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!
Exile Editions publishes literary and speculative fiction, indigenous fiction, nonfiction, poetry – and our annual fiction and poetry competitions have awarded over $125K the past decade. Visit website and view flyer to learn more about upcoming submission opportunities.
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Deadline: April 15, 2023 South 85 Journal is open for submissions of poetry, fiction, and nonfiction until April 15, 2023, for our summer issue. As the literary journal for the Converse University Low-Residency MFA program, we are entering our 11th year of publication. Our editorial staff is comprised of experienced readers, writers, and editors who carefully consider every work of writing they receive. Visit website and view flyer for more information.
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Minimalist Wisdom is the theme of the spring 2023 issue of Still Point Arts Quarterly, featuring art and photography, fiction and non-fiction, and poetry. Widely praised for its rich and valuable content and splendid presentation. Intended for artists, writers, nature lovers, seekers, and enthusiasts of all types.
CUTTHROAT, A JOURNAL OF THE ARTS announces a 357-page anthology of poetry and prose devoted to the climate crisis featuring work by Rita Dove, Joy Harjo, J. Drew Lanham, Linda Hogan, Luis Alberto Urrea, Patricia Jabbeh Wesley, Patricia Spears Jones, Lidia Yuknavich, Cynthia Hogue, Jesse Tsinijinnie Maloney, Alice Zheng, Richard Jackson and more. Purchase at our website. Profits donated to Endangered Species Preservation.
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Registration Deadline:May 7, 2023 NYWW Workshops (fiction, poetry, cnf, translation, travel), panels, readings, excursions in Mexico City with Kim Addonizio, Ravi Shankar, and Tim Tomlinson. Workshops M/W/F mornings, T/Th/S afternoons. Readings, panels, events on four evenings. In Vallodolid, four late afternoon gatherings for talks, panel discussions, consultations, readings. Other events include visits to cenotes and the Mayan Ek Balam ruin. ¡Danny Caron provides music! Visit website or view flyer to learn more.
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Deadline: April 1 Submit one humor poem to Winning Writers’ 2023 no-fee Wergle Flomp Humor Poetry Contest to win $2,000 and online publication. Accepts published and unpublished work. Co-sponsored by Duotrope. Recommended by Reedsy. Judged by Jendi Reiter and Lauren Singer. Winners announced on August 15. View website.
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Our Lady of the Lake University’s 100% online Master of Arts-Master of Fine Arts (MA-MFA) and Master of Arts (MA) in Literature, Creative Writing, and Social Justice prepare critically engaged and socially aware scholars, writers, educators, and professionals. This nationally unique, virtual program combines creativity with practical skills and critical knowledge, while keeping in mind the pursuit of social justice. View flier or visit website to learn more.
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Happy St. Patrick’s Day! Feeling amazing about your latest work and want to find a home for it? Or do you want to try your hand at submitting to a writing contest? NewPages is here to help with our weekly roundup of submission opportunities.
Here in the Midwest weather is trying to act more like spring. Let’s hope warmer weather with a break in storms is finally on the way. Don’t forget NewPages is offering a 20% discount on annual subscriptions to our weekly newsletter. This makes it just $40. Consider subscribing today to get first access to submission opportunities and upcoming events, the majority before they go live on our site.
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Let’s dive into our weekly roundup of submission opportunities without further ado.
W. E. B. Du Bois Souls of Black Folk: A Graphic Interpretation by Paul Peart-Smith Rutgers University Press, April 2023
“The problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color line.” These were the prescient words of W. E. B. Du Bois’s influential 1903 book The Souls of Black Folk. The preeminent Black intellectual of his generation, Du Bois wrote about the trauma of seeing the Reconstruction era’s promise of racial equality cruelly dashed by the rise of white supremacist terror and Jim Crow laws. Yet he also argued for the value of African American cultural traditions and provided inspiration for countless civil rights leaders who followed him. Now artist Paul Peart-Smith offers the first graphic adaptation of Du Bois’s seminal work.
Peart-Smith’s graphic adaptation provides historical and cultural contexts that bring to life the world behind Du Bois’s words. Readers will get a deeper understanding of the cultural debates The Souls of Black Folk engaged in, with more background on figures like Booker T. Washington, the advocate of black economic uplift, and the Pan-Africanist minister Alexander Crummell. This new release vividly conveys the continuing legacy of The Souls of Black Folk, effectively updating it for the era of the 1619 Project and Black Lives Matter.
The March 2023 issue of Poetry features “How It Continues to Astonish: The Poetry of Ann Lauterbach” with an introduction by Richard Deming, as well as works by Kinsale Drake, Nam Le, Dorothea Lasky, Yahya Hassan, Jenny George, Laura Villareal, Jay Deshpande, Ari Wolff, Cathleen Calbert, Rodolfo Avelar, KB Brookins, Yuki Tanaka, and Yahya Hassan translated by Jordan Barger along with notes on the translation. The “Not Too Hard to Master” series of poets writing on forms and sharing a prompt features Terrance Hayes in this second installment.
