At the NewPages Blog readers and writers can catch up with their favorite literary and alternative magazines, independent and university presses, creative writing programs, and writing and literary events. Find new books, new issue announcements, contest winners, and so much more!
Sex Augury: Poems by C. Bain Red Hen Press, September 2023
Sex Augury is a collection that practices divination with the symbolism of our radically changed and changeable world. Exercising trans poetics, C. Bain denormalizes the violence embedded in the most intimate strata of American life. Confrontationally queer, urgently wounded, deeply political, and metaphysically transported, these poems create their own system of meaning in an environment that is increasingly hostile to meaning of any kind. This collection spans digital culture, gender reversals, and archetypal-mythic vocabularies, alongside close observation of the surround of “ordinary” urban existence. These poems bristle with intelligence, acuity of feeling, and refusal to gloss the complexity of our moment into a false narrative of progress.
To discover more great books from small, independent, and university presses, visit the NewPages Guide to Publishers as well as the New Books category on our blog. Subscribe to our weekly newsletter to stay up to date!
Status is the theme of the Summer 2023 issue of The Missouri Review, as Editor Speer Morgan writes in the foreword, “status…with the storytelling that illuminates it, encompasses more than just economic or social position. For most living creatures, status can impact both intraspecific and interspecific chances of survival.” Exploring this theme is new speculative fiction by Emily Mitchell, Naeem Murr, and Jonathan Wei, new stories from John Fulton and Becky Mandelbaum, new poetry by Aaron Coleman, Cynthia Marie Hoffman, and Stephanie Niu, and essays from Grace Plowden and Kathleen Spivack. There is also an arts feature on Vanitas: the Art of Death and Decay, work on Clara Bow, and a review essay on recent books about Gay Life in the 20th and 21st centuries. Cover art: Mirror Head by Estanislao Gonczanski (2018).
Asides: Occasional Essays by George Singleton EastOver Press, November 2023
George Singleton’s Asides: Occasional Essays offers readers a fascinating and curious collection in which Singleton explains how he came to be a writer (he blames barbecue), why he still writes his first draft by hand (someone stole his typewriter), and what motivated him to run marathons (his father gave him beer). In eccentric world-according-to-George fashion, Laugh-In’s Henry Gibson is to blame for Singleton’s literary education, and Aristotle would’ve been a failed philosopher had he grown up in South Carolina. Singleton gets his dogs to promise they won’t use his new gardens as a Porta-Potty, learns about his not-so-famous relations, and generally charms anyone sensible enough to read this delightful book. Word of advice? Buckle up and relish this ride.
To discover more great books from small, independent, and university presses, visit the NewPages Guide to Publishers as well as the New Books category on our blog. Subscribe to our weekly newsletter to stay up to date!
The MacGuffin Spring/Summer 2023 issue marks the final volume of long-time typesetter and designer Ione Skaggs. The publication sends her off in grand style with a new story with a post-modern bend from MacGuffin favorite Gracjan Kraszewski to open things up and closes with a touching story that ruminates on both art and artists from Jeffrey Ihlenfeldt. In poetry, Karen Marker admits she’s “Been Following You on Instagram” and Laura Grace Weldon muses on the theater of our own lives in “Rich People We Know Offer Theater Tickets;” all this plus a four-poem spread of food-related poetry to inspire any reader’s next charcuterie foray. Cover art: “Dinner Guests” by Carol Aust, whose works are also featured in a full-color portfolio inside the issue.
The Cruelties of Brooklyn by Paul Schaeffer Mudfish Individual Poet Series #17 Box Turtle Press, June 2023
In The Cruelties of Brooklyn by Paul Schaeffer, each poem builds upon the next to create an unsparing vision of all the characters in the poet’s childhood and adulthood that is nevertheless suffused with a love of humanity. With almost as few words as possible, Schaeffer conveys a world of meaning and abundance of detail, telling his outrageous stories that are colorful, earthy, perceptive, empathic, and brilliant. His intense realism lifts into the visionary: “The coffin lid flew open / Her body so light / She lifted into the air / A white sheet escaping a clothesline.” He mourns Aunt Helen, “the last of the gang,” but not before he immortalizes each and every one of them.
Lit Mag Covers: Picks of the Week recognizes cover art and designs for literary magazines, whether in print or online. These are chosen solely at the discretion of the Editor. Enjoy!
Sprinkler by Deanna Dikeman on the Summer 2023 cover of Epiphany is the quintessential image of the season and brought back many wonderful childhood memories.
I got into a stare-down with the Sugar House Review Summer 2023 cover image octopus and lost when I decided I’d rather look inside at all the great new poetry.
As a Michigander, this Michigan Quarterly Review Summer 2023 cover definitely speaks to me on many levels as well as fascinates my artistic appreciation with the mix of oil, acrylic, gouache, ink, marker, and graphite on paper by Andrea Carlson. The work, Future Cache, is currently part of an exhibit by the same name showing at the University of Michigan Museum of Art. The 40-foot tall memorial wall commemorates the Cheboiganing (Burt Lake) Band of Ottawa and Chippewa Indians violently burned from their land in Northern Michigan on October 15, 1900. Visit the UMMA for more information.
