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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!

Editor’s Choice :: New Book :: Slim Blue Universe

Slim Blue Universe: Poems by Eleanor Lerman book cover image

Slim Blue Universe: Poems by Eleanor Lerman
Mayapple Press, February 2024

Slim Blue Universe is acclaimed author Eleanor Lerman’s seventh collection of poetry. Her work speaks to readers in different voices – the Woodstock generation grown older, social activists still raging at the powers that be, lovers remembering days of paradise, and lonely dreamers still dreaming of better days to come – that weave together both the joys of life and its many afflictions. The poems in this collection ache with longing for what has been lost along the journey through a life shaped by the volatile middle years of the 20th century and with a yearning to look beyond the human horizon to whatever mysterious pathways may lie just up ahead.

Eleanor Lerman established a fifty-year history of published works, including numerous award-winning collections of poetry, short stories, and novels. One of the youngest people ever to be named a finalist for the National Book Award in Poetry, she also won the inaugural Juniper Prize from the University of Massachusetts Press and the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize from the American Academy of Poets, among other accolades for poetry as well as fiction.

Editor’s Choice is not a paid promotion; selections are made solely at the discretion of the editor. To discover more great books from small, independent, and university presses, visit the NewPages Guide to Publishers as well as our Books Received monthly roundup. Subscribe to our weekly newsletter to stay up to date!

Book Review :: To Free the Captives by Tracy K. Smith

To Free the Captives by Tracy K. Smith book cover image

Guest Post by Kevin Brown

In To Free the Captives, poet Tracy K. Smith brings her lyrical writing style to the essay form, as she explores what it means to be Black in America today. Rather than straightforward essays laying out an argument, though, Smith uses parts of her life—her marriage and motherhood, for example—as entry points into meditations on the world as she experiences it.

She ruminates on the difference between being Free (white) and Freed (Black) throughout the collection, as she reminds readers that the past is as present as ever, for good and ill. She draws on the lineage she knows and delves into her family history, but she also looks to the broader Black culture for ancestors who can support her and the other Freed, as they continue to shape lives of meaning and beauty.

This approach isn’t metaphorical for Smith, as she feels those who have come before her speaking to her and guiding her in who she should be and who she could yet become. Her subtitle of “A Plea for the American Soul” reminds readers that both the Free and Freed must live in and through this past, as we all seek to create a present and future together; ignoring the past will only deepen the divide that has always existed in the American soul.

To Free the Captives by Tracy K. Smith. Alfred A. Knopf, 2023.

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.

Magazine Stand :: Rain Taxi – Fall 2023

Rain Taxi Review Fall 2023 print edition cover image

For screen-time aficionados, Rain Taxi Review of Books has been continuing to post reviews, interviews, and features to their Fall Online Edition. Some gems in this “issue” include a dialogic review (by dynamic duo Pierre Joris & Nicole Peyrafitte) of Enheduana: The Complete Poems of the World’s First Author and a feature on Jim Starlin’s Warlock comics (any Marvel fans out there?); reviews of three new poetry books in translation; interviews with Mary Jo Bang and David Jauss; and a nice handful of fiction, nonfiction, and comics reviews. Check them out (and stay tuned for a few more additions) before this season’s Online Edition wraps up, and visit their website to find out how to have the print edition of Rain Taxi delivered.

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 in our monthly roundup or featured on our blog and social media, please contact us.

Where to Submit Roundup: December 8, 2023

40 Submission Opportunities including calls for submissions, writing contests, and book prizes.

As always, Mother Nature likes to keep us guessing. If you’re also experiencing odd weather in your neck of the woods, NewPages has the perfect excuse to keep you indoors with our weekly roundup of submission opportunities for the first full week of December 2023.

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. You also receive our monthly eLitPak Newsletter which features even more opportunities and other literary goodness.

Continue reading “Where to Submit Roundup: December 8, 2023”

Sponsored :: New Book :: Dead Men Cast No Shadows

cover of Sergio Ramirez' Dead Men Cast No Shadows translated by Daryl R. Hague

Dead Men Cast No Shadows: The Managua Trilogy 3, Novel by Sergio Ramirez translated from Spanish by Daryl R. Hague

McPherson & Company, October 2023

Forcibly exiled to Honduras at the conclusion of No One Weeps for Me Now, Inspector Dolores Morales returns in Sergio Ramirez’s final, stand-alone volume of The Managua Trilogy, accompanied by a cast of brave priests, corrupt secret service agents, washed up former foot soldiers, and out-for-themselves vestiges of mid-century ideals, all colliding in this exuberant portrait of the depredations of oligarchs and dictators, the human cost of promises deferred, and the implacable hopes and resolve of Nicaraguans.

