Year of the LitMag: New England Review, Vol. 32, No. 3

[This is the 6^th installment in my Year of the LitMag Feature. If you are interested in writing about an issue of a literary magazine, please leave a comment or send me an email.]

There’s a lot to absorb in the latest issue of New England Review, Vol. 32, No. 3, including seven stories, several essays, and lots of poems. NER is one of my favorite literary magazines, and it shows up near the top of the rankings: #12 in Fiction, # 45 in Nonfiction, and #7 in Poetry.

Since I keep sending them short stories (no luck yet), I’m always curious about the stories they publish. There’s quite a range in this issue, but there might be some characteristics that tie them together.

Let me start with James Magruder’s “Matthew Aiken’s Vie Bohème” since Jim is a friend (we were Fellows at Sewanee together and recently had overlapping residencies at VCCA). This story, from his novel in stories, Let Me See It, due out in May, is set in 1981, when Matthew Aiken, a young gay man, is studying in Paris. He doesn’t get along with his host family, the amusing and emotional Sirjean family, or with his roommate, Bruce. But he does manage to meet a man at the Beaubourg, with unhappy (but amusing for the reader) results. Let me just say that I learned a new French word: la chtouille. Funny and sad, a terrific read.

I also really enjoyed Scott Southwick’s “Time Keeps on Slipping, etc.” in which time does, indeed, slip into the future, relentlessly. Nicky is in grade school and his babysitter tells him he has the most beautiful eyes. In high school he becomes a reporter for the student paper and his teacher remarks on his eyes. His father out of the picture, Nicky is on his own when his mother dies suddenly, and the future is now. Fast forward . . . “Brad Pitt played him in the movie version.” Nicky’s life has its ups and downs and we get them all in this quirky story.

“Confession, with Wolves” by Carol Keeley is a monologue, a wife speaking to her husband about their marriage. As with most monologues, this one is about the voice, in this case an unreliable narrator confessing to her husband about her . . . transgressions. And, in the process, the present circumstances are revealed. It’s an interesting technique, the monologue, and this is a good one.

“Manga Dolls on Skype” by Sandra Leong was fun, but I was rooting for it to turn out differently. Michael Coffey’s “I Thought You Were Dale” was funny, although it felt like there was an inside joke I was missing. (Also it’s an odd structure—all sections and no paragraphs.) While most of the stories are funny, “Keeping an Eye on Jakobson” by Anne Raeff is not. It’s a straightforward dramatic story about, among other things, the sorrows of war.

And there’s more, including poems by both the Director and the Assistant Director of the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, Michael Collier and Jennifer Grotz, which, like the New England Review, is also connected to Middlebury College. There’s a poem by Chelsea Rathburn, a friend from Sewanee. And there are several notable essays, including one by Michael Milburn about his brother Frank: “My Brother, the Writer.” I especially enjoyed this because we published an essay by Milburn in Prime Number Magazine recently: “My Memoir.”

It's an excellent issue from a wonderful magazine.

Year of the LitMag: Prairie Schooner, Winter 2011: Ireland

Year of the LitMag: Prairie Schooner, Winter 2011

Vol. 85, No. 4

Ireland

The Winter 2011 issue of Prairie Schooner probably won’t help me figure out what kind of work the editors like. For one thing, it’s the last issue before the new editor took over (it was actually put together by an interim editor). And for another, it’s a special issue focused on Ireland. But, for that, it’s quite an interesting issue, and by the end of it you're probably speaking in an Irish brogue.

In fact, one of the distinguishing features of the fiction here is the voice that comes through loud and clear. In “My First Time” by Andrew Fox, for example, two teenagers spend a lot of time talking about sex, and the dialect is thick—not so thick that it isn’t understandable, but there’s no mistaking where they are. 

There’s also a lot of drinking in these stories, and several of them are set in pubs. “Peach” by Nuala Ní Chonchúir opens in a bar, where a pregnant woman is getting drunk. Thomas Lynch’s one-act play, “Lacrimae Rerum,” also opens in a pub. As does “A Drop to Warm My Blood” by Aiden O’Reilly. “My First Time” doesn’t start in a bar, but it gets there soon enough. Apart from the voice and the drinking, the stories also have in common what the stories in James Joyce’s Dubliners do—these are working (or sometimes out-of-work) men and women who don’t get very far from their roots. The final story in the issue, “Sitting Ducks” by Kathleen Murray, is about two former prisoners who work as orderlies in a hospital and can’t seem to stay out of trouble, but they count themselves lucky that they’ve got work. (I love the character of Viv in this story, an elderly, demented woman who seems to think she’s already dead.)

