increase for periodicals of about 11.7 percent in May of 2006, an increase which would have affected all periodicals more or less equally. While this would have been a very large increase, small magazines were budgeting for and preparing for its implementation in 2007.

Instead, in its February, 2007 decision, the PRC recommended a version of the Time Warner (the largest publisher in the industry) rate proposal that had previously been explicitly rejected by the Postal Rate Commission and strongly opposed by the USPS, and that had a disproportionately adverse effect on small national publications, while easing the postal burden on the largest magazines. The PRC ignored its own precedent and instead accepted a proposal from a segment of the industry that not only fundamentally changes the historic ethos of our postal system, but does so in a breathtakingly short period of time.

While in theory interested parties could participate in the rate case between the USPS recommendation and the PRC decision, and those (unlike us) with very substantial resources did, it was impossible for us to judge how the Time Warner plan would affect individual small titles, and frankly, most of us did not think an industry-generated plan that had previously been rejected would be chosen over the USPS proposal. After the dramatic and unexpected PRC decision, there was an industry "comment period" of only eight working days. This was an impossible amount of time for small magazines to digest changes so complex that to this day there is no definitive computer model to fully assess the actual new charges.

We now know that small titles will be devastated. According to an analysis done by McGraw-Hill (but not, inexplicably, by the PRC or BOG)and presented to the Governors in its comments, about 5,700 publications (almost all of small or medium circulation) will incur rate increases exceeding 20 percent, with another 1,260 publications seeing increases above 25 percent, and hundreds more incurring increases above 30 percent. Some small magazines will no doubt go out of business. Some will be forced to produce a lesser product to pay for these increases. Meanwhile, the largest magazines will enjoy the benefit of much smaller increases or in some cases (1,260 publications) actual rate decreases.

Journals of opinion, all of which struggle financially, will be hard hit. The American Conservative's postal costs will increase by 23 percent, and The American Prospect's by 21 percent. The American Spectator's rates will go up 18.5 percent, The Nation's and Mother Jones' by 18 percent, National Review's 16 percent, Commonweal's 15 percent, World magazine's 23 percent, In These Times 20 percent, and so on.

These increased rates will also raise the barriers-to-entry for prospective new publishers to such an extent that they will all but kill off the launching of any new periodicals, unless associated with the largest conglomerates, for the foreseeable future. This is a measure therefore that destroys competition in the periodical market and locks in the privileged positions of the largest firms. While it is understandable that Time Warner would relish the idea of making it much more difficult for new competitors to enter publishing, there is no reason to think that it is in the interest of the American people or the market economy. This is an issue the BOG and the PRC have not considered at all, yet the implications are certain to be grave.

To make matters even worse, the PRC-recommended rates also, for the first time in recent history, will charge editorial content based on how far it travels in the postal system, not by virtue of the oft-rejected zoned editorial pound rate but by virtue of a shift in weight-related cost recovery to the various container charges, which are themselves heavily discounted for those who can drop ship (generally the largest mailers). This preference for the dissemination of editorial content has existed since our country's founding and seems to have been summarily dismissed by the PRC, and then by the Governors, with little thought as to its future impact.

Since its inception, the United States Postal Service has recognized small magazines like ours as serving a vital function to the American political system. And while the realities of the marketplace have no doubt required some adjustments to postal costs, the PRC's new rates turn the ideals of Jefferson and Madison on their head: we will now have an entirely cost-based system. Cost-averaging for the periodical class was dismissed. Incremental implementation of higher rates was rejected. Small mailers were told to change their editorial (just a simple "business decision") or to co-mail or co-palletize (even while the BOG recognized the implausibility of these options for many titles, not to mention the demonstrated inability of the market to handle even all current co-mailing requirements).

Even if the argument can be made that a cost-based system trumps all other interests, the USPS remains in effect a government monopoly. Small publishers were totally blindsided by this decision. We are, for the most part, small businesses - to raise costs so dramatically without our input and with no recourse is devastating. No trade organization or high-priced consultants and lawyers defended our interests. Comments on how these changes would affect small titles were heard only from companies that could afford to provide them, via expert testimony and top-notch legal advice. No one from the PRC even analyzed the effects these new rates would have on the thousands of magazines like us, at least as far as we can tell. No one considered how a small business would accommodate a 30% increase in one of the most expensive, if not the most expensive, items in its budget. This rate case process was unorthodox and unaccountable to the very industries most affected.

Instead of the preference periodicals were entitled to throughout this country's history, the PRC has adopted the most burdensome requirements for magazine mailers, with the most complex rate structure of any class of mail and surcharges for containers not found anywhere else in the postal system. What is the justification for changing a historically preferred mail class into the most bureaucratically burdened and cost-based of all mail classes in the span of a single rate case? Periodical rates ought to be the least cost-based, because it is a class that exists for content. It appears as if the PRC and the BOG have in fact completely dismissed the ideals that the country's founders articulated when they instituted the national mailing system, ideals that have been eloquently defended in every past rate case.