Some Days the Bird by Heather Bourbeau (HB) and Anne Casey (AC) is an epistolary exchange written between Northern California and Sydney, Australia in 2021 during the COVID-19 pandemic. As Bourbeau puts it in “The letting,” the poem-letters track the “conjunction” of how “People have become numbers, corridors are morgues” with “the tenacious need of green to grow.” In “Coastal descent,” Casey adds her “changing / tableau” from Australia’s “megafires” and “wreckage.” There’s the feeling from these pandemic dispatches, from their different continents and opposite seasons, that the description of each poet’s physical and natural surroundings offers solace, connection, and awareness; a saving formula, as Bourbeau writes in “This is not an inauguration poem” against “heat and fire and fear.” Throughout the exchange, the poets look more carefully, more completely at flowers, insects, and animals, at the “never before noticed” (“Equinox,” HB).
A high point in the exchange came via the corresponding poems “Our Prime Minister stands by” (AC) and “Pause” (HB), where the poets confront “gendered violence” (AC) and “value” (HB). In her poem, Casey takes on “this country // long at war with / its women”; while Bourbeau notes “Next week will mark my menopause.” I hoped for more of this direct engagement “with things we have been taught / are not worth savoring, / hold no value” (“Pause,” HB), but the poems relegated these gender concerns to subtlety and foregrounded lockdown, exile from family, daughters’ relationships to fathers, and Mother Nature: “this messy line between accustomed / and detached” (“Richter’s scale,” HB). Regardless of what I hoped for, Some Days the Bird is Heather Bourbeau’s and Anne Casey’s “song / of survival” (“Days of wild weather,” AC), “their song of freedom” (“Season’s greetings,” AC) across a “relentless distance” (“Solstice,” HB).
Some Days the Bird by Heather Bourbeau and Anne Casey. Beltway Editions, 2022.
Reviewer bio: Jami Macarty is the author of The Minuses (Center for Literary Publishing, 2020), winner of the 2020 New Mexico/Arizona Book Award – Poetry Arizona, and three chapbooks, including Mind of Spring (Vallum, 2017), winner of the 2017 Vallum Chapbook Award. Jami’s writing has been honored by financial support from Arizona Commission on the Arts, British Columbia Arts Council, and by editors at magazines such as The Capilano Review, Concision Poetry Journal, Interim, Redivider, Vallum, and Volt, where Jami’s poems appear. More at https://jamimacarty.com/
Young Writers and Artists 2023 from Cholla Needles is the eighth edition in this series. The editors write, “We deeply thank the students for taking their time to create and share the wonderful work you’ll find within these pages. And, of course, all of this would be meaningless without you, the reader. We are blessed to continue a great relationship with the Mojave Desert Land Trust to have these special youth issues appear twice a year. Mary Cook-Rhyne leads the educational arm of MDLT and has created curriculum and classroom units available to teachers of all grade levels that explain the uniqueness of the Mojave Desert with age-appropriate activities.”
Icelight, Ranjit Hoskote’s eighth collection of poems, enacts the experience of standing at the edge—of a life, a landscape, a world assuming new contours or going up in flames. Yet, the protagonists of these poems also stand at the edge of epiphany. In the title poem, we meet the Neolithic cave-dweller who, dazzled by a shapeshifting nature, crafts the first icon. The ‘I’ of these poems is not a sovereign ‘I’. A questing, questioning voice, it locates itself in the web of life, in relation to the cosmos. In “Tacet,” the speaker asks: “What if I had / no skin / Of what / am I the barometer?” Long committed to the Japanese mono no aware aesthetic, Hoskote embraces talismans, premonitions, fossils: active residues from the previous lives of people and places. Icelight is a book about transitions and departures, eloquent in its acceptance of transience in the face of mortality.
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 Rattle (#79) features a Tribute to Irish Poets. From Yeats to Boland and Heaney, Ireland has a long tradition of producing great poets. Rattle editors take an opportunity with this issue to look at what’s going on there now. The theme includes seventeen poems by Irish poets and their always-interesting contributor notes, and a conversation with Frank Dullaghan, a poet who has lived an interesting life in both Ireland and abroad. The open section features twenty-one poets exploring their perspectives on life. Cover art by Joseph Lynch.
Publishing quarterly online, the San Francisco Youth Anthology offers middle-school, high-school, and college-aged writers and readers of any age a platform for all genres of creative writing. Based in San Francisco, the publication only accepts submissions from San Francisco and the surrounding areas, but they are open to readers from around the globe.
As Editor Ava Rosoff explains, “SFYA began with the desire to start a magazine and initiative for young writers to help them showcase their work in an anthology, captured in the ‘Youth Anthology’ part of the name.” She and her editor peers saw SFYA as “a way to foster a community of youth writers in the San Francisco Bay Area and encourage young writers to share their work with the greater community.”
