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The story "Church" is in the Spring 2013 issue of Ploughshares and per her contributor notes, is Kimblery Swayze's first story published (along with some previously published poetry). Let's hope as readers that it's not the last one she publishes.

Because he could not afford to bury her, Wilson was still living with his mother.

That's how Swayze opens the story--seriously, how in the hell do you not read the second sentence after that beginning? Which is:

On the whole, though, his luck was holding.

What? He's living with the dead body of his mother--how well can his luck be holding? I'm definitely in at this point and over the course of the next 11 or 12 pages, Swayze doesn't give me any reason to let myself wander to another writer in this journal--the writing is gritty, it's full of surprises, for example:

He did not want her touching him. She drew closer, pusher her face against his shoulder. He could feel the warmth of her body. He edged away, as far as he could go. Darlene slid closer, trapping him against the door. She put her hand on his thigh. She began to stroke, using her palm, her fingernails.

Obviously we all know where this is headed...

Wilson's stomach roiled, his mouth filled with brine. he knew what would happen next. Wilson clenched his jaws together, choking as his mouth filled up. He made a desperate attempt to shove her away in time but he wasn't fast enough. She shrieked, leapt aside, snatcher her purse away from the stream of vomit. Her jacket, her furry boots, were splattered.

Not quite what I was expecting. Swayze's writing is exciting--again, gritty (as seen above), and takes on a pretty dark subject and goes maybe even farther than is comfortable--which is exactly how I prefer the writers I read deliver their works. I'll be watching for more work from Kimberly Swayze for sure.

Should I be thanking you for asking, or is that a slam because I was whining last Friday? Bah. I don't care.

Well, after running through a few other tasks, I was able to review my Facebook professional page (you know--the one that can be Liked, not Friended) because I will often post there about new lit journals I've found. Thus, the page is rather useful for me, because I can go back and find those things.

I've just been looking at something I found back in November,  The Review Review.  It's a lit review about lit reviews/magazines, with reviews and a listing of pretty much as many journals/magazines as you could never hope to get through, as well as interviews with editors and writers. Seriously, you could spend a large chunk of your life at this site. What drew me here was The Submitter's Dilemma. No, I do not recall how I found it.

New Pages does something similar, but in addition to lit mags, it covers independent publishers, bookstores, and record labels and some other stuff.

Lots and lots to wade through.

Wish you could read your favorite literary journal on your digital devices? LitRagger has recently launched, giving indie journals a chance to publish on Apple devices.

Inside of the app, you can subscribe to Bellevue Literary Review, FIELD, Gulf Coast, Hobart, Prairie Schooner, Salamander, Sycamore Review and Willow Springs. If you are interested in adding your literary journal to the mix, you can contact adam [at] litragger [dot] com for more details.

Here’s more from the company: “Apple’s iPad, iPhone, and iPod Touch that is designed specifically for literary journals. Built with the needs of small publishers and university-run magazines in mind, LitRagger simplifies the process of digital publication. No more fancy file types. No more formatting nightmares. LitRagger integrates with the print publishing process you already use, making it easier than ever to put your content on the world’s most popular tablet.”

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

A conversation came up this past Saturday involving literary journals, and the keeping of them for weeks, months, or even decades. It was mostly about the weeding out of one's library--opening up to the TOC and seeing a name or a story title (or poem or essay title) and thinking, Oh, this one stays, etc.

I'm not really one to speak on this as I rarely ever throw any old journals away, but if you are the type that doesn't keep many of them around for any length of time, is there a journal or two that you simply won't get rid of? Maybe you have all of them since issue one, or maybe you love their editorial style so much that every issue is still a great read years after it was published. Or are there authors that you won't throw away?

A few that I can't ever see getting rid of, even if I one day succomb to the idea that I need to make room to live in the house:

Hobart - I love nearly every single story and essay that this journal has published. I also own every issue which is something that will more than likely make it difficult for me to toss a title

Absinthe: New European Writing - I enjoy finding story, poems and essays from writers I'd most likely otherwise never heard of. The addition of the artwork focused on each issue a year or so ago has made this already great journal even better.

Conjunctions - One I'm late to the party on but digging my way backwards into owning. Great fiction, great essays and great reviews and nearly 60 issues edited by the same individual--another trait that helps greatly in this category.

The Quarterly - It took me a long time to track down nearly all of the issues and going through them one at time (very slowly, I know) has been a pretty amazing experience.