In accepting the Time Warner rate plan, the PRC and the Governors have allowed the cost-based proposal of one of the country's largest mailers to trump all public and small business concerns. Small magazines that have historically contributed to the diversity of voices and opinions and have an out-sized effect on our public discourse (versus their relatively small circulations) are now potentially silenced so that the likes of Time Warner can mail People more cheaply.

We appreciate that costs increase and mail technologies change. However, the mail system is a public system, and the dissemination of small magazines remains a public good. Accordingly, any changes should be implemented gradually and on a cost-averaged basis so as not to threaten the very existence of the small magazines that have always been considered, at least until this latest rate decision, absolutely essential to a vibrant democracy.

We would ask that:

1. The Board of Governors moves quickly to delay the implementation of these new rates, allowing an additional period of public comment and

2. A full assessment and justification of the new rates and their impact on the public good is completed. And if the new rates cannot be adequately assessed and justified at this time, that the decision of the BOG is revised and the new rates revoked.

3. Whether it exercises its right to file another case under the old reform law, or whether it moves right to the new law's provisions, the Postal Service shifts some of the added burden from the smaller circulation publications that manage to survive until then.

Sincerely,

The American Conservative, Ron Unz, Publisher
The American Prospect, Diane Straus Tucker, President and Publisher
The American Spectator, Alfred Regnery, Publisher
Columbia Journalism Review, Evan Cornog, Publisher (added 4/20)
Commonweal, Thomas Baker, Publisher
Foreign Affairs, David Kellogg, Publisher (added 4/23)
Harper's, John R. MacArthur, Publisher (added 5/4)
In These Times, Tracy Van Slyke, Publisher
Mother Jones, Jay Harris, President and Publisher
Ms. magazine, Katherine Spillar, Executive Editor
National Review, Jack Fowler, Publisher
The Nation, Teresa Stack, President
The New Republic, Elizabeth Sheldon, Publisher
New York Review of Books, Rea S. Hederman, Publisher (added 5/3)
The Progressive, Dennis Best, Associate Publisher
UU World Magazine, Tom Stites, Publisher (added 4/20)
Washington Monthly, Nicholas Penniman, Publisher
World, Nick Eicher, Publisher
YES! Magazine, Fran Korten, Publisher"

New Issue Review: Post Road no. 14

2007-07-11T06:49:00.000-07:00

Based in two literary hot spots, Cambridge and New York, started in 2000 by Jamie Clarke and David Ryan, and now captained confidently by Mary Cotton, Post Road is one of the hippest young literary magazine around. Not that it's fluff. It is very much art. It is, more exactly, a little magazine put together by people who are very excited by literary magazines and what goes into making them, something certainly not always the case. Post Road is a good example of the results of passionate editing and staff work and a seemingly constant effort to make their issues, well: good looking and new. And their newest issue, Post Road 14, continues to express the keen talent of the people at Post Road for publishing art and literature that wakes you up from your usual reading experience.

A perusal through the issue is like reading The New Yorker dipped in a Delillo novel and served with sides of Rain Taxi and VF Proust Questionnaires. Read a list of electric blurbs by literary recluse (and genius) Thomas Pynchon: "Mind-warping in its vision, absolute in its integrity, Arc d'X is classic Erikson--as daring, crazy, and passionate as any American writing since the Declaration of Independence." Read a new twist on J.M. Barrie's original Peter Pan in a brief review by Mary Gaitskill: "I recommend it somewhat incidentally as a book that doesn't condescend to young children, who (being human themselves) know in their hearts every horrible thing that human beings are capable of and every sadness that human life entails." Read a candid and self-conscious interview of Amy Hempel by Adam Braver: "I feel uncomfortable with everything about writing. Really, I resent the fact that I've published X number of stories now for more than twenty-five years and I still feel stupid when I sit down to start something. And I think I would--but at the same time I think I wouldn't--trust the feeling that I knew what I was doing, that I knew my way around, because that would suggest to me just what you're saying; well, if it's obvious, I must not be thinking." Check out poetry by Elliot Liu ("as paragraphs collapse/from the margins in, the rebels/are proving too literate"), a discussion of food and literature by Irina Ryan ("Soviet poetry, too, tried to convince the general public that their stomachs were more filled than they actually were"), an arrestingly blunt new story called "Marge" by Michael Lowenthal ("He tippytoed nearer, his mouth up in my face. I saw a smear of Hershey's on his teeth. His breath was like the Y locker room at closing time: bleach trying to hide a human stink. I made a guess about what he had swallowed") and color images of captivating installations and paintings by a talented array of artists. The issue is packed with poetry, fiction, reviews, and essays, most of which prove to be more than well worth the read. The end Questionnaire in this issue is with satirist and short story writer George Saunders. On being asked what reception of his own work has surprised him, Saunders replies, "I'm always surprised that 'Hamlet' is so widely believed to have been written by Shakespeare. I worked really hard on that one, for like a straight month. And this was before computers, so I had to write it with a quill pen. And I don't even know French, so had to write the whole thing using a French-English dictionary."