The September/October 2023 issue of World Literature Today presents a cover feature devoted to Indigenous Literatures of the Americas, showcasing contributions by sixteen Native writers from the “long, long continent” of the Western Hemisphere. Additional highlights include short fiction by Uruguayan writer Armonía Somers, five questions with debut novelist Javier Fuentes, and Veronica Esposito’s “Untranslatable” column on Sehnsucht. Along with a book review section brimming with the latest must-reads, creative nonfiction from Canada, plus postcards from Georgia and Ecuador, the September issue offers a tantalizing lineup of the best new reading from around the world.
The Society of Classical Poets Journal publishes a print annual of poetry, translations, and essays selected from those published on the SCP website between February and January as well as artwork for inclusion in the print copy. Throughout the year, readers can find these works on a rolling basis, making each visit to the website a new reading discovery. Recent contributors include Leland James, Julian Fite, Lucia Haase, Monika Cooper, James Sale, Carey Jobe, Paul A. Freeman, Phil S. Rogers, Daniel Howard, C.B. Anderson, Rob Crisell, D.R. Rainbolt, Gregory Roxx, Brian Yapko, and Nathaniel Todd McKee. Readers may also want to take part in the discussion following Julian Woodruff’s essay, “Can Long Poems Still Work?” and Joseph S. Salemi’s essay, “The Cultured Heonist.”
Kazim Ali is a poet, novelist, and essayist whose work explores themes of identity, migration, and the intersections of cultural and spiritual traditions. His poetry is known for its lyrical and expressive language, as well as its exploration of themes such as love, loss, and the search for meaning in a rapidly changing world. “Sukun” means serenity or calm, and a sukun is also a form of punctuation in Arabic orthography that denotes a pause over a consonant. This Sukun draws a generous selection from Kazim’s six previous full-length collections and includes 35 new poems. It allows us to trace Ali’s passions and concerns, and take the measure of his art: the close attention to the spiritual and the visceral, and the deep language play that is both musical and plain spoken.
To discover more great books from small, independent, and university presses, visit the NewPages Guide to Publishers as well as the New Books category on our blog. Subscribe to our weekly newsletter to stay up to date!
Winner of the 2022 Big Moose Prize, Down Here We Come Up by Sara Johnson Allen is about three women who have lost connection with their children, through alienation, adoption, and across a militarized border. Their lives intersect in a “safe house” for migrant workers outside of Wilmington, North Carolina in 2006. From her deathbed, con artist Jackie Jessup lures home her estranged 26-year-old daughter Kate Jessup. There, Kate meets former teacher Maribel Reyes, who is separated from her family in Ciudad Juárez. While none of these women trust each other, they do have a chance to get back what they have each lost.
To discover more great books from small, independent, and university presses, visit the NewPages Guide to Publishers as well as the New Books category on our blog. Subscribe to our weekly newsletter to stay up to date!
Focused on place, climate, and justice, Terrain.org offers readers editorials, poetry, essays, fiction, hybrid forms, videos, review, interviews, the ARTerrain gallery, the “Upsprawl” case study, and the series Letter to America – all online on a rolling basis. Their email newsletter keeps readers up-to-date on fresh content, like “Oh, possum,” an essay by Laura Jackson Roberts (with audio); “Moon: An Excerpt of A Little Bit of Land,” nonfiction by Jessica Gigot; “What Water Holds,” nonfiction by Tele Aadsen; “Earth and Motherhood, Part II: A Collection of Wildness” by Melissa Mattewson; “Rapid Lightning,” a story by Megan Campbell; “Single Family Residence,” a story by Sara Joyce Robinson; “Land in Formation: Drawings” by Nicola López; poems by Rachel Richardson, Grant Kittrell, William Wenthe, Joe Wilkens, Grant Kittrell, Teresa Mei Chue, and Joseph Powell; and “Care is a Creative Act: Interview with Awren Danahue” by Martha Park. All content is free to read online.
Selected Poems of Calvin C. Hernton edited by David Grundy and Lauri Scheyer Wesleyan University Press, August 2023
This volume promises to be the definitive guide to Calvin C. Hernton’s unparalleled poetic career, re-introducing readers to a major voice in American poetry. Hernton was a cofounder of the Umbra Poets Workshop; a participant in the Black Arts Movement, R. D. Laing’s Kingsley Hall, and the Antiuniversity of London; and a teacher at Oberlin College who counted amongst his friends bell hooks, Toni Morrison, and Odetta. As a pioneer in the field of Black Studies, Hernton developed a theoretical and practical pedagogy with lasting impact on generations of students. He may be best known as an anti-sexist sociologist, following in the footsteps of W.E.B. Du Bois, but Hernton viewed himself, above all, as a poet. This volume includes a generous selection of Hernton’s previously published poems, from classics like the often anthologized “The Distant Drum” to the visionary epic The Coming of Chronos to the House of Nightsong, reprinted in full for the first time since 1964, alongside uncollected and unpublished material from the Calvin C. Hernton papers at Ohio University, a new critical introduction by Ishmael Reed, and detailed notes, chronology, and bibliography.