The issue also has work from a couple dozen poets. What I read of the poetry I enjoyed, but can’t comment on.

When the new editor’s first issue is out I’ll revisit the magazine.

Year of the LitMag: One Story #156

[Note: this is the 4^th installment in my Year of the LitMag series. If you would like to contribute to the series, leave a comment below or shoot me an email.]

One Story #156 “The Quiet” by C. Joseph Jordan

By now, everyone knows about One Story, right? It’s a little magazine that comes out every few weeks and contains just one story. It’s a cool concept and it’s also available on Kindle. (As soon as my print subscription expires, I’ll switch to the Kindle version, I think.) Lunch Hour Stories tried the same thing a few years ago, but it didn’t last as long, and is now gone.

This story by C. Joseph Jordan is a nice read about a Vietnam vet who comes home to Oregon after two tours. It’s been a tumultuous few years for him—his father died while he was in Vietnam; he fell in love while on R&R in Sydney, Australia; he killed a Vietnamese kid with a knife. And now he’s finally home. But as we know from every war story we’ve ever heard or read, it’s not that easy, and Sergeant Adlai Malick has some demons and secrets he has to deal with. So, upon arrival at his mother’s house, where there is a big, noisy welcome home party waiting for him, he goes into the basement in search of quiet. (Be sure to check out the editor’s interview with the author.)

Although the story is thoroughly readable, and my sympathies are with Sergeant Malick throughout, even when I fear he’s going to explode, even when he behaves badly, it had a feeling of familiarity to it. Because haven’t we read this story before? Beginning with “A Soldier’s Home” by Ernest Hemingway and followed by countless others, we’ve seen the difficulty a soldier has in coming home from war. Malick is damaged by the war and he is going to have to find a way to cope, or not, but I don’t feel that the story takes us anywhere new. Am I asking too much? Isn’t it enough that I haven’t seen this particular veteran and his particular circumstances before? Maybe. Maybe we’re ready for a new take on this subject. I just wish it had been a little more surprising.

Year of the LitMag: Mid-American Review Vol. XXI No. 2

[Note: this post is part of my Year of the LitMag series. If you would like to contribute to the series, please leave a comment below or send me an email. CG]

I’ve read other issues of the Mid-American Review out of Bowling Green State University, but with the new issue, Volume XXI No. 2, I am reminded that the editors seem to like quirky, off-beat stories. There are lots of examples here.

Matthew Eck’s “The Many Inventions of Walt Whitman, Jr.” is a love story, sort of, about a guy who goes out on a date with a wrong number, but he wears a sheet because she tells him it’s a philosophy party (and he’s thinking “toga”). The dialogue is witty and fast-paced, and reveals the delightfully twisted character of the narrator. Shannon Cain’s “I Love Bob” is about Hillary, whose mother, a drunk, has told her that Bob Barker is her father. So Hillary goes to Hollywood and meets Bob Barker. Lydia Fitzpatrick’s “Flood Lines,” which won the Sherwood Anderson Fiction Award, is told in the third person plural from the point of view of Catholic school girls who were displaced by Katrina but are now back, all but one. Kate Finlinson’s “Transliteration,” a fragmented piece, is about a widow who is carrying on a conversation with her late husband—in Russian. Matt Mullins’s “The Braid” is without quirks, but it does have quite a shock built into it. Mark Mayer’s “The Evasive Magnolio” is about dealing with the corpse of an elephant. (It’s about way more than that, actually.) There are also a number of excellent flash fictions in this issue, including Ravi Mangla’s “Better Halves,” and one that I resisted (but ultimately liked) because it’s in second person, “Divination” by James Tadd Adcox.

On top of the fiction, there are three essays and a lot of poetry, including an interesting translation chapbook called “Beneath an Avalanche of Waking” by Mira Kus, translated by Karen Kovacik.