At a $10.99 cover price--dollars less than a Murakami paperback or tickets to the movie--Post Road 14 is a good investment, if only to be reminded of the eclectic space where writing lives.

Found in Fence: Fiction from Ken Foster

2007-07-10T06:44:00.001-07:00

"I was thirty-four years old when I adopted my second child, at a pet store on Highway 41. I had only gone in for some Kibble, for Max, and was looking at a few chew toys."
-Ken Foster, "Feral Children"

The power of fiction is due to language's birthplace in metaphor. Because language itself is a web of allusions and references, so is a story. When a single word can seem slightly magical in its ability to mean a variety of things at once--seeming then to allow us a fleeting glimpse of the fabric of life--a story, as it is language embedded with character, plot, and setting, is that same magical quality to the power of a thousand. In a good story, instead of only glimpsing the fabric of human life, we can feel as though we are looking at that fabric head on, even if only for a few lovely moments.

Ken Foster's brief story "Feral Children" from the most recent issue of Fence is one of these stories. (Foster is the author of, most recently, The Dogs Who Found Me, and the issue of Fence in which his story appears is vol. 9 no. 12, pictured at left above.) Foster's simply told story of another universe where people adopt and care for feral children (as opposed to dogs or other animals) is a story grounded in metaphor, though it is not a traditional allegory. It is the unique sort of allegory that makes the reader pity the characters in the allegorical representation as much as they pity the reality the allegory is understood to represent.

"Feral Children" begins with the narrator going to a pet store and adopting his second child, Dora (a possibly skewed allusion to another caged woman, Ibsen's Nora). The narrator then engages in a hilarious conversation with an overly pushy and opinionated woman with the Humane Society, who are at the pet store to "set up their cages and lure people into adoption." The narrator ends up taking Dora home, where she and Max get along swimmingly: "Max was older, but could barely outrun her, and every time she came close to catching up, Dora let out a quivering yodel of a war cry. Finally they collapsed together beneath one of the overgrown shrubs."

As with all great fiction, simplification drains it of its mysterious power. Basically, "Feral Children" is the heartbreaking story of a man who adopts feral children and keeps them as pets at his home--a behavior, though at first sounding strange, even mean, is a normal behavior in the world of the story, something everyone does in the same way we keep our pets on leashes or lock them up in our cars as we "run" into the store (fiction, it has often been said, makes the strange familiar, the familiar strange). Foster (a last name that seems a too perfect allusion to child foster homes) forces readers to look nakedly and truthfully at their relationship to pets, at what pets represent to us beyond the joy they bring. What are our responsibilities, and when is our good judgment not enough? He seems to pose the question: How differently would we treat our pets, our "best friends," if they looked just like us? And then, what about pets that bite, feral pets? What about feral children?

...But we don't want to say any more about the story, as it is only 4 and a half pages in its entirety, and every bit of it is an eye-opening, wonderful reading experience. Every piece of "Feral Children" seems to have that quality Francine Prose once described as a definition of a good story: it feels as though the top of your head has been lifted off. It is a cross between Borges, Carver, and Hempel, all at the top of their form. The best thing Luna Park could tell you about "Feral Children" is to read it. The tragic ending will revolve in your mind for days like a haunted ferris wheel. And you will look down on your pets as they have always looked up at you, with new, curious eyes.

From the Newsstands: New Fiction from Mississippi Review vol. 35 no. 1&2

2007-07-09T06:17:00.001-07:00

From the Newsstands is a section of Luna Park featuring work from just released or soon to be released issues of little magazines or journals, online or in print. As this section is an attempt to showcase these magazines as well as generate interest in them, specific information about the issues and where they can be purchased or accessed will also be provided.

The following is a story from the most recent issue of Mississippi Review, vol. 35, no. 1&2, spring 2007, $12.5o; Frederick Barthelme, editor. This is their annual MR Prize issue containing the poetry and fiction prize winners, along with several runner-ups in each category. Mississippi Review has been published steadily since 1971, and is available in some bookstores, through DeBoer and Ubiquity distributors, and directly through their website (linked above).

In Madrid, at Kiko’s

Elizabeth Hille

After my father’s funeral I left Ohio and went back to Madrid. Days later we had another party. Kiko and Christina sat on the mustard-colored couch I’d pulled from our street. It didn’t have cushions, so we used folded blankets instead, but they weren’t fluffy in the same way. High or not, the two of them looked like creamy dark-haired elves. Kiko’s decaying flat was where the three of us lived then, and he’d painted each wall a different, bright shade. For all the parties I decorated the large cold rooms with candles. Everyone had taken something different, and we were waiting for it to come on. For us, it was mostly Ecstasy. I’d never had this opened feeling in the Midwest, but in Spain I felt more allowed. I could call myself anything and no one would know the difference. Confidence, I dimly reasoned, might be geographic. I was somewhere around twenty-four, five.