To discover more great books from small, independent, and university presses, visit the NewPages Guide to Publishers as well as the New Books category on our blog. Subscribe to our weekly newsletter to stay up to date!
37 Submission Opportunities including calls for submissions, writing contests, and book prizes.
Welcome to the final Where to Submit Roundup for August 2023. That’s right. By next Friday, September will officially be here. This is a perfect time to check out our Big List of Writing Contests for upcoming fall deadlines, too.
In this third full-length collection of poems, Madison welcomes the reader to step into her craft for a tour that tracks the movement of a life. Among narrative, lyric, and points in between, the poems in this collection are informed by the poet’s keen eye for detail, command of language, and ear for the music of words. Poems of loss, growth, grief, pleasure, joy and snark, are presented with arresting imagery, humor, and an abiding faith in the salvation that nature offers.
To discover more great books from small, independent, and university presses, visit the NewPages Guide to Publishers as well as the New Books category on our blog. Subscribe to our weekly newsletter to stay up to date!
Fictive Dream is an online magazine for short stories (500-2500 words) that give an insight into the human condition. The publication features stories “with a distinctive voice, clarity of thought, and precision of language. They may be on any subject. They may be challenging, unsettling, uplifting, cryptic but, above all, they must be well-crafted and compelling.” The publication accepts submissions on a rolling basis and publishes one story every Friday and Sunday. Recent contributors include Graham Mort, Sharon Boyle, Robert Scotellaro, Kerry Hadley-Pryce, Louis Gallo, Kim Magowan, Claire Polders, Carolina Peleretegu trans. Norma Kaminsky, Catherine McNamara, Megan Catana, Gary Fincke, and Will Musgrove.
Shō Poetry Journal is a new print publication released twice a year, and while it can’t be said it has a happy origin story, Editor Johnny Cordova has turned adversity into a beautifully crafted opportunity for both readers and writers. “Shō is a project that I abandoned in 2003 shortly after the second issue was published. I was going through a divorce, moved from Arizona to California, and wanted a clean break from everything.” Both Cordova and Editor Dominique Ahkong had moved from Southeast Asia to Arizona and started sending their own poetry to journals. “We were struck by how many journals had moved online. We saw a need in the market for a high-quality independent print journal that publishes a wide range of voices, accepts simultaneous submissions, has a reasonable response time, and that feels good in the hands.” And thus, Shō was created.
You Were Watching from the Sand: Short Stories by Juliana Lamy Red Hen Press, September 2023
Playful, kinetic, and devastating in turn, You Were Watching from the Sand is a collection in which Haitian men, women, and children who find their lives cleaved by the interminably strange bite back at the bizarre with their own oddities. In “belly,” a young woman abandoned by her only living relative makes a person from the mud beside her backyard creek. In “We Feel it in Punta Cana,” a domestic child servant in the Dominican Republic tours through his own lush imagination to make his material conditions more bearable. In “The Oldest Sensation is Anger,” a teenager invites a same-aged family friend into her apartment and uncovers a spate of disturbing secrets about her. Written in a mixture of high lyricism, absurdist comedy, and Haitian cultural witticisms, this is a collection whose dynamism matches that of its characters at every beat and turn.
To discover more great books from small, independent, and university presses, visit the NewPages Guide to Publishers as well as the New Books category on our blog. Subscribe to our weekly newsletter to stay up to date!
Cutleaf publishes a new issue online every other week and will update readers via email so they can keep reading fresh new prose and poetry that “responds to our common experience and reflects our differences.” Recent contributions: Gary Fincke explores where emotion lives in the essay “In the Heart,” Kristin Lindsey is visited by the spirits of the past and present in “Ghosted,” Annette Pearson travels towards the past in search of what is remembered and forgotten in “Road Trip South,” Jacob Boyd challenges, deepens, and complicates the principles espoused in John Perry Barlow’s list of 25 Principles of Adult Behavior, beginning with the poem “Remember that Your Life Belongs to Others as Well. Do Not Endanger It Frivolously,” Christen Noel Kaufman learns to hold death in her hands in three poems beginning with “Never Close a Knife Someone Else Has Opened,” and Okwudili Nebeolisa sinks into the kind of loneliness that can only be felt on dark nights beginning with his poem “It’s Never a Ghost.”
NewPages receives many wonderful literary magazine and alternative magazine titles each month to share with our readers. You can read more about some of these titles by clicking on the “New Mag Issues” under NewPages Blog or Mags. Find out more about many of these titles with our Guide to Literary Magazines and our Big List of Literary Magazines and Big List of Alternative Magazines. If you are a publication looking to be listed here or featured on our blog and social media, please contact us. You can also subscribe to our weekly newsletter to stay the most up-to-date on all things literary!