Unsaid - This annual brick of incredible writing would be almost impossible for me to toss or give away as it continually publishes authors I love and helps me find new authors to enjoy.

 Authors? Man, that's a lot tougher I think. One reason I rarely get rid of any literary journals is that there's rarely a TOC without somebody that I think I should be holding onto, even in the many cases that the story involved is one that I own the book it eventually gets printed in. Some I can say I actively look for: Robert Coover, TC Boyle, Alyson Hagy, Matt Bell, Steve Yarbrough, Steven Gillis, Elwood Reid, Kellie Wells, Brian Evenson, Terese Svoboda and Dawn Raffel. If I'm fortunate enough to pick up a journal and their names are among those on the TOC, the journals not being set down until I reach the counter.

And you?

"My Man at the Station," by Sanford Chernoff starts off:

     My train is late, later than usual getting in this evening. I was dozing. m mouth is dry and half my newspaper is on the floor.

The reader is left to wonder if this just having jarred to being awake is what causes the narrator's confusion only a paragraph later:

     He has obviously taken me for someone else. I was going to say something to this effect, but he's already using my first name and talking about my lawn. It has been giving me trouble lately, thought it seems incredible to me that he should know this.

Chernoff seems to let the reader off the hook fairly soon though as by page two, and a conversation with his wife, Dave, the narrator slides towad simply being an unreliable narrator. Or, are the conversations with his wife actually closer to real life meal conversations than we typically are allowed to read--one person talking about one thing while the spouse answers questions that were never really asked and vice versa? Perhaps Dave isn't as unreliable as the conclusion one might have jumped to so quickly.

Continuing to read, Dave's conversations with his wife stay as disjointed as the original one. He continues to talk to the man he met at the station, and the reader finds out that his son, Jules, is refusing to leave his room, causing great concern to Dave's wife, and eventually to Dave as well.

The main story, about Jules, and how Dave and Edna (his wife) handle his refusing to leave his room and how they deal with each other, and the slow progression of it, is tempered well by the inclusion of the man at the station, and Dave's subsequent meeting with him and then what might only be considered obsession with him.

Chernoff does a nice job mixing these storylines, moving back and forth at just the right times, and creating a cohesive little world.

I believe Paulette Jiles is the first (at least in the Table of Contents order) repeat Quarterly offender, as she had close to 40 pages of poetry in The Quarterly #1. This time around she tries her hand at fiction (though a peek at my review of those poems will find me wondering why I kept reading the poems in a prose fashion and ignoring the line breaks) with the short story, "Dune Trek."

Broken into seven sections over 10 pages, "Dune Trek" includes a fair amount of repetition and not in the simple idea of repetition of a single word, but instead the repetition of phrases or ideas:

"One of the men gets up, opens the door, and spits violently into the sand."

The idea that five miles out into the distance the curvature of the Earth kicks in and short items cannot be seen as they are below the site line of the person looking.

Fishbones, be they burned as fossils into the stone, or tattooed on ladies bodies.

These and more find themselves mentioned multiple times and in more than one of the seven sections. Jiles brings some aspect of rhythm to her writing beyond the above mentioned repetition and while I cannot be anywhere near sure what the story was really about, I'm not sure it mattered as I found myself caught up and enjoying it as I read it.

I picked up a copy of the latest issue of The Antioch Review (Winter 2012) last night and did so partially as it was the first time I'd seen an issue for sale in some time (at Barnes & Noble) and then additionally as it contains new fiction from Gordon Lish. His short story, "Gnat," starts as follows:

She said "Put it on. I want to see it on you," Or "see you in it." She perhaps said "in it," and not "on you," but in either event I complied, got into the shirt that I had purchased, what does one say, on the spot? By gum, yes, there had not been any of this frantic shopping around, that I can promise you, trying store after store, nor, when the saleslady had pointed it out to me, did I find myself the least uncertain, asking, as a person unsure of himself might, "Looks good, you bet--but what else do you want to show me? I mean, don't you think you should show me something apart from just this?"

Any time there is a new Lish work, you'll most likely find me picking the issue up, as it's always great reading through his sentences. This story was no different.

The issue is subtitled "Intimate Memoirs" and even the stories and poems that I've looked at so far have a memoirish feel to them.