People were in groups of two or three, and I inserted myself near Kiko and listened to his jagged Spanish accent, hoping for the good feelings to start. Sometimes they didn’t. Our friends mixed, mine trying to speak Spanish, theirs English, and all the people were dancing in a harmless friendly way. Months later Kiko’s liver got really sick and I’d left, but the entire time I was there I loved Kiko and Christina fiercely and easily in that non-exhausting way love often works when you know you’re going to be attached to someone only for a short time.

Quickly I found there was one man at the party I hated. He was British, and all his stories were about how much money he spent. “Kiko, okay,” he said, “stop holding out and give us more.” The man’s eyes were already shaking. Kiko didn’t speak English, so I translated as he studied the Brit. Kiko gripped the Brit’s wide shoulders so he’d relax and I told him, None left. The Brit’s eyes blinked so fast they seemed to curl inwards until finally someone offered him another bump. I hated him because he kept saying everything was just so crazy and his tongue would dart out the side of his mouth. When he moved out on our small balcony I wondered what would happen if I shoved him off. It wasn’t that far of a drop. I got a drink, which scattered my hate for a little while, but it all came back together later.

I distracted myself by talking to a beautiful boy with dark wavy hair, a round kind chin. He reminded me of someone, but I couldn’t think who. David was his name. The last syllable pronounced closer to a th: Davith. We tossed that back and forth. I’d never known American could be considered exotic, but for some reason it was, and I thought it better not to question it. This helped me be bold in Spain in ways I wasn’t in the Midwest. I never thought I could choose before. Davith took my hand and pressed it into his. I could tell he took care of things. He had green-hazel eyes with little lines and when he opened his mouth to speak I saw it was big and gentle. It seemed like a safe place to crawl inside . He’d probably like it if I did some damage too. We both knew what would happen.

“I sell restaurant supplies,” he said. It took me some time to understand because I didn’t know the word supply in Spanish, but it didn’t matter, because anything he said sounded like seduction.

“I teach English,” I said.

“You told me,” he said. I looked around, searching for something else to say.

On the corner table sat untouched plates of jamón serrano, sweaty Manchego, chunks of bread. Of course no one was eating. Kiko had asked why I wanted to put the food out in the first place. I told him it’s polite to have snacks, but he was right, the pink thin slices of pork looked sick. I broke free from Davith to quickly transfer all the food into the darkness of the kitchen. No one should have to look at it. I shoved everything in the corner. I turned and watched a group of three people firmly reach for each other until they formed a kind of knot. Their heads leaned in as they whispered their secrets. I stood some ways away and strained to hear what they said. They radiated absolution, but I was scared to be too near. Months ago, in Ohio, I’d insulted my father as he drove me to the airport, trying hard to strip him of his dignity, and then I’d stolen some of his money. Then he died.

I was rescued from the kitchen by a thin couple who’d been eyeing me. I let them talk me into the empty white room. Both of them wore black and had square-framed glasses. They said they studied semiotics and giggled. We tried to talk about that, but it went nowhere. Their attention was excessive and hungry, and I let them devour me with it. They wanted to do something that night that both of them could share, talk about later. I liked their focus and was flattered to participate. They asked what Ohio was like as their fingers kneaded mine. Not everyone owns guns was all I could think of to say. Only maybe half. They asked me about fatness and TV shows, and I babbled in a frivolous way so none of us would pay too close attention to where everyone’s hands were. We had a little show going. Some people glanced in.

“Well, there’s lots of space for graveyards,” I said. This stopped them, so it could have been I didn’t know the word for cemetery. The whole time their eyes kept meeting, but missing mine. Loneliness started hammering at my chest and I couldn’t catch my breath. Something wasn’t working and their hands felt cold and rough. I gotta go, I told them, and left them there to gnaw on each other.

I stopped in our tall yellow hallway. The walls were crying, but not sadly. I ran my hand down the soft painted stucco and hundreds of years came off under my nails. In my mind, my future stretched out before me like a sun-soaked highway. Before, I didn’t mind waiting to find it, but now it’s all I thought about. I was trying to get one of those yellow, haloed moments that just opened up and I didn’t care where it went. Like the time I was with my first love on our cozy damp futon, exhausted and sore. I was twenty and amazed at the beauty of his chest, the wood paneled walls, and how sweetly the room smelled of us. It was late afternoon, humid in Indiana, and we were naked, eating cereal and drinking wine. I’d just won a game of gin rummy and he leaned in to kiss the long scar on the back of my calf, a leftover from falling on a broken gin bottle at one of my parents’ parties. My dad had quickly poured whiskey on it to sterilize the wound. My first love ran his lips over my puffed-up scar until my whole leg started to glow. I walked differently, stronger and more tenderly after that. Where was he now, with his wet yellow mouth?

“I need more,” I said into Kiko’s pointy ear when he walked by.