Born and raised in El Paso, Texas, Ray Gonzalez returns to Texas and nearby New Mexico to meditate on love, literature, loss, and la línea in Suggest Paradise. The collection offers readers some of the richest and most complex poems that embody the Southwest and the borderlands, including a poignant look at the massacre at the El Paso Walmart. A unique voice of the Southwest, Gonzalez brings his intellect and his well-honed craft to this work and offers readers a nuanced and powerful perspective on poetry and the Border.
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!
Our Beautiful Reward, ed. Catherine Rockwood Reckoning Press, March 2023
Our Beautiful Reward is a collection of works from Reckoning Press, a nonprofit, annual journal of creative writing on environmental justice. This special issue on bodily autonomy, edited by Catherine Rockwood, was anthologized on the occasion of the repeal of Roe v. Wade and features work by Mona Robles, Linda Cooper, Dana Vickerson, Leah Bobet, Laurel Nakanishi, Robert René Galván, Anna Orridge, Taylor Jones, Julian K. Jarboe, Dyani Sabin, Annabelle Cormack, Rimi B. Chatterjee, Taylor Jones, Amber Fox, Juliana Roth, Mari Ness, Riley Tao, Taylor Jones, M.C. Benner Dixon, and Marissa Lingen.
There will be a free virtual launch event for the publication featuring eight contributors. For more information and to RSVP, click here.
The Main Street Rag Winter 2023 features an interview with Jim Lundy involving the history of the Poetry Society of South Carolina. Also in this issue, readers can enjoy poetry by L. Ward Abel, Melissa Apperson, Susan Ayers, Carol Barrett, Maria Berardi, Mike Bove, Terri Drake, Sam Capps, Ricks Carson, Robert Cooperman, Steve Cushman, Barbara Daniels, Abigail Dembo, Patrick Dungan, Michael Flanagan, Tony Gloeggler, Earl Carlton Huband, Judith Janoo, Becky Nicole James, Mike James, Garret Keizer, Casey Killingsworth, Jennifer LeBlanc, Justin Lacour, Richard Levine, Mary Makofske, Ronald J. Pelias, Erik Rosen, Janet M. Rives, Bret Roth, Claire Scott, William Snyder, Jr., Shaheen Dil, Tom Whalen, James Washington, Jr., Frederick Wilbur; fiction by Chris Daly, Brett Dixon, Peter Fraser, Paul Juhasz, Eugene Radice, Beate Sigriddaughter, Karen Sleeth; images by Rebeccah Williams Connelly, Karen Pelosi, Michael Woodruff, Lynn Black, Jill L. Rausch; and a slew of book reviews.
Our Share of the Night, Mariana Enriquez’s second novel, is a welcome addition to the emerging genre of Literary Horror. Well-defined lines have been drawn to distinguish “literary” fiction from horror, sci-fi, fantasy etc. Enriquez is becoming a name that is defying the pretensions of such categorization.
Our Share of the Night is a family history, primarily following Gaspar throughout his childhood and adolescence. His father, Juan – a medium for a Satanic cult – strives to help Gaspar avoid his fate of also becoming a medium. The story spans 37 years and has the backdrop of Videla’s military dictatorship, a theme common amongst contemporary Latin American writers.
Like with Hereditary and other recent Art House Horror films, a big part of the novel’s success can be attributed to its commitment to allegory, rather than simply using horror tropes for their shock value. The otherworldly forces, with their power to make people disappear, hold clear parallels with the military dictatorship in Argentina.
Enriquez is keen to explore the psychological effects of the narrative on her characters. A great deal of time is given to exploring the damage done to Gaspar through his involvement with the Occult. Gaspar also suffers real-world problems that are at times more psychologically devastating than the Occult horrors that fill the story.
These real-life problems are not sidelined; as it is put following a Satanic ritual, “we get hungry and we eat. . . we need to meet with the accountants. . . what happens is real, but so is life.”
Our Share of the Night by Mariana Enriquez; Illustrated by Pablo Gerardo Camacho; Translated by Megan McDowell. Hogarth Press, October 2022.
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.