The one essay I've read so far, "Reflections of a Book Reviewer," by Jeffrey Meyers was a fantastic read--he names names, going over a four decade long (so far) career as a book reviewer explaining both what he feels reviewers should do and shouldn't do, but maybe more interestingly getting into specifics of journals that killed reviews he'd written and why, good and bad editors to work with and why, ripping apart some reviews and books he felt were unworthy of the praise they'd received over the years and more. While there is more than a bit of a smartest guy in the room feel to the writing, Meyers definitely has me looking for some of his reviews online, as well as one or two of the biographies he's written.

So far the issue has started off well--but that's almost always the case when I buy a journal for specific reasons (in this case the Lish story). I'm looking forward to reading more from this issue over the next few days.

One negative about so many books or journals coming into the house is that they consume the home, our lives, and also, tend to get misplaced very easily amongst stacks, shelves, boxes, piles. One positive, the nice bonus when you "find" something you didn't remember buying or receiving, have not read yet, etc.

The last time I was near the University of Michigan campus, I stopped by a used bookstore looking for a specific author or two that had recently gotten me excited about their work. I don't even remember if I found any books that day, but in the journal section, I found a copy of Conjunctions 34: American Fiction--State of the Art. Just read this partial list of the contributors within and you'll see why I was more than excited to plunk down eight bucks for this eleven year old issue:

Paul Auster, Russell Banks, Ann Beattie, Mary Caponegro, Sandra Cisneros, Robert Coover, Lydia Davis, Matthew Derby, Rikki Ducornet, Steve Erickson, Brian Evenson, William H. Gass, A.M. Homes, Paul LaFarge, Ben Marcus, Carole Maso, Rick Moody, Bradford Morrow, Joyce Carol Oates, Padgett Powell, Richard Powers, Pamela Ryder, Joanna Scott, Leslie Marmon Silko, Christopher Sorrentino, Alexander Theroux, William T. Vollman, John Edgar Wideman, and Diane Williams.

That's the partial list as the other names were not recognized by me upon first or second glance, but based on their inclusion, I plan to get familiar with their work inside these pages at the very least.

Mark Richard's short story, "On the Rope," starts:

     I have to tell my uncle it is just a bread wrapper, a crubbly piece of paper thrown up on the fence by the wind. I run out to show that is all it is, but the spell is already on my uncle. When I come back in from showing, it is just as well I should have stayed inside.

Just under four pages later, it ends:

... They stood looking, giving good hard long looks, because they knew, like my uncle knew, that once we were back up the bayou they would never be able to watch a stew pot boil, or look at something caught on barbed wire ever the same again, even with someone like me coming in to show it is nothing but a crubbly piece of nothing thrown up on the fence by the wind.

In between those paragraphs are just under four pages of fantastic sentences and images of the bayou post-something terrible where the narrator's uncle was forced, seemingly by soldiers, to take his boat out into the water to help them scoop dead bodies in various stages of disfigurement up out of the water, down from branches overhanging the water, etc. Richard hits these images hard enough with his prose that the reader is right there with the uncle by the end, fully understanding why seeing a crubbly piece of paper up against a fence might just create a much more frightening image in his head.

A quick example:

     My uncle said the girl swimming on the barbed-wire fence had skin that did not come off in his hands like the skin on some of the others did.

or

... The baby was cutting through the current with its arms and head thrown back like it had just broken up to the surface to take a long deep breath that it was still taking.

My understanding is that this story is in Richard's debut story collection, which I believe I have somewhere in the boxes from a long ago purchase that I don't remember reading. I'll be looking for it now.

The second issue of The Quarterly (which on the front cover has a subtitle that appears not on the title page within--The Magazine of New American Writing) begins with a short story from Noy Holland. It's titled, "The Absolution." It begins:

     Me and him, we're lovers. Sure, I know, he's a crazy motherfucker--and I'm the Banana Queen of Opelousas. They say I'm the prettiest since Luana Lee.  But you best clap your eyes on Jimmy--he is something, too.

Holland's writing is full of these slightly odd turns of phrases like "Me and him," and "you best clap your eyes on." They aren't quite different enough to stop you from reading as your eyes pass them by, but they do get you to slow down a little bit and make sure you understand exactly what they mean. One thing, if you read them aloud, they tend to flow really well, leading me to believe there's at least a touch of aural writing on Ms. Holland's part.

Holland also has a nice turn with similes, as for example:

I seen his bare black arms, though, veins standing out like hard-ons in church.