“None left,” he answered. “You always want,” he said. A wave of broken grins sailed across his lovely jaundiced face. I pinched him, he hugged me. We had something. Small, beautiful Christina came over, and we all laughed about nothing. We gripped hands and a swell of euphoria welled up, then broke, and I felt so flooded I thought I might drown. I rooted in my brain for a word and hallucinated love. I whispered my idea to angelic Christina and she congratulated me on my syntax. My Spanish was so much better when I was high. What I imagined fluency would feel like, sentences spinning out of me carelessly.

Soon they moved away to talk to other people, and the familiar restless itch began to eat at my stomach. I looked around at what I could do. Some people I knew were dancing. They pulled me into their hot sweaty circle, and I let them wrap their snaky arms around me. The Brit ran his sarcastic hand through my newly short hair. Christina had cut it with meat shears. This is how it looked, blunt and staticky, when I stood next to my father’s casket. It’d been months since I’d seen him, but he was serene in a way that was new. He didn’t look like himself, and I wanted to close the casket because it seemed profane that everyone should be able to look at him so openly. I tried, but the fat hand of the funeral director stopped me. No, no, his shook head said. After, I got drunk in honor of him. I think we all did but I can’t remember. Then there was yelling, and I used my free ticket back to Madrid.

***

In the spirit of things, I folded into the mass of dancing people. Arms and faces blurred into a mosaic of strange fellowship, an attempt at family for the evening. I looked around Kiko’s bright blue living room, at all these strangers whom I wouldn’t know next year. Dancing next to all of those people I realized there were only two, maybe three, that I’d miss, but that’s probably how it is everywhere. Who misses everyone? There’s always a hierarchy of missing. Someone passed me a joint, other people were doing lines. I danced with the Brit, found out he was a friend of a friend, his face a smeared smile under his beard. I forgot I hated him until he grabbed my head to kiss me. A gesture of goodwill or beauty, but I didn’t like it. He reminded me of no one I’d ever known. His English accent disgusted me. It was so arrogant. Who was he to judge? He kept talking about how Americans were Britain’s children and so that made me, in some confused and stupid way, his long-lost child.

“But I’m older than you,” I said.

“I mean figuratively, you know, symbolically,” he said.

“Look,” I said, “come this way.”

We went into my room and shut the door. I didn’t like him, but I let him kiss me, put his fingers inside me. He tasted angry, and his tongue jerked in and out of my mouth. I slapped him for fun. He turned his head so I could hit the other side. I smacked harder and we laughed. I’d forgotten his name. He pushed me on the bed and unbuckled. We could communicate easily.

“This is repulsive,” I said, but I was smiling. “Does this mean we’re still related?”

“Come to Daddy,” he said.

I pushed myself off his chest. He thought I was teasing, saving some for later. But it was just that I was reckless, bouncing my desire off someone to see if it would stick, have any effect. If it wasn’t in this country, it was in a bar, at some other party. I’d put anything in my body to see if it turned into love.

“I know this game,” he said happily. I left him there with his pants down. I searched him for any kind of shame, but left disappointed.

I fled into the bright green dining room and found Davith talking to a Spanish girl. I slipped my hand into his and her smile didn’t falter. She carried herself like a float queen. Her long hair fell in perfect curls, and she smelled like flowers. I couldn’t help touching her. Her smile said, Please don’t. At that moment I wanted nothing more than to impress her. Underneath us, most of the old parquet tiles were broken. I flipped one over with my shoe to show them the cool, packed dirt. This is where I live, I said. They laughed at my gurgled sentence, thinking me cute. Then they said something I didn’t understand. I stood there with a nervous smile until Davith pulled me into him. Proof that something I had he wanted.

We went to sit on the stained mustard couch, and I felt his muscles tense and give under my hands. The music was going and everyone had crowded into Kiko’s blue room.

“You’re beautiful,” Davith said, as if he meant it.

“Say something else,” I replied. He spoke in long sentences, and I translated them in my head.

I avoided the eyes of the Brit, but then looked at him when I kissed Davith. He stared and licked his lips. He was letting me know how wrong I was and that he liked it. He didn’t have to say anything. This warmed my chest in a cold red way. The skinny couple laughed in the corner, but not mockingly. Kiko and Christina danced together. Other people were smoking, drinking orange juice, conjugating verbs. Everything seemed to be turning out okay, or at least not horribly.

“I’m sorry,” I whispered into Davith’s ear, but he didn’t know what I was talking about, and I wasn’t sure either. But I knew I was. All I wanted was for him to forgive me, but he refused to understand. Anyone could baptize me, maybe even in the bathtub. Then all I’d have to do was let the dirty water circle down the drain. It could be that easy. Christina might do it for me, but she was busy. I almost asked the Brit, but then I heard him say the words so crazy to the beautiful Spanish float queen and I abandoned my plan.