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 adjacent islands, Nicole Cecilia Delgado, Ugly Duckling Presse & there’s you still thrill hour of the world to love, Aby Kaupang, Parlor Press Before After, Owen McLeod, Saturnalia Books Between Twilight, Connie Post, NYQ Books The Book of John, Lindsey Royce, Press 53 Boy, Tracy Youngblom, CavanKerry Press Crisis Inquiry, Tony Iantosca, Ugly Duckling Presse The Day Every Day Is, Lee Upton, Saturnalia Books Dreamer: Poems in Culture, Alan Botsford, Cyberwit.net Ephemera, Sierra DeMulder, Button Poetry Exceeds Us, Leah Poole Osowski, Saturnalia Books The Exhausted Dream, Joshua Edwards, Marfa Book Company Exilium, Maria Negroni, Ugly Duckling Presse Failures of the Poet, Anthony Robinson, Canarium Books Far from New York State, Matthew Johnson, NYQ Books The Fight Journal, John W. Evans, Rattle Poetry
In the summer of 1962, a group of young Native American puppeteers travel in a converted school bus from the White Earth Reservation to the Century 21 Exposition, World’s Fair in Seattle, Washington. The five Natives, three young men and two young women, have endured abandonment, abuse, poverty, and find solace, humor, and courage with a mute puppeteer—a Native woman in her seventies who writes original dream songs, and creates hand puppets and ironic parleys that mock the ghosts of authority. Dummy Trout, the mute puppeteer, also figured in Vizenor’s previous books, Native Tributes and Satie on the Seine. The troupe attends a performance of Waiting for Godot by Samuel Beckett and they create a puppet parley for Wovoka, the inspiration of the Native American Ghost Dance Religion.
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!
Holly Jackson’s A Good Girl’s Guide to Murder has a girl, and cold case, and a killer on the loose. All this in the small town of Fairview, where Pippa “Pip” Fitz Amobi lives. Years ago, Andie Bell was murdered by her boyfriend, Sal Singh, whose guilt drove him to suicide. But Pip doesn’t believe that’s the real story. This thrilling mystery is full of red herrings and revealed secrets, and no one is innocent. Jackson both sympathizes with and implicates characters, and takes advantage of readers’ assumptions to lead them away from the truth. Readers who love murder mysteries and strong female characters will be compelled to keep reading until every curiosity is satisfied.
Reviewer bio: Indigo Stephens is a violinist and a book lover. She enjoys reading books with strong female characters, especially sci-fi, murder mysteries, and Dystopian YA. Veronica Roth is one of her favorite authors, and one of her favorite series is A Good Girl’s Guide to Murder.
Rooted in the Midwest but at home anywhere, Glenna Luschei has spent over fifty years writing and supporting other writers in the midst of adventures that have taken her around the globe. Now in her late eighties and as vibrant as ever, Luschei has crafted a collection that comprises a retrospective of her life: her youth during World War II; her adventures in New Mexico, Colombia, Cuba, and elsewhere; and her ongoing love affair with the arts. Luschei relives highs and lows through these poems and reminds readers to live life to the fullest as we never know if tomorrow will be our last day.
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!
Another week and more storms. Mother Nature is sure giving us a great reason to stay inside to write, edit, and submit, isn’t she? In good news, NewPages is offering a 20% discount on annual subscriptions to our weekly newsletter. This makes it just $40. Consider subscribing today to get first access to submission opportunities and upcoming events, the majority before they go live on our site.
Let’s dive into our weekly roundup of submission opportunities without further ado.
The newest issue of Chinese Literature and Thought Today (vol. 53, no. 3–4, 2022) examines Chinese literature and culture in the time of contagion, and offers part two of a special section “Re-Aestheticizing Labor.” The featured scholar is Deng Xiaomang, an important philosopher and public intellectual. Moving to a mostly digital format, this full issue is available to read through Taylor & Francis Online. More developments are in the works for this already outstanding publication of intellectual literary culture – stay tuned!
After spending five years in LA working successfully as a screenwriter, the protagonist of this novel decides it’s time to return to his hometown, Santa Luz, New Mexico, to pen the novel he has always needed to write about the strained relationship with his father. He reconnects with old friends and meets new ones, and the parade of quirky characters—self-proclaimed artists, wealthy retirees, corrupt lawyers—distracts him from his project. There’s Helen, who hooks up with an unsavory character and winds up in jail—for murder. Sheryl can’t take her philandering husband anymore and drives her car off a mountaintop, killing herself and her children. And there’s Paul, who lives a double life as a happy family man, but who has a serious drug addiction. Against the backdrop of mystical mornings and beautiful mountains, the writer soon realizes things aren’t always what they seem in Santa Luz. The writer’s sympathies are with the working class, and his satirical gaze embraces the people who live in the shadows, those considered “misfits.” Jimmy Santiago Baca writes compellingly about artists and their responsibility to society.
The March 2023 issue of The Lake online poetry magazine is now available for reading and features works by Jean Atkin, Jimmy R. Coleman, Sandra Hosking, Beth McDonough, Bruce McRea, Jeff Mock, Leah Mueller, Wren Tuatha, and Susan Waters.
In Issue 3.4 of Cutleaf online, Craig Holt barely survives, and may have learned his lesson, in “Drinking the Ocean: Notes on Travel and Drowning.” A young man negotiates family expectations and his relationship with a widow in Maya Kanwal’s “A Shade for the Window.” And Carolyn Oliver says “In another life, I am…” in four poems that expand on the possibilities of what we all are or might be, beginning with the poem “Deep Learning.” This issue features stills from John Frankenheimer’s film “Seconds” (1966).
