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Other Voices – Spring/Summer 2004

20th Anniversary Issue

Spring/Summer 2004

With this issue, Other Voices celebrates twenty years of publishing some of the finest fiction around.

With this issue, Other Voices celebrates twenty years of publishing some of the finest fiction around. The best of this issue are the more experimental pieces. In “Encore, Don Beppo!” Michael Mazza writes the transcript of a documentary about a mafia don who becomes a musical genius after being struck by lightening. Michael C. Seward’s “All Things Bleak and Sordid” allows its omniscient narrator to enter scenes and ultimately be critiqued by his 11th grade English teacher. But I also thoroughly enjoyed the more traditional stories. In “Have Her Home,” Melissa Lion debunks the myth of motherhood with a young woman nurturing one newborn twin in favor of the other; across the street, the mother of a missing child comes under suspicion for deviating from the “good mother” script. And in “Try to Be Good,” Suzanne Tague perfectly captures the smug disgust of a teenager towards her parents, even down to the way her father eats an egg: “‘Ahhh,’ he says, once he’s swallowed, a satisfied smile on his face. A bit of yellow leaks out of one corner of his mouth. The second egg sits untouched on his plate, waiting to be attacked. Molly thinks she will die if he does it again. He does. She watches in agony and tortured satisfaction.” It’s my favorite moment in a journal that’s full of great ones. [Other Voices, University of Illinois at Chicago, Department of English (MC 162), 601 South Morgan Street, Chicago, IL 60607-7120. E-mail: [email protected]. Single issue $7. http://www.othervoicesmagazine.org/] – DM

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