“Dead Men Cast No Shadows is an enormously entertaining novel about responses to perfidy in high places by one of the most prominent writers in the Spanish-speaking world. It is a courageous act of political defiance; Ramírez has paid a painful price for simply putting pen to paper to tell the truth. . . . He examines a shameful period in Nicaraguan history through the lens of a police/detective yarn and he succeeds magnificently.”— Brooks Geikan, The Arts Fuse

Now living in exile in Spain, Sergio Ramirez is the only Central American author ever to be awarded the Cervantes Prize, the highest honor in Spanish language letters.

New Lit on the Block :: SWING

SWING literary magazine cover image Autumn 2023

Nothing invites company more than a gently swaying porch swing on a beautiful day, which makes SWING an aptly named biannual print publication of fiction, poetry, nonfiction, and comics, welcoming readers and writers alike. Also aptly named, shares Editor Leigh Anne Couch, as SWING is published by “an incredible literary nonprofit in Nashville called The Porch. Not only do we share a budget and staff, but a spirit of openness and curiosity. The word swing points, prismatically, toward objects and actions and relationships, toward music and influence and ambivalence. It won’t be pinned down, and yet it’s securely attached to The Porch.”

For readers and writers, this connection bodes well in our tumultuous times of publication defunding and rocky start-ups, to which Couch is no newcomer. Formerly at Duke University Press, the Greensboro Review, and the Sewanee Review, she is now a freelance editor, who edits the poetry series Sewanee Poetry at LSU, and has published several poetry collections of her own. “SWING grew out of the ethos of The Porch,” Couch says, “and the longing of its editor to experience the thrill of treasure hunting and mysterious resonances again after a five-year break from working in literary magazines. Its ethos is about connection: the unintended and therefore mysterious dialogue between the poems, stories, and essays within.”

Continue reading “New Lit on the Block :: SWING”

Magazine Stand :: Valley Voices – Fall 2023

Valley Voices Fall 2023 cover image

The Fall 2023 issue of Valley Voices includes contributions about experiences of memorable moments in the Civil Rights Movement. Robert Butler’s short memoir presents his experience as a teacher at Tougaloo College and his participation as a marcher in Port Gibson. Diane Williams remembers the riots in Newark, New Jersey, in 1967 when she was a 14-year-old girl.

Creative expressions by other writers include poetic tributes to historical figures, immigrant life, police violence, and racial crimes. Toru Kiuchi’s essay surveys the Kokura Incident and its significance as “a trigger for a true and definite integration in the Army and in the United States.” Charlie R. Braxton’s essay discusses human rights in Africa. Further, Mack Hassler’s empathetic poem about the goose and Ted McCormack’s essay about collective wisdom lead to other issues as well as harmony rather than discord in our global society.

Although Valley Voices has decided not to publish reviews anymore, it did gather a few related to the theme of the issue, including Jerome Berglund’s review of William R. Ferris’s book of photography, I Am A Man.

Magazine Stand :: Jewish Fiction .net Issue 35

The newest issue of Jewish Fiction .net just came out, and Editor Nora Gold welcomes readers to their 35th issue which celebrates Chanukah. In Issue 35 readers will find 12 terrific stories originally written in Russian, Hebrew, Yiddish, and English. “We hope these stories enhance your celebration of the upcoming holiday, and especially in these challenging times we wish you and those you love a Chanukah filled with miracles and light!” This is also an exciting time for Jewish Fiction .net: one of their stories was selected for the Pushcart Prize and published last month in the latest The Pushcart Prize: Best of the Small Presses anthology!

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 in our monthly roundup or featured on our blog and social media, please contact us.

Book Review :: The Future by Naomi Alderman

The Future by Naomi Alderman book cover image

Guest Post by Kevin Brown

The Future, Naomi Alderman’s latest novel, is set in a near-future America that’s dominated by three tech companies: Fantail, Anvil, and Medlar. Those companies are a clear combination of social media sites (ranging from Facebook to TikTok), Apple, and Amazon, and their three leaders echo attributes of Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, and Steve Jobs.