Sometime later I led Davith to my bedroom. It was so effortless. He was soft and big and surrounded me. I felt small under him. He hugged me, pushed my hair off my face. Something shifted in my spine and my face was falling down. I felt leaden. Things started. He responded and we got into my bed, but I was so wound up I could barely breathe. I heard my housemates laugh in the other room. The Midwest and its long flat roads were far behind me. My father was dead, and I was more glad than not but I wasn’t thinking that then.

“Spain is beautiful,” I said in Spanish.

“Why did you cut your hair like that?” he asked.

“I like it,” I said. No way was I going to sleep with him now.

I watched the light creep in under the French doors, trying to make its way across the old ceiling. Davith started rubbing my back, trying to get me to breathe, calm down. I felt his skin on mine, but he could have been anybody. He was soft and too gentle. I wanted passion! I wanted him to rip my clothes off. Cover my mouth and hold me down like that other one did. Instead, he kissed my body up and down, curled around me. I’d just learned that in Spanish you say me voy when you are close to coming. I wanted to go, but he wasn’t going to take me anywhere. The light finally stuck itself onto the old faded ceiling, behind both French doors. Davith thought I was cold, so he hugged tighter. I think there was more speed in my pills than MDMA. It took me years to unwind.

How the Paris Review Made Popular Literature, Literature Popular

2007-07-07T10:57:00.000-07:00

Why choose for our first little magazine essay to feature The Paris Review, a magazine which receives more press coverage than any other literary magazine in America? Why give yet more attention to the magazine that was first published in 1953 and in only five years Time Magazine was already calling it "the biggest little magazine in the world?" A magazine that by its fifth year had already landed interviews with Hemingway, Faulkner, and Thurber? Well, exactly because of these reasons, actually. Because, through all controversy (and there has been some) and advantages (some there to) that have been given and gotten by the review throughout its 54 year history, The Paris Review seems to deserve nearly all the attention it gets. Though not the longest running literary magazine in America (see Sewanee Review, Poetry, North America Review, and Yale Review), The Paris Review is the most recognized literary magazine foundation America has.

It is not an exaggeration to say that nearly every literary magazine editor in America today would cite George Plimpton (the magazine's editor from its inception until his death in September of 2003) and The Paris Review as major influences. There are only a handful of people working in the arts over the last century who garnered this sort of across-the-board respect. From the beginning--with a first issue including E.M. Forester, William Styron, Robert Bly, George Steiner, current U.S. poet laureate Donald Hall, Terry Southern, and many more--the magazine has been able to both publish the best literature available and to somehow also say what that literature--what literature itself, in some respects--is. William Styron and Donald Hall both worked on the magazine and many of the others were close friends with Plimpton and the others. Whether they realized it or not fifty years ago, when many of the review's founders were recently out of ivy-league universities, over the next half-century The Paris Review was to become not only a recorder of what Styron called in the magazine's first issue "the good writers and good poets, the non-drumbeaters and non-axe-grinders," but it would also come to designate just what good writing was.

In Paris, 1953, George Plimpton, Peter Matthiessen, William Styron, Harold "Doc" Humes, John Train, and a few others put out the first issue of The Paris Review. From then on, Plimpton, along with anyone he could persuade to help him, constantly pushed to keep the review alive, the subscriber numbers (the only true sign of health for a literary magazine) up. Rumor has it that it was not uncommon to have a conversation with Plimpton end by him pressing into your hand what he called "the Editor's calling card," which was none other than a subscription card. "No harm in filling one out," he would say. He seemed to have had an a priori sense that the work was worth it, that keeping a literary review alive, after five years, after ten years, after twenty, was a worthwhile thing to do in the world. And what is perhaps shocking about this attitude for Plimpton (and since he was in many respects The Paris Review, it became the magazine's attitude as well), was that Plimpton came from a family of privilege. And he was very successful in his life at other things besides running a little journal. He was in films. He wrote well-received books. He hung out with stars. And still he spent long hard hours promoting, editing, organizing, budgeting, and fundraising to publish a small short story and poetry magazine in Paris, and later from his small apartment at the end of 72nd street in Manhattan, overlooking the East River. One can only wonder how much passion and persistence can drive any project, or if Plimpton was just the right person at the right time.

On September 26, 2003, George Plimpton died soon after The Paris Review fiftieth anniversary issue had been completed. On the issue's cover is a drawing of a large horse carrying a small man who is politely tipping his hat. In the last Paris Review preface he wrote, Plimpton ended with a cheery encouragement, congratulating "the horse and its rider." It was almost too perfect. Could he have known somehow? (Similarly, Charles Schultz died soon after he had finished the final planned strip of his comic, Peanuts, which ran in newspapers the day after his death.) The horse was the magazine, taking up half the cover image, and the small man sitting atop of it was Plimpton, gently doffing his hat, forever confident and genial, trusting the horse, riding along until the very end.