2River View, Summer 2023 Alaska Quarterly Review, Summer/Fall 2023 Apple in the Dark, Summer 2023 Arboreal, Number 3 Arc Poetry, Summer 2023 The Awakenings Review, Spring 2023 Blue Collar Review, Spring 2023 Boulevard, 112 & 113 Cholla Needles, August 2023 Cream City Review, 47.1 Cutleaf, August 2023 The Dream Review, Issue 3 The Empty Inkwell, July 2023, Issue 1 Fictive Dream, August 2023 Free Inquiry, August/September 2023 Ganga Review, 2023 The Gettysburg Review, 34.3
Toy Gun: Poems by Matt Coonan Button Poetry, August 2023
Through each poem in the debut collection Toy Gun, Matt Coonan fires his offbeat childhood and adolescence at the page. He enters each exit wound with sharp diction and form, extracting shards of trauma, mental health, and evolutionary violence. What readers will find in this collection is ambitious anaphora—an attempt to explain the irrationality of an obsessive mind by imitation. The result of it all? Raw candor dripped on the backdrop of New York suburbia; an intimacy that lingers from backyard barbeques to funeral homes.
To discover more great books from small, independent, and university presses, visit the NewPages Guide to Publishers as well as the New Books category on our blog. Subscribe to our weekly newsletter to stay up to date!
South Dakota Review, Volume 57, Number 3, had just been released and includes poetry by Alison Zheng, John Walser, Joanna Acevedo, E J Cousins, Glenn Shaheen, Richard Robbins, Jen Yáñez-Alaniz, Judith Harris, Dylan Willoughby, Tricia Bogle, Gary Charles Wilkens, Joshua Michael Stewart, Simon Anton Niño Diego, Dani Putney, and Lisa Roullard; a novella excerpt by Yelizaveta P. Renfro; short stories by Joe Davies and Rylann Watts; creative nonfiction by Chelsy Diaz Amaya and Stephanie Dickinson; and a scholarly essay by Audrey Fong. Subscriptions and copies can be ordered here.
Lit Mag Covers: Picks of the Week recognizes cover art and designs for literary magazines, whether in print or online. These are chosen solely at the discretion of the Editor. Enjoy!
Artist Fran De Anda’s work is front and back on the 2023 annual issue of Pembroke Magazine. The Magician of Roots (2022) seen here is oil and gold leaf on canvas and is utterly mesmerizing.
Continuing with the ‘gold’ theme, the image on the front cover of Brick 111 is a detail of Zhang Xiaogang’s Light No. 5, 2022, oil on canvas.
PULP Literature covers are always a unique blend of classy, classic, and surreal. Their summer 2023 issue features the painting Dreaming Underwater by Claire Lawrence.
Tara Kelly’s moving memoir, No Last Words, opens: “The day before Robert died was an otherwise perfect June day in Connecticut: warm but not hot, with a bit of a breeze, flawless blue sky, puffy white clouds—the sort of weather a sailor loves, and Robert was a sailor.”
Robert Willis was Tara’s husband, father of their children, restauranteur, sailor, bon vivant, and alcoholic. From an enchanted start in Manhattan to a townhouse in Brooklyn, from an island in Maine and back to rural Connecticut, in fast cars and sleek boats, Tara and Robert seemed to live a charmed life. But beneath the glittering exterior was the struggle of money, alcohol, and ultimately self-control and hard-won sobriety. When this couple seems to have reached an impasse, separation brings renewed love, and then tragedy brings new challenges. Kelly’s memoir is a clear-eyed excavation of the lives lived together and apart by two charismatic modern Americans, a story told in love and compassion for herself and others.
To discover more great books from small, independent, and university presses, visit the NewPages Guide to Publishers as well as the New Books category on our blog. Subscribe to our weekly newsletter to stay up to date!
In Jill Hoffman’s long-awaited second novel, STONED, forty-year-old mother of two Maud Diamond is getting a divorce. Having experienced the colossal disappointment of being jilted by a famous artist, she falls in love with a poor unknown artist who assuages the disappointment but leads to other ills. Maud’s son leaves home to live with his father; the daughter does phone sex from their new home, proclaiming, “I’m the only one in this house earning any money.” As Maud starts a literary journal called Wild Leek with her new boyfriend and moves downtown, their relationship spirals downward from her pot-smoking and his alcoholism. STONED is for anyone who has been in love or lost love, been married, divorced, or lonely. It is about the satisfactions and deprivations of sex and drugs.
To discover more great books from small, independent, and university presses, visit the NewPages Guide to Publishers as well as the New Books category on our blog. Subscribe to our weekly newsletter to stay up to date!