I would like to say that the fictional companies are doing far more damage to Alderman’s world than their real-life inspiration, but I could only say that for certain because Alderman lets readers know what her CEOs are actually up to. They’re preparing for the end of the world, as was Martha Einkorn — who was raised in a cult that focused on preparing for the end of the world, but who has become the assistant for the CEO of Fantail — and Lai Zhen, a survivalist who’s become famous thanks to her online presence.

They meet and begin a relationship that is complicated by the billionaires’ seeming desire to bring about the end of the world as they know it. Alderman’s satire of our technology-obsessed world and the egos that run it is spot on, but she also creates characters worth caring about.

Readers won’t just want the world to continue because they want to see the tech leaders lose, but because they want Martha and Lai Zhen to live on.

The Future by Naomi Alderman. Simon and Schuster, November 2023.

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.

Magazine Stand :: The Lake – December 2023

The Lake online magazine of poetry and reviews logo image

The Lake December 2023 issue of poetry and poetics is now online featuring works by Beatriu Delaveda, Chris Dornon, Alexanda Etheridge, Tim Fellows, Willian Ogden Haynes, Mary Beth Hines, David James, Carolyn Martin, Sandra Noel, Ian Parks, Frances Sackett, J. R. Solonche. Book reviews include Jaswinder Bolina’s English as a Second Language, Alan Catlin’s How Will the Heart Endure?, and J.V. Birch’s ice cream ‘n’ tar. “One Poem Reviews” features one poem from a poet’s new collection, and this month spotlights works by Katherine Coda, Jonaki Ray, and Hannah Stone.

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 in our monthly roundup or featured on our blog and social media, please contact us.

Book Review :: Dear Park Ranger by Jeff Darren Muse

Dear Park Ranger by Jeff Darren Muse book cover image

Guest Post by Susan Kay Anderson

Imagine zoning out during a campfire talk at a National Park, wondering what the ranger’s life is really like during their off-hours. . . This book of essays satisfies some of that curiosity as Jeff Darren Muse takes readers through his life’s journey. Muse offers the ins and outs of his profession through carefully constructed prose and is very entertaining in his telling. In his chapter “SAR Talk,” Muse describes being behind the counter while his co-rangers pack up gear: “The counter is important, I tell myself. The lead ranger put me here because I’m good with people. […] I’ve got a shiny badge that looks like a toy. I’ve got a buzz cut, a thinning hairline. I’m in my own damn storm. On a ledge. Stuck.” Here, Muse is talking about his own anger that has put him “on a ledge.” This writing explores how Muse rescues himself by acknowledging what is around him and what and who has traveled before him. Gary Snyder is one of his role models, and Muse shares private thoughts and experiences walking in Snyder’s footsteps, traveling further and further into ranger adventures.

Dear Park Ranger by Jeff Darren Muse. Wayfarer Books, May 2023.

Reviewer bio: Susan Kay Anderson lives in southwestern Oregon’s Umpqua River Basin. Her long poem “Man’s West Once” was selected for Barrow Street Journal’s “4 X 2 Project” and is included in Mezzanine (2019). Anderson also published Virginia Brautigan Aste’s memoir, Please Plant This Book Coast To Coast (2021).

Magazine Stand :: The Greensboro Review – Fall 2023

The Greensboro Review Fall 2023 cover image

The 114th Greensboro Review features the winner of the 2023 Amon Liner Poetry Prize, Madeleine Poole’s “Pile of Maggots,” as well as an Editor’s Note, “In Praise of LitMags,” by Terry L. Kennedy. In this Fall 2023 issue, discover new flash fiction, poems, and stories from an outstanding group of more than two dozen emerging and established writers, including Allison Field Bell, Stacie Cassarino, Sasha Debevec-McKenney, Corinne Dekkers, Chard deNiord, Arielle Hebert, John Hoppenthaler, Nalea J. Ko, AG Latham, Michael Meyerhofer, Ania Mroczek, John A. Nieves, Rachel Richardson, Robert Stone, and Mimi Yang.

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 in our monthly roundup or featured on our blog and social media, please contact us.