Today, after a bit of struggle in the transition, The Paris Review is in the new and, it seems, very capable hands of editor Philip Gourevitch (author of We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed With Our Families), along with a recently acquired board of directors. So far the magazine's quality has not slackened, though Gourevitch has shifted the format away from the magazine's traditional focus on fiction and poetry, and added more journalism, non-fiction, and photography (we are, it is true, living in the age of image, and the new graphic literary journal certainly reflects that fact). Also the magazine has adopted a larger, flatter format. If the magazine will last another fifty years while continuing to uphold the standards of the first fifty, only the future can tell. So far, contrary to Brigid Hughes understandable criticisms, the issues are consistently fine. The new summer issue treads both old and new ground, with an interview with Norman Mailer, poetry from Baudelaire and William Carlos Williams, fiction by Andre Aciman, and photos from Raymod Depardon. And it would be a shame to miss a new story by Benjamin Percy (2007 Plimpton Prize winner) in the spring issue. Percy, first published on mississippireview.com, consistently represents the wilderness and mystery of Oregon with the intelligence and delicacy it deserves, a landscape largely non-existent (except in some stories of D'Ambrosio) in modern American short fiction.

[From everyone at Luna Park, though we never knew George Plimpton in person, we knew him as we could through his collaborative work. He is missed.]

Found in Ploughshares: Fiction from Jim Shepard

2007-07-06T22:54:00.000-07:00

"Two and a half weeks after I was born, on July 9th, 1958, the plates that make up the Fairweather Range in the Alaskan panhandle apparently slipped twenty-one feet on either side of the Fairweather fault, the northern end of a major league instability that runs the length of North America."
-Jim Shepard, "Pleasure Boating in Lituya Bay"

The fiction of Jim Shepard is magical in every sense of the word. Often, Shepard takes historical contexts for his fiction, such as the Hindenburg disaster or the French Revolution (from, of all things, the executioner's viewpoint), and dramatically telescopes these historical events through his use of heightened language, the captivating thoughts and actions of eccentric characters, and considerable empathetic skills (what Rick Bass called Shepard's "elephantine heart), so that in the end the stories feel as though they are somehow more than stories. They are historical arias, perhaps, historical illusions. The characters and the historical moment reverberate against one another in a cacophony of emotion and language. In an interview on identity theory with Robert Birnbaum, Shepard commented about why some of the stuff in his historical fabulations is, well, made up:"If you are writing a novel about the Russian Revolution and you are determined to read everything there is to read about it, you are never going write it. You are just never going to write it. And it's just a great way to shut yourself down. It’s also a great way to forget that you are not regurgitating what everyone has said about the Russian Revolution. You are creating a plausible illusion based on—really on your emotions and your particular peculiar obsessions." This is what makes Shepard's stories--whether they are fictionalizing history or the present--so captivating: he is continually fascinated. Not interested, but fascinated, which may just be the distinction between mediocre and exceptional art.

In the most recent issue of Ploughshares, that landmark journal located at Emerson College [Special note: Ploughshares editor Don Lee has recently left the journal, heading north to Minnesota where he will teach and write. Lee's influence during his 21 years working at Ploughshares has been exceptional, to say the least. He will certainly be missed there, by the reading audience, and certainly by Luna Park.], Shepard has in his story "Pleasure Boating in Lityua Bay" once again glowingly rendered his fascinations--this time using the vehicle of a character born just before the great destructive 1958 Lituya Bay tsunami that sent 1,720 feet high waves crashing into the bay, which the story's narrator calls, "the largest wave ever recorded by human beings." Later on in the story we are given this flooring description of the tsunami's actual destruction: "Ninety million tons of rock dropped into the Gilbert Inlet as a unit. The sonic concussion of the rock hitting the water knocked them both onto their backs on the deck. It took the wave about two and a half minutes to cover the seven miles to their boat....Four-foot-wide trees were washed away, along with the topsoil and everything else. Slopes were washed down to bedrock. Bigger trunks were snapped off at ground level. Trees at the edge of the trimline had their bark removed by the water pressure."

But it's not a story about the tsunami. Or, it is and it isn't. "Pleasure Boating in Lituya Bay" is, like many Shepard stories, more about the character than the event itself, even though the beautifully and powerfully depicted events leave indelible imprints on our imaginations, as they always seem just a touch more than lifelike. The story is really three stories: 1. what happened to the narrator as a young boy, 2. the 1958 tsunami, and 3. the narrator as an adult not wanting to have a second baby with his wife. What the story is about is not disasters themselves, but what disasters do to people, how they can make people look at the world as a starker, dimmer place, how they can make people shut down. The nameless narrator born just before the tsunami disaster, lost his mother to a different disaster: she put him up for adoption after seeing a friend of hers die in a freak tidal wave and almost dying herself along the way, clinging to her son as the wave destroys a cabin they are in and carries them out to sea.