Notes from the Passenger by Gillian Conoley is a collection written over the course of the last few years, as the author sought for ways to make room for joy amongst an upturned and unsteady quotidian. Written in response to climatic and societal catastrophe, war, increasing gun violence, plague, and the global spread of white supremacy and patriarchy, the sonically vivid and cinematic poems in Notes from the Passenger arrive like missives from a journey between the living and the dead. Gillian’s use of play, music, and humor offers us pleasure when we need it most, reminding us to turn our heads toward the light. Gillian Conoley is the author of nine collections. A long-time resident of the San Francisco Bay Area, she is currently Professor of English and Poet-in-Residence at Sonoma State University where she edits VOLT.
A Thousand Ways to Pay Attention: A Memoir of Coming Home to My Neurodivergent Mind by Rebecca Schiller explores the several-year period when she untangled the threads of her health diagnoses and the background of the land she and her family recently purchased. Compared to my memoir intake, my nature reading is slim, but Schiller’s sumptuous sensorial descriptors of her small farm in the UK enmesh the reader in the landscape of its mucky, weather-beaten, seasonal wonders. Interwoven with this ecological narrative is the history of former owners of their two-acre property, including interpretive retellings of their experiences supported by primary documentation and literary device.
Schiller’s mental health is addressed through the first two-thirds of the book via her interactions with her children and spouse, foggy memory, clumsiness, and heightened anxiety and depression since moving to their farm. Her diagnosis, and understanding of her neurodivergence, encompass only the latter third of the book and thus feel rushed.
Part of the joy, and potential conundrum, of A Thousand Ways to Pay Attention is the sheer amount of content all wrapped in a book that contains too many gifts: first years on a small family farm, obtaining a health diagnosis, and researching and reinterpreting the history of the land around her.
Reviewer bio: Amanda Weir-Gertzog is a writer, gerontologist, and eater of too much milk chocolate. A caregiver and community volunteer, she also authors book reviews to compensate for her prodigious reading habits. Amanda lives in Durham, North Carolina with her partner, pets, and overflowing bookcases.
The newest issue of Cholla Needles (74) features inspiring artwork by Nancy Brizendine and life-affirming words by Dorianne Laux, Joseph Millar, Domonique, Zary Fakete, Miriam Sagan, Roger G. Singer, Ruth Ann Dandrea, Kent Wilson, Jeffrey Alfier, Peter Nash, and Jonathan Ferrini.
Latina Leadership Lessons: Fifty Latinas Speak edited by Delia García Arte Público Press, November 2022
The recipient of numerous awards and accolades, García gathers “Top Ten Leadership Lessons” from 50 high-achieving women. This “who’s who” of movers-and-shakers contains representatives from government, corporate and non-profit worlds. While each woman’s unique experiences and heritage are reflected in her advice, there are several recommendations that made many of the lists, such as the importance of believing in oneself, the need to mentor and be mentored, remembering one’s roots, embracing change and taking care of one’s physical and emotional needs.
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!
Publishing twice year, Action, Spectacle is a new open-access online magazine of just about everything you could want: fiction, nonfiction, poetry, plays, graphic literature, comics, interviews, reviews, and still and video art. A spectacle of options indeed, but actually, the publication draws its name from Marxist theorist, Guy Debord’s well-known book, The Society of the Spectacle, in which he suggests, “All that once was directly lived has become mere representation.” However, ‘mere’ is not the word that comes to mind when viewing contributions to Action, Spectacle.
The publication was begun by Adam Day, as he says, for “the sheer joy of getting to see what’s out there, getting to feature new voices, getting to feature work we love.” Joining him behind the scenes are Prose Editors Kate Tough, novelist and story writer, and Sarah Rose Cadorette, Creative Writing MFA and a Travel and Social Advocacy BA, both from Emerson College. “We also have several guest editors per issue,” Day adds, “Usually up to ten.”
Day himself brings some credentials as author of Left-Handed Wolf (LSU Press), and Model of a City in Civil War (Sarabande Books), and the recipient of a Poetry Society of America Chapbook Fellowship for Badger, Apocrypha, and of a PEN America Literary Award.
For writers looking to submit works, Day explains that “all general submissions are read by the editors. We do not have screeners. There is also work published from creators solicited by our guest editors. We do not provide feedback, and our response time is usually a month.”
A well-run publication with experienced writers and editors on the team, Day comments that “it’s been super rewarding starting and publishing Action, Spectacle. Thankfully we have yet to run into any major challenges in keeping the publication going, other than some glitches with our old website.”
For readers, Action, Spetacle has much to offer. Day says, “The magazine exists at the intersection of the socio-political, the cultural, and the arts. We put a spectrum of voices online, seeking both debut and established writers and thinkers creating intriguing and original work, whether relatively conventional or extremely experimental, and we don’t shy away from the idea of a text that might be ‘difficult.’ We employ the broadest possible aesthetic when considering submissions, including translations and hybrid and collaborative work.”