Again, just different enough in thought process and phrasing to get you to slow down a bit. It's not at all an uncommon thing for me when reading stories or poems or "letters" from The Quarterly--slowing down my reading that is.

Another aspect of Holland's writing is just how well her descriptions allow the reader to visualize what's going on:

     If I ever flew, it woudl feel like this, like the earth was just something long gone. I got a big heart and can hold my breath, and when I go deep in this black, black river, my whole body disappears. I can feel water wanting me. I know it's a sin, but I open my legs. I shout Jimmy's name so it turns to music by the time that it finds air.

I found the story to be a great beginning to this issue.

While I can't be sure, as the month is only halfway through, and technically this is my Lit. Journal short story post for the 8th, I'm pretty sure that Michael Garriga's "Custody Battle for Chelsea Tammy: At the Toys "R" Us, Aisle 6, in a Suburb of Atlanta, Georgia, December 24, 1983" from the Spring 2011 issue of The Southern Review, is going to have the longest title of any story I read this month.

Garriga breaks this story into three parts, each told from the point of view of one of the main characters involved in the story's confrontation or action.  Chelsea Tammy of the title turns out to be 1983's hot doll--the one every girl has to have.  The first two points of view we get are the combatants, the two men doing what they have to in order to make their young daughters happy.  The third is a stockboy at the Toys "R" Us who has a big hand in what is happening in an indirect, but extremely important way.

Garriga very nicely gets into each character's head and if the story were longer than one section told from each point of view, it would be very obvious upon entry of a new section which of this trio were thinking/speaking.

From "Lewis Malgrove, 38, Attorney and Divorced Father of a Six-Year-Old Daughter":

I am a trial attorney. I make a damn respectable living through confrontation. I own a Saab turbo sedan, a closet full of Polo and Armani, and a Movado watch my wife gave me for our anniversary the year before she left me. I bought a three-bedroom ranch in Buckhead, where my Jennifer attends the finest prep school, and my wife drives the Volvo 240 that I paid for and lost along with the house when she divorced me.

From "Sam Bowling (AKA "Pin"), 31, Vietnam Vet and Divorced Father of an Eight-Year-Old Daughter":

I yank him to me and grab hold of his neck right below his bobbin apple and squeeze and it feels good and I am back on R and r in the Thanh Hotel, downtown Saigon, '72, and Chi will be my girlfriend for the week and she feeds me shrimp dumplings dipped in fish sauce, savory and spicy, and I drink cold beer in a glass and she rubs lemongrass oil into my feet . . .

From "Witness: Chuck Simpson, 19, Stock Boy and Drug Dealer":

I came from dumping another stupid fat-face doll into the big Dumpster out back--that makes seventeen total, and at forty bucks apiece, that equals . . . shit if I know, like a thousand bones I guess, way more than I make at this job of peddling dime bags to my sister's pals, though Megan looks long at me when I give her the shotgun and our lips damn near brush--I've carried a crush on her for years and will make my move when she starts high school next fall--

Each is distinct from each other--the attorney's thoughts/speech clipped short, confident, everything contingent on material issues; the vet's thoughts/speech rather manicly paced, immediately referencing Nam;  the stock boy's thoughts/speech about himself, at a lower level than the other two, the much shorter level of life experience showing clearly.

In choosing to only have one section per individual, Garriga was going to have to really map out there identities, give enough back story for the reader to become compelled to care about them, and do enough to move the story forward and not simply have it be a Rashomon tale. Good thing for the reader, he does just that. He's able to create this story about a potential tug-of-war over the last of the

"What Boly Seed" from Brian Evenson appears in issue 27 (Summer 1994) of The Quarterly. It jumped out at me as the title didn't make any sense to me--What Body Seed--what could that mean? What type of seed was a Body seed? So I began reading the story itself:

Boly seed her the first, her head all cave in and her leg-split hacked nigh up to her ribs, and saidto hisself, Well, now, What have we?

What? Okay so seed is not something you plant in the ground, but something you did in past tense, not saw but seed.

"Ye done good," he told to his dogs, and made for them to sat their buttholes flush to the ground and stay there for him until he tossed them shards of lint-covered jerky fished up from his pocket bottoms. He wasn't too eager to call out for Rollins yet. He locked his triggers up, leaned the shotgun against a maple, and got down there on knees. He got hisself a twig and used it to lift the hair outta her face, adn seed he didn't know this one, no how. Some quite a face on her though, and he may could see what to make a man do her plain and simple, though the cutting and the head job, they wan't no reason for it, far as he could tell; they was mystery. But whatever be the reason of it, no how were this the reward girl.