The thirteen stories in Rebecca Turkewitz’s debut collection, Here in the Night, are engrossing, strange, eerie, and emotionally nuanced. With psychological insight and finely crafted prose, Here in the Night investigates the joys and constraints of womanhood, of queerness, and of intimacy. Preoccupied with all manner of hauntings, these stories traverse a boarding school in the Vermont woods, the jagged coast of Maine, an attic in suburban Massachusetts, an elevator stuck between floors, and the side of an unlit highway in rural South Carolina. At the center of almost every story is the landscape of night, with all its tantalizing and terrifying potential.
To discover more great books from small, independent, and university presses, visit the NewPages Guide to Publishers as well as the New Books category on our blog. Subscribe to our weekly newsletter to stay up to date!
Issue 3 of The Dawn Review celebrates work that is surprising and otherworldly. In every piece, the self is intimately connected to its environment– as the world turns and folds inward, the self is reconstructed, and new usages of language are essential for capturing the transformations that occur in the crossroads. The works in Issue 3 refuse a concrete ending, just as life itself forces us to be constantly reborn. In “Sanctuary with the Burning Self,” Muhammed Olowonjoying renews language, writing, “I oasis of my existence. I camouflage / into fluorescence.” Meanwhile, LeAnn Perry wakes the dead in “Yes, No, Goodbye,” and Edward Gunawan allows personhood to bloom between the lines of his contrapuntal poem. Even as summer ends in Fiona Jin’s “Cassiopeia,” time is relentless, keeping the speaker “so here, so here, so here.” Issue 3 highlights the best work from the Dawn Review’s third reading period, as well as the winner and the finalists of the Dawn Prize for Poetry, judged by Sarah Ghazal Ali. Ultimately, the writers and artists in this third issue buckle against the restraints of language and form – in doing so, they unearth beauty and strangeness in how we build, rebuild, and destroy ourselves.
The 2023 issue of the nationally-acclaimed literary magazine The Meadow captures readers with the cover photo, Lichen Fang, by Mike Clasen. Once inside, featured writers will continue to captivate, with poetry by Stacy Boe Miller, Joanne Mallari, Jeffrey Alfier, Mark Sanders, Lora Robinson, Christine Kwon, Paul Ilechko, Kathryn Levy, Jana Harris, Lori Howe, Richard Robbins, and many others. The issue also includes four essays by Lori White, Kian Razi, David Stewart, and Zachary Greenhill. The Meadow is produced by Truckee Meadows Community College in Reno, Nevada, and is currently open for submissions.
All the Ways We Lied: A Novel by Aida Zilelian Keylight Books, January 2024
Set in Queens, New York, meet the Manoukians—a dysfunctional Armenian family and the fraying rope that binds them. While a father deteriorates from terminal illness, three sisters contend with one another, their self-destructive pasts, and their indomitable mother as they face the loss of the one person holding their unstable family together. Kohar, the oldest sister, is happily married, yet grapples with fertility issues and, in turn, her own self-worth. Lucine, the middle child, is trapped in a loveless marriage and haunted by memories of her estranged father. Azad, the beloved youngest child, is burdened by an inescapable cycle of failed relationships. Zilelian uses humor and compassion to explore the fraught and contradictory landscape of sisterhood, introducing four unforgettable women who have nothing in common and are bound by blood and history.
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Deadline: October 15, 2023 The reading period for Consequence Volume 16.1 is open from July 15 through October 15. As always, we’re after the strongest work that deals with the consequences of war or geopolitical violence. We publish in Fiction, Nonfiction, Poetry, Translations, and Visual Art, though we are especially interested in increasing our Translations submissions.
BIPOC and people from other under-represented communities are strongly encouraged to apply.
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Submit published or unpublished poems to the 21st annual Tom Howard/Margaret Reid Poetry Contest sponsored by Winning Writers and co-sponsored by Duotrope. We will award $3,000 for the best poem in any style and $3,000 for the best poem that rhymes or has a traditional style. The top 12 poems will be published online. Final judge: Michal ‘MJ’ Jones. Deadline: September 30. Fee: $22 for 1-3 poems. View flyer for more information.
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36 Submission Opportunities including calls for submissions, writing contests, and book prizes.
Welcome to the NewPages Weekly Roundup of Submission Opportunities! August is officially half over with this week. The weather is crazy, the only thing that wants to grow properly is grass and weeds, bugs are destroying everything in the veggie garden, and invasive pests are trying to kill my roses. Hopefully your summer is going better.
I hope you are able to get some nice R&R time in before the crazy period of back-to-school and fall descends upon us. If you’re still working on your submission goals, we are here to help. Don’t forget paid newsletter subscribers can get early access to the majority of submission opportunities and upcoming events before they go live on our site, so do consider subscribing or upgrading your subscription today.
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From a cathedral in Cuernavaca with its frescos of samurai and soon-to-be-martyred priests to neighborhoods in Miami at the end of lockdown, to New York City in the 1970s, or to mythic Greece, the poems in Remote Cities are conscious of history as a process happening right now. They look back at us with an urgency that demands response, not that we embrace this or that political or religious dogma but that we live our lives with a sense of their fragility and value.