Some recent contributors include Anne Carson, Douglas Kearney, Ron Padgett, Shelley Wong, Rodrigo Toscano, Denise Duhamel, Lidija Dimkovska, and Anna Badkhen.
The future for Action, Spectacle includes “building readership and continuing to publish fresh and exciting work,” as well as an annual chapbook contest judged by Dara Wier. A good look forward for both readers and writers.
The Falling Crystal Palace by Carl Fuerst Planet Bizarro, February 2023
The residents of Sterling, Indiana don’t know who they are. They can’t recognize voices on the telephone. They can’t recognize faces in the mirror. When their name is called, they don’t respond. When they flip through family photo albums, it’s like looking at strangers. Sixty-one-year-old Tory Stebbins runs a one-person Identity Verification agency that can help. But, as the town implodes, so does her business. She has fewer clients, stiffer competition, and her methods have become mysteriously ineffective. Tory is broke, lonely, and—most alarmingly—she’s now suffering from the same problems she’s helped her clients with over the length of her career. Just when her situation seems beyond hope, Tory receives a cryptic message from Hoppy Bashford, her best friend who disappeared forty years earlier. Tory’s quest to rescue Hoppy leads her through the strange, shifting landscapes. With the help of her odd intern, her bitter business rival, and her astrophysicist ex-wife, Tory ultimately follows Hoppy’s trail to the Crystal Palace Resort. To locate her lost friend, escape from the resort, and find a cure for the identity-scrambling, reality-bending condition from which everyone in her world suffers, Tory must come to terms with who she is.
In addition to featuring winners of the 2022 Perkoff Prize, The Missouri Review Winter 2022 is themed “The Body” and includes new fiction from Dina Guidubaldi, Shala Erlich, Malerie Willens, Peter Grimes, and Robynne Graffam; new poetry from Bridget O’Bernstein, Anna V. Q. Ross, and Jeff Whitney; and new essays from Faith Shearin, Adam Boggon, and Joshua Doležal. Also included are features on dressing Greta Garbo and the influence of anime on contemporary art, and an omnibus review of contemporary memoirs about coming to terms with illness and affliction.
Fertility: 40 Years of Change by Maureen McTeer Delve Books, May 2022
In Fertility: 40 Years of Change, lawyer and author Maureen McTeer explores key medical, research, and legal developments in assisted human reproduction since the birth of the first IVF baby in 1978. With keen insight, she analyses how Canada has responded to the many legal and societal opportunities this foundational reproductive technology has created, such as new types of human relationships; the treatment of infertility; human embryo research; and the revolutionary possibilities for society raised by the combination of reproductive and genetic technologies, as we create, manipulate, and alter human life in the laboratory.
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!
Marry Me a Little by Rob Kirby Graphic Mundi, February 2023
In Marry Me a Little, Rob Kirby recounts his experience of marrying his longtime partner, John, just after same-sex marriage was legalized in Minnesota in 2013, and two years before the Supreme Court decision in Obergefell v. Hodges made same-sex marriage the law of the land. This is a personal story—about Rob’s ambivalence (if not antipathy) toward the institution of marriage, his loving relationship with John, and the life that they share together—set against the historical and political backdrop of shifting attitudes toward LGBTQ+ rights and marriage. With humor, candor, and a near-whimsical drawing style, Rob relates how he and John navigated this changing landscape, how they planned and celebrated their wedding, and how the LGBTQ+ community is now facing the very real possibility of setbacks to marriage equality.
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In her collection of essays, Bright Unbearable Reality, Anna Badkhen—a former war correspondent, now essayist—forces us to examine the reality of migration despite the desire to look away. As her title implies, she compels readers to see the true causes of the massive amounts of people—one in seven worldwide, she says—who relocate due to climate change or suffering related to new weather patterns and natural disasters. I had planned to write that those people are forced to relocate, but that would be a false passive, a sentence construction Badkhen points out that ignores the true action and actor in order to make ideas more palatable. Badkhen doesn’t allow the reader this comfort, as she continually highlights the systemic problems that those in the wealthier countries cause, while at the same time, those countries deny entry to those whom they have displaced. In her essay, “Ways of Seeing,” she points out that there is the surface reality that most of us who have the privilege of reading her book know and the reality of those whose lives enable us to have that privilege; the difference, to use one of her images, between the restaurants and hotels that line Waikiki and the hotel workers striking for a living wage.
Reviewer bio: Kevin Brown has published three books of poetry: Liturgical Calendar: Poems (Wipf and Stock); A Lexicon of Lost Words (winner of the Violet Reed Haas Prize for Poetry, Snake Nation Press); and Exit Lines (Plain View Press). He also has a memoir, Another Way: Finding Faith, Then Finding It Again, and a book of scholarship, They Love to Tell the Stories: Five Contemporary Novelists Take on the Gospels. Twitter @kevinbrownwrite or kevinbrownwrites.weebly.com/.