And so continues Evenson's short tale. My initial wariness of reading a story all with this type of language was eliminated as Evenson writes a story that was going to keep my attention no matter what language it was in and really, after getting through that first paragraph, it was interesting to me just how quickly my mind adapted to the language, to the oddities of it. I rarely found myself, throughout reading the rest of the story, stopping to have to think about what a word really was or what a phrase meant to say. I was very impressed with the consistency of the language and voice within the story, which I'd think had to have some difficulty in finding.

This story is only three pages long in this journal but it may have caused me to think about it, about language, about how my own mind works when I read, than any other story I've read so far this month. Did Evenson create a world (even in a scant three pages) just different enough than the one we live in to justify the slightly offbeat language? I think he did. Does the typical reader's mind adapt quickly to something like this or is it experimental to the point of possibly losing readers? Not sure on that one; not at all. Why in the world would the characters behave as they did? That was the easy one, it's an Evenson story.

If you can dig up a copy of this issue of The Quarterly, do so, it's loaded with great stuff. This story can also be found in Evenson's first book, Altmann's Tongue, as part of three Boly Stories.

Maura Candela's debut story publication, "The Boys' Club," is in the debut issue of The Common, a new journal from The Common Foundation, who appear to be affiliated with Amherst University.

"The Boy's Club" is a seventeen page story in fairly small font size, so a bit longer than many posted about so far this month. The time setting is during the Vietnam War, with the bulk of the story taking place in, or around, a deli. A pretty run down, less than well-stocked, deli at that. It begins:

It was August when a young balding man and his fat mother appeared behind the counter of the corner deli. No grand opening. The previous owner, Herman, had cleared out one night. Gambling debts, neighbors said. Herman's Deli had always been a beat-up place on the corner, and the new owners didn't seem very ambitious either. The pushpins that held Herman's rick-rack borders were still on the shelves--half of which were bare and unlined, exposing warped wood. The glass case that held the cold cuts was smudged even on that first day.

It's not until the third paragraph that we learn who is telling us the story:

But the disarray in this deli was not enticing. We went in only to buy safe things: small glass bottles of Coke and little bags of salted pumpkin or sunflower seeds. Then we would go outside and eat the seeds and spit the shells on the gum-spotted sidewalk or shoot for the corner mailbox--or down the steps of the subway station a few feet away. We were girls waiting for high school to begin. Josie and her cousin Lisa lived in the third floor apartment directly across the street from the store. They liked Slim Jims. It took some doing to tear apart those specled sheets of dried meat. You have to be a friggin' barbarian to eat this, Josie would say, holding it up to the boys who arrived on the corner by bike. She had a beautiful mouth--bow lips and the straightest teeth--and the boys we knew would laugh as she made a show of her ability to rip and tear.

Candela does a nice job of taking a little time to get this story moving, which as readers this month know is pretty contrary to what I've been espousing--that the best short stories start well into the conflict. Knowing this, especially as I finished the story in a long, single setting, had me realizing what a really nice job she had done in starting the story off well before the conflict(s) that would eventually arise, yet completely sucking me into the story and characters.

There is definitely conflict later, and resolution, and really great character development--something not always seen in short stories. A couple of dogs even play a big role. It's really a great story, especially for a debut publication.

It's the type of story I would not at all be stunned to later hear that the author was expanding into a novel, but it does work out absolutely fine as it stands in this journal.

To start with, a nice little package containing a limited edition (84 copies--this is hand numbered number 6) chapbook of stories by Peter Markus titled The Moon is a Fish (Cinematheque Press, March 2011).  This contains stories that will also be found in We Make Mud (Dzanc, July 2011) but at $8 is a bargain considering it's a hand-stitched, really nicely assembled, collection and all proceeds go to help InsideOut Literary Arts Project, where Peter works. 

Another smaller package contained The Quarterly issue 23.  Works from Barry Hannah, Jason Schwartz, Daniel Wallace, Greg Mulcahy, Brian Evenson, Bruce Holland Rogers, C.M. Mayo (!), Ben Marcus, Richard St. Germain, Diane Williams, Michael Kimball, John Rybicki, Cooper Esteban plus many new names to look forward to.