Everything in the story is wonderfully and tenderly rendered by Shepard--from the tsunami destruction to the landscape around Ketchikan to the touchingly painful anti-discussions between the narrator and his loving wife (they are anti-discussions as they are one-sided, the wife lovingly trying to break through to her husband, and the husband not being able to say what he knows she wants to hear, his own voice, loving her). And what breaks our heart is the narrator, this man, who cannot seem to come to terms with how his mother dealt with the disaster, by focusing on herself instead of him, abandoning him in order to deal with her own pain. Due to this, the narrator is set at a distance from the world--his wife, his son--worried every second that he will be abandoned (though he doesn't too consciously realize this). The most shocking example of this is his decision to get a vasectomy without even discussing it with his wife, nor telling her when he has the opportunity. Midway through the story, the narrator accidentally wonders aloud to his seven-year-old son, "What's this thing about putting people to use? What's that all about?" He can never get past his own defense measures, even now that he has his own family; he is constantly worried about his worth. At one point in the story he walks around his house feeling "like a demolition expert who's already wired the entire thing to blow and keeps rechecking the charges and connections."

In a Philosophy of Life course the narrator was in as a young man ("I got a C. If I took it now, I'd do even worse"), the teacher would, at the end of class, ask a series of questions that none of the students were able to answer. These questions are the questions of the story. They act upon the story like the same shifting tectonic plates that devastated Lituya Bay: "What makes us threaten the things we want most? What makes us so devoted to the comfort of the inadvertent? What makes us so unwilling to gamble on the non-cataclysmic?" Shepard is one of the most stunning and accomplished fiction writers today, and by the end of "Pleasure Boating in Lituya Bay" he once again makes his fascinations, his questions, our own.

Luna Park, Welcome: Talk and the Little Magazine

2007-07-06T08:22:00.000-07:00

We have long felt that there was something missing in the world of literary journals and small magazines. There didn't seem to be a continual discussion about the state of affairs in this avenue of publishing--no reviews of short stories or essays, no commentary about the changing guard at Antioch Review or new formatting at Tin House. Paris Review got--as usual--brief mentions in the mainstream press regarding their recent overhaul, but these comments were brief at best, and not, at least in our humble opinion, long or considered enough writing for such a drastic change to what could be considered one of most important literary foundations in the history of western literature. Luna Park will attempt to fill that void, providing continuous commentary, reviews, and news regarding little and literary magazines and journals. It seems, at least here at Luna Park, that these journals formed and continue to form the backbone of literary writing, that they, just as James said of the novelist, work in the dark, doing what they can.

We decided that Luna Park was to be a web site and not a blog. The idea was that blogs do not have the formatting necessary to combine all the elements that Luna Park requires (such as story excerpts, interviews, ongoing journal reviews, etcetera)--but we have not created that website, and the blog technology is already available. So perhaps we will consider this a trial run for Luna Park. And, seeing what such literary blogs as Elegant Variation and Critical Mass, to name only a couple, have accomplished within the blog format, there might be more room for Luna Park to grow in this medium than at first envisioned.

The name Luna Park came from a story by Roberto Bolano (who himself has done much today to bring the world of little magazines to public attention by writing so inventively and mysteriously about that world). The story is called, in English, "Vagabond in France and Belgium," from New Directions's posthumously translated book of his stories, Last Evenings on Earth. The story is about, obviously, a vagabond young man. He spends his days wandering from bookstore to cinema. In one bookstore, he finds "an old copy of the magazine Luna Park, number 2, a special issue on writing and graphics, with texts or drawings (the texts are drawings and vice versa) by Roberto Altmann, Frederic Baal, Roland Barthes, Jacques Calonne, Carlfriedrich Claus, Mirtha Dermisache, Christian Dotremant, Pierre Guyotat, Brion Gysin, Henri Lefebvre, and Sophie Podolski." The narrator reminisces about his own youthful engagement with work of all the artists in the magazine, except for Lefebvre. The name means nothing to him. At this point, Bolano creates what seems an entirely fictitious portrait of the theorist Henri Lefebvre, painting him as a reclusive, unpublished thinker who lived with his mother and killed himself soon after she died. The portrait is stunning and moving. Maybe there is another Henri Lefebvre out there writing theory. If not, the portrait by Bolano is so stunning even people knowing a bit about the theorist were probably forced to go recheck the biography, just to be sure.

As far as we have been able to tell, just like the biography of Lefebvre, Bolano completely fabricated the magazine Luna Park. What a beautiful idea. (Though it is certainly a wonderful idea to invent a literary magazine in a work of fiction, Kári Tulinius recently pointed out to us that Luna Park was a real magazine from Brussels, and an incredibly beautiful one at that--click here for a post by Guido Vermeulen with scans of the magazine). Due to Bolano's staggering power as a fiction writer, this richly detailed magazine stands in the doorway between the fictive and the real; he writes of it with such authority, conviction, and detail (what Garcia Marquez said was the trick of magical realism writing) that a reader might wish it to be true. Which is what we did. Though we searched and searched through libraries and databases for records of Luna Park's existence, though Lefebvre's biography was obviously fabricated, though Bolano's main influence was Borges, though this was fiction--we still half imagine it is true, that this beautiful little magazine halfway between image and writing ("the texts are drawings") is somewhere out there waiting to be found.

Luna Park. Welcome.