The Sins of Mortality by Marilyn Fox and Nancye McCrary EastOver Press, February 2023
The Sins of Sweet Mortality is a collection of poems by Marilyn Fox and illuminative paintings by Nancye McCrary. In this unique collaborative project with full-color images throughout, Fox and McCrary combine poetry with painting — juxtaposing voice and image, wonder and sensation — to create literary and visual work that is impassioned, thought-provoking, disturbing, and healing. Endlessly suggestive, consistently evocative, this work entices the reader into a deep dive to discover what’s beyond the surface.
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Exilium by María Negroni Translated by Michelle Gil-Montero Ugly Duckling Presse, December 2022
As Juan Gelman once wrote, “exile has no form but leaves a trace.” In Exilium, Argentine poet María Negroni sketches precisely such a trace, in a poetic form that approaches opposite extremes of material immediacy and evanescence. On an imaginative terrain that sweeps the Greco-Roman, the “long night” of Argentina’s last dictatorship, and the crisis of displaced migrants today, Negroni locates the exile within poetry itself. In this poetics of exile, the poem shines in its utopian desire to write the “unwritten words,” revealing language at its most estranged, most wanting.
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Happy March…or is it? Seems like the weather wants to really dive into March Madness this year. While the month has come in like a lamb, it’s going to be roaring soon here with yet another winter snowstorm coming in this afternoon and a rain/snowstorm possibly coming in on Monday. If mother nature is being very fickle in your neck of the woods, too, spend time indoors writing, editing, and submitting. NewPages is here to help with our weekly roundup of submission opportunities.
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The poems in Testament by Luke Hankins bear witness to traumas—cultural, personal, and spiritual—as well as moments of revelatory transport. While the catalyzing tragedies and dilemmas are never out of mind, these nuanced poems maintain faith in the act of speaking as a pathway through despair and toward transformation. Hankins is the author of two poetry collections and a collection of essays. He is the founder and editor of Orison Books, a non-profit literary press focused on the life of the spirit from a broad and inclusive range of perspectives.
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Sita in Exile by Rashi Rohatgi 2022 Novella Prize selected by Misha Rai Miami University Press, May 2023
When Indian American Sita moves to the Norwegian Arctic, she finds a warm welcome from Mona, a local surfer from a refugee family who sees her as someone with whom she can be herself. But Sita’s not sure how to reciprocate, for as she begins to discover impossible fruits in the forest, she grows more unsure of who she is: a happy wife, when her husband seems impatient with her inability to assimilate? A good mother, when she can’t fathom what her baby wants? A pet-killer, when she was just acting on instinct? A terrible person, for leaving behind her grieving father and her best friend Bhoomija, a brown feminist artist struggling to get by during the pandemic? Or someone even worse, as she finds herself drawn to Mona’s partner, Morten, who owns the only land on which she feels whole? When Bhoomija asks her to return home, Sita must take stock not only of the life she’s made in the far north with Mona, but also of the self she’s held back, lying in wait for forgiveness, and choose which version to make real. Drawing upon Hindu mythology, Sita in Exile is a lyrical exploration of migrant sisterhood and brown motherhood in today’s Europe.
Dreamer: Poems in Culture by Alan Botsford Cyberwit.net, January 2023
Dreamer: Poems in Culture, a companion volume with Possessions: Poems in American Poetry, features poems spoken in the voices of 170 contemporary cultural figures east and west, high and low, among them Lady Gaga, Clint Eastwood, Toni Morrison, Saul Williams, John Berger, Leonardo DiCaprio, Brad Pitt, Roger Federer, Joan Baez, Bong Joon Ho, Tom Hanks, Bill Maher, Jerry Seinfeld, Bob Dylan, Dave Chappelle, Rihanna, Claire Danes, Diane Seuss, Ocean Vuong, Pico Iyer, George Clooney, Angela Carter, Wendy C. Oritz, Maggie Nelson, Cheryl Strayed, Patti Smith, Julian Assange, Barack Obama, Marilynne Robinson, Camille Paglia, Laura Kipnis, Oprah Winfrey, Mary Gaitskill, Rachel Cusk, Kendrick Lamar, Yuval Noah Harari, and Lewis Hyde, to name a few. It is also an attempt to lay bare the workings of the shadow economy rooted in vernacular energies, exploring how our rational thought process is linked to our dream life.