A book I ordered a while back direct from the publisher, SMU Press, Edward Falco's latest short story collection, Burning Man, also arrived.  I think I've read all but one or two of Edward's really early novels and really enjoyed them all--he's one that can move from short story to novel and back and be really great at both.

A galley also arrived later in the day (technically a source of lit - ups man!) from Random House, Northwest Corner, a novel from John Burnham Schwartz who it seems I should have read by now based on the PR papers included, but have not.

I also received a nice package containing the latest Oxford American (Barry Hannah issue) and a copy of Southern Humanities Review's Winter 2011 issue which has work from Matt Baker, Gary Fincke, and Alexander Lumans in it to look forward to!

A few packages today and the first one contained a copy of Ken Sparling's novel, dad says he saw you at the mall (Knopf, 1996).  This has one of the more playful designs that I've seen with an image similar to the one on the cover as a header for every chapter, the title information runs up and down the sides of every page, not along the top or bottom, and the back cover looking almost like a comic book ad (it's a Chip Kidd design).

The next package contained the first issue of the literary journal, Midwestern Gothic, which contains stories and poems from (among others) Anna Clark, Roxane Gay, Lindsay Hunter, Jac Jemc, Anne Valente, Mary Biddinger, and Molly Gaudry!

The other package contained two issues of The Quarterly.

22 has work from, well, John Rybicki and Cynthia Ozick are the only two I've read before, but I feel part of that is due to the first 203 pages being a novel from Laura Marello--that's right, not only was Lish publising long stories and novellas in his literary journal, he published a novel.

24 has work from Gary Lutz (two fictions), Brian Evenson (three fictions), Jason Schwartz, Ben Marcus (three fictions), Greg Mulcahy, Victoria Redel, Yannick Murphy, Rick Bass, Diane Williams, Jack Gilbert, Michael Kimball, Cooper Esteban and John Rybicki.

Robert Gibb has five longer (all at least a full page in length) poems and unfortunately, the thing that stood out the most to me wasn't specifically the work itself, but the fact that every line, whether it was after a period or not, started with a capitalization.  I realize that if you're typing a poem in MS Word this will happen to you, but it's not difficult to remove and replace with lower case letters, so I have to assume that Gibb meant for the work to have this--I just don't understand why.

From "The Knife":

"We have not yet stumbled

Against the furnaces of steel

Mill and marriage.

                          Tonight

It is his father who careens

Into the room, smiling and drunk,

And holding to his mouth

A blood-soaked towel

And the knife he's been using

To cut loose a tooth.

There are three poems from Linda Gregg up next in this issue of The Quarterly, none of which is overly long.  The first two in particular gave off a particular sense of history that I liked:

From "Whoever We May Finally  Be, Said Rilke":

Seeing the bodies at Belsen is not simple.

Bodies the shape of their bones, mouths,

and the fresh holes in the earth.

The illusion of tenderness in the arms and hands.

The people who were in charge standing in warm

     coats

on the dirt ridge above watching the excavations fill

with corpses. Other soldiers carrying other dead.

Two pulling a body with its lax hand dragging

on the dirt. Worst of all is seeing

how beautiful these bodies are in their ruin.

I simply found the poem(s) putting me in these locations, creating a visual for me that I guess I expect when I read prose but am still surprised by when it happens to me when reading poetry.

Having finished the Jane Smiley novella, I found myself in the land of Quarterly poetry.  The first poet is Paulette Jiles, with "The James Poems," thirty poems spread over forty-three pages.  As I've noted before here at the EWN, I'm not one versed in the language of poetry, or the various styles.  However, I kept finding myself reading these works as prose and not poetry.  I wasn't finding meaning or reason for the line breaks.  In such cases, I usually blame myself, my lack of understanding, and my lack of having read volumes of poetry to date.  As I got deeper into this near chapbook worth of poetry though, I found myself blaming myself much less than I usually would.

From "Frank Surrenders: October 5, 1882"

"I have known no home, I have slept in all sort of

     places...I am tired

of this life of taut nerves...I want to see if there

     is not some way out

of this."

I might not have mentioned that the poems are about Frank and Jesse James--the James Gang.  Having read these, I did feel like I knew much more about this family and time period than I did before sitting down with this issue. I just didn't feel like I'd read a lot of poetry.