And then, at the back of the issue, I was reminded that Mid-American Review runs reviews. Lots of reviews. In a section called “What We’re Reading” there are 22 book reviews, including reviews of books from a lot of small presses: Ryan Call’s Weather Stations (Caketrain Press); Heather Fowler’s Suspended Heart (Aqueous Books); Seth Fried’s The Great Frustration (Soft Skull Press); Michael Hemmington’s Pictures of Houses with Water Damage (Black Lawrence Press); and lots more.

I wanted to mention, too, that MAR design is great. For this issue, the beautiful cover art is by Nikkita Cohoon.

YLM: The Greensboro Review (Fall 2011)

[Note: 2012 is the Year of the Lit Mag (YLM), and I've resolved to read and comment upon as many issues of literary magazines as I can this year, in part to deal with the piles of the things that have accumulated in my office, but also to get a better feel for the many magazines that are out there. I invite readers to participate by posting about Lit Mags on their own blogs or guest blogging here at Perpetual Folly. Leave a comment with contact information, or send me an email, if you're interested.]

First up is The Greensboro Review, chosen because it was the most recent magazine to arrive when I decided to do this. Before digging into the Fall 2011 issue, I'll note that the website doesn't seem to have been updated recently (the Spring 2009 issue is highlighted). Note also that the magazine now accepts online submissions (via Submishmash). The magazine does not feature on the Perpetual Folly Pushcart Prize Ranking for Fiction (which means that in the last 10 years it has received no prizes or special mentions for fiction). However, when the ranking for poetry debuts in a week or so, TGR will be on the list.

The Greensboro Review is a slim volume out of the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. The current issue, Fall 2011, has six short stories (by Sean Padraic McCarthy, Kirk Nesset, Jesse Goolsby, Dan Pope, Reid Wegner, and Patrick Dacey) and poems by 18 poets. [I hesitate to mention this, but I will because much has been made of the supposed difficulty women have in getting work published in magazines: all six of the stories in this issue are by men. I can’t guess why that is the case, but my own magazine tends to see fewer fiction submissions by women, and, as a result, we generally publish more male fiction writers than female. I have no idea what the deal is at TGR. Anyway, I noticed.]

I won’t discuss the poetry in the issue (since I’m primarily a reader and writer of fiction), except to say that I enjoyed “The Great Hunger” by Chelsea Rathburn, but I have to say that I really liked the stories. 

Although all the stories are good, my favorite is probably “Sing for Me” by Patrick Dacey, about Henry, who is sent from Buffalo, NY, to spend three months on a project at a factory near Qingdao, China. Henry, who has recently been dumped by his girlfriend (a singer), does the things that lonely guys do on long overseas assignments: drinks too much, seems bored, has a run-in with some locals, gets sick, visits prostitutes. Also, eventually, Henry becomes enamored of Lulu, a cleaning-woman with a sweet voice whom he first sees in a Karaoke club. What I like about the story is its freshness—the setting is unusual and the pairing of Henry and Lulu is also new. There’s also the element of Henry’s assistant/translator, “Kid,” who livens things up considerably. One reason this story appealed to me is the setting. People seem to like stories set in foreign countries, and I’m interested in China, so I was immediately drawn in. But the structure is classic—put a character in an unfamiliar environment and you’ve got instant tension. I would add that if the environment is also unfamiliar to the reader that the tension is further enhanced. Unusually, the story gives us a lot of background before we get to his first glimpse of Lulu and the beginning of his quest to find her.

Then there’s Kirk Nesset’s “Miami,” a long story about a pig. Nesset recently had a flash fiction piece in Prime Number Magazine, which you can read here. But the story about the pig is really about a couple of college roommates and their trials and tribulations, including conflicts with parents, boyfriends, and the pig (“. . . a house with a pig is a curious thing.”).

“Safety” by Jesse Goolsby is a compelling story about a guy with a deep, dark secret who marries a woman whose brother, Dub, is an endless source of trouble. I love titles with multiple meanings and in this story a gun—an item in which one of the meanings of “safety” is important—plays a crucial role.

I should also mention “Testudo” by Reid Wegner if only because I’ve never before seen a story from the point of view of a tortoise—a Russian tortoise born in Afghanistan, no less.