To discover more great books from small, independent, and university presses, visit the NewPages Guide to Publishers as well as the New Books category on our blog. Subscribe to our weekly newsletter to stay up to date!
NewPages receives many wonderful book titles each month to share with our readers. You can read more about some of these by clicking on “New Books” under the NewPages Blog or Books tab on the menu. If you are a publisher or author looking to be listed here or featured on our blog and social media, please contact us!
Poetry
Apples & Crows, Alan Basting, Kelsay Books The Cruelties of Brooklyn, Paul Schaeffer, Box Turtle Press Directed by Lilly Obscure, Dana Curtis, Blaze Vox Excuse Me As I Kiss The Sky, Rudy Francisco, Button Poetry Feast of the Ass, Jahna Khajavi, Ugly Duckling Presse Floriography Child, Lisa C. Krueger, Red Hen Press Frida Kahlo in Fort Lauderdale, Stephen Gibson, Able Muse Press Honest Sonnets, Nicole Farmer, Kelsay Books Joan of Arkansas, Emma Wippermann, Ugly Duckling Presse Let Our Bodies Change the Subject, Jared Harel, University of Nebraska Press MA, Ida Börjel, Ugly Duckling Presse Morpheus Dips His Oar, Tamara Madison, Sheila-Na-Gig Editions Nice Nose, Buck Downs
Named for the sacred river, the annual print Ganga Review is a journal of international writings for liberation inspired by a pilgrimage through India. The Ganga Review 2023 features Michele Alborg, Hila Amit, Edward Bruce Bynum, Ch’oŭi, Craig Czury, Daniel De Leon, Antonio Di Bianco, Craig Evenson, Jay Frankston, Ian Haight, Philip Jason, Ever Jones, Ziaul Moid Khan, Hareendran Kallinkeel, Richard Leise, Alexander Mercant, Emily Murphy, E. Martin Pedersen, Patrick Pfister, Sandro Francisco Piedrahita, Thomas Piekarski, Peter L. Scamardo, Stuart Silverman, Michael T. Smith, Joseph Thomas, Ana Vidosavljevic, Kwong Kwok Wai, Sarah Walko, and Saman Zoleikhaei.
The Weight of Ghosts: A Memoir by Laila Halaby Red Hen Press, September 2023
The Weight of Ghosts is a circling of grief following the death of the author’s older son when he was twenty-one, a horror that was compounded by her younger son’s drug use, the country’s slow eruption as it dealt with its own brokenness, and reckoning the author had to do regarding her own story. The Weight of Ghosts is a lyrical reclaiming and an insistence by the author that she own the rights to her story, which is American flavored with an unreleasing elsewhere. The Weight of Ghosts is an immigrant story and a love story. While it is raw and honest and tragic, it is also a hopeful, funny, and original telling that demonstrates the strength of the human spirit, while offering a vocabulary for these most unmanageable human experiences.
To discover more great books from small, independent, and university presses, visit the NewPages Guide to Publishers as well as the New Books category on our blog. Subscribe to our weekly newsletter to stay up to date!
Immigration Diaries is a new online journal of short stories, personal essays, poetry, and visual art founded by Yawen Yuan. Yuan lived in Shanghai until she was nine years old when she then moved to New York City. She recounts that for many years after immigrating to the United States, she felt lost and alone in her experiences. Yuan says that after listening to authors like Min Jin Lee, who immigrated from Korea at a young age, both felt more comfortable in their own experiences. Yuan would like to help others the way listening to Lee helped her by creating a place to share immigration stories and experiences.
Robert L. Penick’s short, masterful poems have been making appearances in small press magazines since the early 1990s. The Art of Mercy, his first full-length collection, contains excerpts from four chapbooks as well as fifty-seven new and previously uncollected poems, representing the best of a long, quiet career in the poetry trenches. This book marks the first in the Beggar Poet Series produced by Shō Poetry Journal in partnership with their parent publisher, Hohm Press. “It is named for seekers across world traditions who set out on the spiritual path with nothing but a begging bowl in hand and a driving thirst for the unnameable. Some of those beggars become poets. Just as some poets, in their sacred vocation, become beggars, standing empty before the muse and writing what is given.”
To discover more great books from small, independent, and university presses, visit the NewPages Guide to Publishers as well as the New Books category on our blog. Subscribe to our weekly newsletter to stay up to date!
The Spring 2023 issue of The Baltimore Review their summer contest winners selected by Judge Kelly Weber: Rochelle L. Johnson for flash creative nonfiction; Robin Littell for flash fiction; and Jarrett Moseley for prose poem. The regular content includes poems, short stories, and creative nonfiction by Kayo Chang Black, Brendan Constantine, Roxanne Lynn Doty, Jim Genia, Sara Elkamel, Michael J. Grabell, Bronte Heron, Rochelle L. Johnson, Virginia Kane, Robin Littell, Jarrett Moseley, Robert Osborne, Charlie Peck, Remy Reed Pincumbe, Tom Roth, and Mimi Veshi. Many contributors also provide notes about their work, as well as audio recordings. All issues of The Baltimore Review back to Winter 2012 can be read online at no cost, and content from the online issues is also published in annual print compilations. Founded in 1996, The Baltimore Review showcases writers from Baltimore, across the U.S., and beyond.