A couple of slim packages were in the mailbox this afternoon.  One from Magic Helicopter Press contained Jen Gann's back tuck, a collection of sixteen stories that I believe are all three pages or less in length.  I actually don't remember if I knew it or not but per the back page it's a limited edition first printing, with this being number 25 out of 75 copies.  I'm always a little curious if those are mailed out in order--does that mean that after maybe an author copy and publisher copies that I was the 25th person to order a copy? It's really a nicely put together chapbook with a harder stock of paper for the cover, nice end pages inside and then the stories laid out very well with some images occasionally popping in as well.  For $6 it seems like a bit more than a nice job.

I also received issue 13 of The Quarterly.  Once this latest rash of purchases I've made all arrive I'll have the first 25 issues of this pretty incredible journal.  This one had a surprise or two in it.  It opens with a story by Tim O'Brien and he's just not somebody that pops into my head when I think of this journal.  There's also a story by A.M. Homes that I'm trying to remember if I've read before.  The issue also includes some newer favorites from other issues of The Quarterly like Patricia Lear and Michael Hickins.  There are also a couple of poems by John Rybicki!

Lastly, perhaps the most exciting item.  This was also in the Magic Helicopter Press envelope as they are a publisher that participates in the Mudluscious Press Stamp Story program.  The story they sent me is by Elizabeth Ellen and it begins:

I have trouble sleeping in open spaces, I say.

There you go, even more reason to pick up one of Magic Helicopter's great chapbooks.

Devil's Lake is a fairly new journal, two issues in as Fall 2010.  It's produced at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and one of the poems from the Fall 2010 issue is Brent Goodman's "What This Poem is All About."

Now this is just teasing me, right?  After I bare all yesterday and admit to having difficulty truly believing I understand the poetry I read, here comes a poem announcing that it is going to tell me what it is about. 

The poem begins:

I won't believe in god
but agree every soft machine

deserves a creator. Given the choice
I'd cremate all my clothes

because I long to escape
the velocity between my skin

and every mirror. I've sealed
the windows for winter, set

the clocks back. What dies in
this poem is a small fish

leaping to the carpet.

Which makes me go back to that word, tease, as I have NO idea what this poem means, but have to say that I absolutely love "Given the choice I'd cremate all my clothes because I long to escape the velocity between my skin and every mirror."  That, and the "small fish leaping to the carpet" makes me think of Faith No More's video for "Falling to Pieces."

You can read the rest of the poem here and maybe let me know your thoughts on it.  I liked it, really like most of the lines and images they provoke.  I'm just not sure that if I put all those images together that I will understand the show.

In "Anton's Album," Janet Kauffman gives the reader, in five short pages, a full look at an old friend/boyfriend(?) of the narrator, whose name was Anton.  This look is done through descriptions of photographs that she is explaining to somebody.  There are sixteen of these descriptions.

     1--All right.  In the grape arbor, and in the shadows, you can see me.  he put me in there, just to look out.  This is September, and he had forgot to prune in the spring.  Look at the tangle.

It takes maybe two or three of these entries before the reader completely understands what the narrator is talking about; the fact that they are looking at photographs.  It's also not until later, maybe the sixth or seven such description before Kauffman really starts to let some of Anton, and who he was, slip into the descriptions.

     8--Another picture of Anton's mother and me.  Anton never made excuses--he wasn't a photographer.  If somebody turned and the face washed out, that suited him.  He said what he wanted was evidence.

     "You two were here," he said about this one.  "Here's the evidence."

Kauffman came up with an interesting way of bringing her story to life through these photograph descriptions.  It's another story I'm glad I took the time to read from this issue so far.

The beginning of Kaye Gibbons' "The Proof" threw me.  There seemed to be some stretching to get a certain type of voice:

     I did not kill my daddy.  He drank his own self to death the year after the county moved me out.  I heard how they found him shut up in the house dead.  Next thing I know, he's in the ground and the house is rented out to a family of four.  Now I live in a clean brick house and mostly am left to myself.  When I start to carry an odor, I take a bath and folks tell me how sweet I look.

The "his own self" and "carry an odor" and then some similarly styled phrases in the next couple of paragraphs were pushing the voice to me--trying too hard to create a young, or simple, voice.  Once I let this slide past me however, and got into the story--simply put, some family strife, and beyond--I enjoyed Gibbons' writing. 