Chasing Giants: In Search of the World’s Largest Freshwater Fish by Zeb Hogan and Stefan Lovgren University of Nevada Press, April 2023
Seeking to answer the question Which of the giant freshwater species is the largest? motivates Zeb Hogan to understand the various species he studies. The megafish’s numbers are dwindling, and the majority of them face extinction. He teams up with award-winning journalist Stefan Lovgren to tell, for the first time, the remarkable and troubling story of the world’s largest freshwater fish. It is a story that stretches across the globe, chronicling a race against the clock to find and protect these ancient leviathans before they disappear forever. Chasing Giants combines science, adventure, and wonder to provide insights into the key role the massive fish of our lakes and rivers play in our past, present, and future.
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Ellie is twenty-four years old, stuck in a dead-end job, and questioning the meaning of life when she meets the much older Calvin. It’s as if her deepest wish has been granted. Star of the Buddhist teaching circuit in New York’s Greenwich Village, his wisdom is exactly what she’s been seeking. When she becomes the center of his attention, it’s almost pure bliss…until it becomes clear that Calvin expects sex as part of the bargain. At first reluctant, Ellie gradually falls ever more deeply in love, until Calvin is all she can think about. Calvin’s lectures stress the Buddhist concept of non-attachment, but that doesn’t salve her wounds when he abandons her. Suddenly alone, Ellie must find a way to heal from her loss, but not before devotion to her teacher takes her halfway across the world to Tibet, and puts her life in real danger. Hope for the Worst asks just how far someone will go for love.
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The Grand Promise by Rebekah Anderson Empty Bowl Press, June 2022
The Grand Promise by Rebekah Anderson takes readers back to the 1930s New Deal public works program. An Eastern Washington town is uprooted and a family grapples with personal and financial dilemmas. A father resists inevitable change and enters into a fierce conflict with his son. The historic construction of the Grand Coulee Dam, a massive project destined to bring prosperity to the Pacific Northwest, will also destroy the family’s home and their town, but it will change the lives of their community and the lives of indigenous people who have sustained themselves on the Columbia River for generations. The Grand Promise is a work of literary fiction loosely based on Anderson’s family history.
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Sinners on Fox Street: A Novella and Stories by Yolanda Gallardo Arte Público Press, November 2022
In this poignant and often humorous account of growing up in the Bronx in the 1950s, Yolanda Gallardo’s mischievous young character vividly recalls her childhood as the neighborhood changed from Jewish to Latino. She and her siblings swam in the East River, despite the rats and garbage; watched police beat up local kids; and got involved in gangs, like the Royals and Young Sinners. Their family was financially impoverished, but there were many happy times as they watched their parents dance to “hick Spanish records,” helped their mom cook pasteles and learned to dance the mambo and cha-cha.
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adjacent islands by Nicole Cecilia Delgado Translated by Urayoán Noel Ugly Duckling Presse, December 2022
Nicole Cecilia Delgado’s poetry in adjacent islands is intimate yet poised toward the radically communitarian, both in the people and histories evoked and in the collaborative and unabashedly political orientation of her editorial and publishing work. adjacent islands / islas adyacentes is a bilingual edition of her artist books amoná (2013) and subtropical dry (2016), both based on camping trips to islands in the Puerto Rican archipelago: the uninhabited Mona to the west of the main island and the municipality of Vieques to the east (Amoná and Bieké in the reconstructed indigenous Taíno language). Challenging the insularist logic that has historically defined Puerto Rican national imaginaries, on these adjacent islands, people and nature connect in unexpected ways, as Delgado documents the art of survival under military occupation, extractivism, and the surveillance state. Part of a larger corpus of what Delgado calls “camping books,” adjacent islands / islas adjacentes seeks to translate the intemperie (open sky) of the camping trip onto the confines of the page. Delgado follows the late Ulises Carrión in enacting a networked book art where “communication is still inter-subjective, but it occurs in a concrete, real, physical space—the page.” Call it book art as counterarchive.
The title for Magic Nation #1 by Ellen O’Grady comes from her having misunderstood her mother, who said, “You sure have an imagination.” Instead, Ellen hears, “magic nation.” Indeed much more fitting for what she offers readers in this first installment of her ongoing graphic autobiography. Originally published on SOLRAD, Magic Nation recounts memories from O’Grady’s childhood of time spent meandering a wooded lot near her home. She sings lines from the Grizzly Adams television theme song, at times having him and his friend Nakoma join her as she goes wandering. She takes readers on an exploration of an abandoned pool and pool house, conjuring past lives lived in darkly shaded imagery, then back out into the brilliantly colored natural world. Her interactions with natural life are as delicate as her graphic style, using fine lines in a mixture of semi-realism and minimalism. Most striking are the unfinished lines that don’t complete figures and white spaces where she doesn’t take the watercolors right to the edge. This creates a kind of soft invitation for viewers to participate in completing the pictures, bringing their own imaginations into play. A beautiful and thoughtfully paced narrative and a welcome meditative escape to visit again and again.
Magic Nation #1 by Ellen O’Grady. Fieldmouse Press, September 2022.
Reviewer bio: Denise Hill is Editor of NewPages.com and reviews books she chooses based on her own personal interests.