And Dogs to Chase Them by Ray Trotter EastOver Press, August 2023
In Ray Trotter’s collection of stories, And Dogs to Chase Them, ordinary humans are pushed to do things in out-of-the-ordinary ways. Trotter has conjured a world of Southern hyper-reality: a good Christian woman who pushes a man down the staircase, “as final as flushing the commode”; a concrete deliveryman who ought to have double-checked the address before he got out of his truck; and a man who enacts his revenge on the self-declared Queen of the Post Office. Through a keen eye for detail, Trotter brings to life a world that is at once familiar and deeply odd and creates characters that stay with a reader long after the book is closed.
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Lit Mag Covers: Picks of the Week recognizes cover art and designs for literary magazines, whether in print or online. These are chosen solely at the discretion of the Editor. Enjoy!
“Grave New World” is the theme of Notre Dame Review‘s Winter/Spring 2023 issue with cover art, Invasion, ink on paper (2021) by Isabella Castellane.
The Tiger Moth Review marks the publication of its tenth issue this summer, which celebrates the voices of writers and artists from Singapore, the region, and the rest of the world. Issue 10 is a compact issue that begins with Liberty Leggett’s “Instructions for surviving the twenty-first century,” which includes learning to “breathe salt water.” There is a sense of honoring our ancestors and recognizing the wisdom and knowledge of the communal and collective in KayLee Chie Kuehl, Andy Oram, and Zen Teh’s poetry and art. Death is a theme in this issue, as is the rebirth and reclamation of self and home. Alejandra Pena’s closing poem offers “a rebellion, a lighthouse, a map home” remembering our fathers who parted seas and walked without shoes or sleep in search of “the promised land” now called home. Other contributors from this issue include Claire Jean Kim, Marie-Andree Auclair, Tara Menon, Adrienne Pilon, Amy Akiko, Georgie Bailey, Drew Townsend, Smitha Sehgal, Eliana Franklin, Upasana Mitter, Calvin VanErgens, and Cerra Cathryn Anderson. Editor Esther Vincent Xueming adds, “Two current and former students of mine, Renee Yeap and Joseph Lee, have their prose and poetry featured respectively, and this is an immensely proud moment for me as an educator.”
Winner of the 2023 Whiting Award for Drama, Emma Wippermann’s Joan of Arkansas is an election-season closet drama about climate catastrophe, divine gender expression, the instructions of angels, and heavenly revelation relayed via viral video. Fifteen-year-old Joan has been tasked by God (They/Them) to ensure that Charles VII (R–Arkansas) adopts radical climate policy and wins his bid as the Lord’s candidate to become the president of the United States. Arkansas is flooding, the West is burning, and borders are closed: “Heaven or / internet—it’s / hard to be / good.”
To discover more great books from small, independent, and university presses, visit the NewPages Guide to Publishers as well as the New Books category on our blog. Subscribe to our weekly newsletter to stay up to date!
The 2023 Poetry Marathon is now open for applications! No running shoes required for this marathon, but you will definitely need stamina and perseverance! This annual event invites writers to join in a half- or full-day of poetry writing, responding to prompts posted on the hour starting a 9:00am EST on Saturday, September 2, and running (no pun intended) through 9:00am EST Sunday, September 3. If you’re not up for the full 24-hour marathon, there are two 12-hour half-marathons (my speed). The first is for day folk and goes from 9:00am-9:00pm on September 2, and the second is for night owls, from 9:00pm on September 2 to 9:00am on September 3. The platform is WordPress, which allows each participant their own space to post as well as to give and receive feedback. Participants who successfully complete their event will receive a certificate of achievement and are eligible to submit works for inclusion in the annual anthology. Over the past several years, the marathon has had over 500 participants each year, though not all finished. That’s the challenge! Registration is open through August 28. Hope to see some of you there!
In Joy Taylor’s satirical fiction Silent Bob, BJ and Rainey are two misfits from a rural town in Kentucky living their everyday lives, until they stumble upon a shocking secret: humanity is controlled by invisible creatures called the viziers who manipulate through pheromones and telepathic suggestion. Delving deeper, they uncover a bizarre world where laughter and tears are commodities and are forced to strive to be more than just “syrup units” providing the viziers with all the tragi-comic emotion they can eat. Silent Bob is a thought-provoking dark comedic exploration of the human condition, exposing the absurdity and vulnerability of our lives. With subtle humor and unexpected twists, Taylor’s craft will leave readers questioning the true nature of their emotions and the forces shaping their lives.
To discover more great books from small, independent, and university presses, visit the NewPages Guide to Publishers as well as the New Books category on our blog. Subscribe to our weekly newsletter to stay up to date!