Re-reading the work, I'm not positive if I actually let that problem slide--beyond the first page in this thirteen page long story (the longest yet in this issue), there really aren't many examples of this.  It's as if Gibbons felt she created the voice early on and then no longer needed to rely on phrasing to keep it--she already had the reader.  And perhaps this is true based on my read and re-read.

Many thanks to Jeremiah Chamberlin (see much more of his work at Fiction Writers Review), and Poets & Writers, as JC spent a good 4-6 hours talking to Steven Gillis and myself awhile back and put together a really nice article on the forming of Dzanc Books, how it all works and what our big goals are.  If you have any interest in the early days of either the EWN or Dzanc Books, or what exactly makes the amazing Steven Gillis tick, it's well worth your time to read.

Becky Hagenston - The Lake

I thought Hagenston did a really nice job of developing the character of the protagonist, David.  I found my opinion of him changing throughout the story and in a more surprising way than I might have thought when I first started reading it.  Without giving too much away, I think she really deftly handled his relationship with his father and how the reader might feel about them both throughout.

Aaron Burch

I definitely agree. I'll echo your hesitation to give too much away, but I too think how she handled the relationship between David and his father is really what makes this story. The writing is obviously very, very strong and I found myself sucked in from the get-go but, especially on initial read, I remember thinking something along the lines of, "where is this going to go?" "The Lake" feels like it could have very easily become a well-written story that never quite fully stuck with me, or at the very least it wouldn't have seemed like a Hobart-story, but it takes a turn that is both surprising and that great kind of "almost over the top, did that really just happen?, moment while never actually snapping that line of believability" in a way that makes the story. I also love the possibility of some kind of monster-like creature and its kind of "does it/doesn't it?" existence and how that is handled in a similar nonjudgmental way. Hagenston really pulls a lot off here, a lot that I think probably feels so easy and natural.

The Best American Series has a spiffy website up today that has separate pages for each of the anthologies under that moniker.  Each title has a details page which has two tabs, one that lists the pieces that will be fully included within the book, and the other listing the notable works, those that were considered, but not quite the favorites of the Guest Editor.

The series' most popular (I at least have heard this is the case, though have no sales figures to back this up) title, Best American Short Stories, was Guest Edited by Richard Russo this year.   If I understand the process, that is, if it's the same as when Shannon Ravennel was the Series Editor, than Mr. Russo was presented with 120 short stories.  He read them, selected his favorite 20, and boom, an anthology is ready to go with 20 short stories and 100 notable stories.  I know that some Guest Editors come to the table with a story or two in mind, I believe I've read that both Michael Chabon and Stephen King brought some to the anthology that may not have been in that original 120.

A look through the 20 stories selected for inclusion this year finds that 12 whole journals are represented.  Some shockers too:  The New Yorker has two stories, and The Atlantic has a trio.  Tin House is the big winner with four of their publishings being reproduced within the anthology.  McSweeney's is another repeat offender with a trio as well.  Continue looking through the names in the notables and you'll see each of these names appear again, along with a long list of journals--I didn't count, there is a great deal of repetition this year though, I'd venture to guess it's less than 100 total journals represented.

Narrative has a trio of notable stories.  This makes them the King of the Online Journals as not one other online journal has published a story worthy of cracking the Top 120 this year according to the folks behind this anthology.  Nothing from Guernica.  Nothing from failbetter.  No mentions of Storyglossia, or storySouth, or Joyland, or any of the 900 plus online journals you can find listed in the index of Best of the Web 2010.

Some visiting here will not have heard of BotW 2010.  Maybe you haven't heard of the journals noted above, or many online journals.  Here are two links to stories snagged from the BotW 2010 Table of Contents.  Give them a peek and then you two can question how awesome things must be these days if there were 120 better stories published last year.  Christine Schutt published "The Girl Needs to Be Kissed" in Blackbird and Stephen Graham Jones' "Modern Love" was captured by Everyday Genius.

The Best American Mysteries Stories major inclusions do not list the original source, so I have no idea how well they scan the online journal scene, but looking at their notables list (seemingly much lower than 100 stories), the only online only journal I could find listed was Thuglit, with two notable works.

None of the Best American Essays looked like they were from online journals either (though there were definitely some notable essays from online only journals).

This is not meant to be a slam on anybody that will find their name on any of the lists mentioned above (or in the Best Comics, Best Non-Required, Best Travel, Sports, Music, Poems, etc.), not at all.  Their work has gone through astringent process an