37 Submission Opportunities including calls for submissions, writing contests, and book prizes.
The first full week of August is behind us. The back-to-school busy season is officially here. NewPages is back with our weekly roundup of submission opportunities to help keep your submitting goals strong by saving you time during this crazy time of year.
NewPages Newsletter subscribers with a paid subscription get early and first access to our submission opportunities and upcoming events, the majority before they go live on our site. Consider subscribing today. Our August eLitPak will be emailed to our current subscribers next week, too!
Snow After Fire: A Memoir of the Paradise Camp Fire & its Aftermath by Kandi Maxwell Legacy Book Press, June 2023
In November 2018, Kandi, already struggling with anxiety and chronic fatigue, faces her family’s unthinkable losses after the Paradise Camp Fire. Her two sons and two granddaughters are immediately displaced when their homes are demolished, and they come to live with Kandi and her husband in their small cabin. As Kandi’s solitude-seeking husband moves out and her energy wanes, she wonders how much of herself she can and should give up for her family. When her family can finally move into temporary FEMA housing, hope flourishes, but as the months go by, Kandi faces illness, more fires, the COVID-19 pandemic, the loss of her parents, housing issues for herself and her family, and the prospect of being torn from her most cherished refuge—the forests and the wild lands she called home.
To discover more great books from small, independent, and university presses, visit the NewPages Guide to Publishers as well as the New Books category on our blog. Subscribe to our weekly newsletter to stay up to date!
The third edition of The Gettysburg Review Volume 34 features paintings by Marjorie Thompson, fiction by Linda Mannheim, Jess Jelsma Masterton, Benjamin Powell, Zara Karschay, Gen Del Raye, and Asha Thanki; essays by Talley V. Kayser, Kathryn Nuernberger, Bradley Bazzle, and Rebecca McClanahan; poetry by Alice Friman, Karin Gottshall, David Moolten, Cody Smith, Esther Lin, Michael Waters, Chelsea Hill, Fleda Brown, M. K. Foster, Heather Christle, Afua Ansong, Jeremy Radin, Brian Swann, Nick Lantz, Joseph J. Capista, Christopher Howell, and Bruce Beasley. A complete table of contents as well as subscription and single-copy purchase information can be found on their website.
A Practical Guide to Levitation brings together thirty of José Eduardo Aguaulusa’s short stories, some written just last year and some so old he doesn’t remember writing them. Naturally, there is a real variety to be found here; “The President’s Madness,” in which the president of the United States awakes from a coma speaking only Portuguese, has a postmodern flavor, and would not seem out of place in a Donald Barthelme collection. “Elevator Philosophy” and “The Tree That Swallowed Time,” however, are more akin to the light-hearted, acutely sad narratives of Adolfo Bioy Casares.
Agualusa is of Portuguese and Brazillian descent, hailing from Nova Lisboa, Portuguese Angola. Magical Realism is a clear influence on his writing. In fact, Agualusa’s literary idols pop us as characters; In the opening story, Jorge Luis Borges finds himself ambling around in the afterlife. Unfortunately for him, it is not the heavenly Library of Babel he was banking on, but an infinite plantation of banana trees. The grand cosmic surveyor has made a clerical error; Borges has been mistaken for Gabriel Garcia Marquez and finds himself in the latters’ heaven. The final image is of Borges eating banana after banana in hell (he finds no more appropriate name for another man’s paradise) with a wry grin on his face; Garcia Marquez must be in the heaven meant for Borges, and thus in his own sort of down below. A nod to Borges’ famously polemic takes on certain Latin American writers, perhaps. (Roberto Arlt, for example, was described as “an imbecile… extraordinarily uneducated” by his fellow countryman.)
The stories compiled here are brought together by abstract and metaphysical topics, with the backdrop of colonization and civil war an everpresent.
A Practical Guide to Levitation by José Eduardo Agualusa, translated from Portuguese by Daniel Hahn. Archipelago Press, August 2023.
Reviewer Bio: Colm McKenna is a second-hand bookseller based in Paris. He has published and self-published an array of short stories and articles, hoping to eventually release a collection of stories. He is mainly interested in the works of John Cowper Powys, Claude Houghton, and a range of Latin American writers.
Perfect for a hot summer’s day, the August 2023 issue of The Lake poetry journal is now online and features Gale Acuff, Kate Gale, Charlie Hill, Beth McDonough, Lauren K. Nixon, Sandra Noel, Nikita Parik, Marka Rifat, Laura Rockhold, Megan Wildhood, A.D. Winans, Victoria Wiswell. Readers can also dig into reviews of David Groff’s Living in Suspense, Bob Hicok’s Water Look Away, and Sarah Wimbush’s Shelling Peas with my Grandmother in the Gorgiolands. The Lake also features ‘One Poem Reviews’ in which authors can share a poem from a recently published collection. This month, discover new works by James Brasfield, Gary D. Grossman, and Kate Maxwell.