Editor’s Choice :: Tandem

Tandem: A Novel by Andy Mozina book cover image

Tandem: A Novel by Andy Mozina
Tortoise Books, October 2023

In Andy Mozina’s novel Tandem, Mike Kovacs is an economics professor who’s trying to get over a bitter divorce. He is barely on speaking terms with his only child. And he has just killed two bicyclists in an inebriated hit-and-run at a deserted Michigan beach.

Claire Boland’s daughter is one of the victims. She’s racked with guilt over what she might have done differently as a parent. Her marriage is buckling under the weight of the tragedy. And yet there’s one person who seems to understand the magnitude of her grief—her neighbor, Mike Kovacs.

Tandem is a dark comedy about two lives that intersect in the most awful way possible. Mozina’s novel details the absurd lengths people go to avoid uncomfortable truths. It’s an exploration of the weight of guilt and the longing for justice—and the extreme lengths we will go to for love.

Andy Mozina is the author of the novel Contrary Motion (Spiegel & Grau) and two story collections: Quality Snacks was a finalist for the Flannery O’Connor Award, and The Women Were Leaving the Men won the GLCA New Writers Award. He teaches literature and creative writing at Kalamazoo College.

Editor’s Choice is not a paid promotion; selections are made solely at the discretion of the editor; descriptions are from the publisher’s website. To discover more great books from small, independent, and university presses, visit the NewPages Guide to Publishers as well as our Books Received monthly roundup. Subscribe to our weekly newsletter to stay up to date!

Magazine Stand :: Cutleaf – November 2023

Cutleaf November 2023 issue cover image

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: Kathleen Gibbons reunites a father and daughter after many years apart in “I’m On Highway 1”; Jude Marr explores concepts of space and movement in three poems beginning with “Moving Continents”; George Singleton remembers what could have been lost over a conversation in his local diner in “Thanksgiving”; Matt Cashion’s characters sweat it out in a waiting room in “Love Song for the Headless”; Jennifer LoveGrove reminds us that “it’s embarrassing to still hope / to be loved” in three poems beginning with “We are all touch-me-nots now, exploding at the slightest provocation”; and Mary Winsor examines how hard it is to be at the bedside of a miracle in “Defying the Gods.”

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 in our monthly roundup or featured on our blog and social media, please contact us.

Book Review :: Songs From The Dementia Suitcase by Karen Massey

Songs From The Dementia Suitcase by Karen Massey book cover image

Guest Post by Susan Kay Anderson

In response to Karen Massey’s Songs From The Dementia Suitcase, I wonder who would want these songs, let alone be handed this suitcase, when the whole world is at odds with memory (past wrongs/wars/devastation)? Well, what I found inside this excellent work was a surprise in the form of a short poem of found material called “Two Blue Songs,” which Massey notes uses Virginia Woolf’s “The Waves” as a source text. “Two Blue Songs” is folded into narrative poems having to do with family and caregiving. Not that the work is bereft of these; what surprises me is the wonderful short parts to it, divided “1.” and “2.” which look a little old-fashioned, yet so familiar and comforting when the poem glides into the unknown: “all the world thick with swans” and “it is summer it is winter.” Stumbling upon this poem was a moment of grace and understanding, if such a thing can be said of the understanding of dementia and its stealth. It is so, so difficult to write about dementia without sounding sappy or drippy. Maybe the key to what this is all about is indeed in waves and the soothing nature of water.

Songs From The Dementia Suitcase by Karen Massey. above/ground press, August 2023.

Reviewer bio: Susan Kay Anderson lives in southwestern Oregon’s Umpqua River Basin. Her long poem “Man’s West Once” was selected for Barrow Street Journal’s “4 X 2 Project” and is included in Mezzanine (2019). Anderson also published Virginia Brautigan Aste’s memoir, Please Plant This Book Coast To Coast (2021).

Sponsored :: New Book :: Dirty Suburbia

cover of Dirty Suburbia, a book by Sara Hosey

Dirty Suburbia, Fiction by Sara Hosey

Vine Leaves Press, January 2024

The stories in Sara Hosey’s stunning collection, Dirty Suburbia, trace the lives of girls and women struggling to live with dignity in a world that often hates them.

Dirty suburbias are working-class neighborhoods in which girls who are left to fend for themselves sometimes become predators, as well as affluent communities in which women discover that money is no protection against sexism, both their own and others’.

Where to Submit Roundup: December 1, 2023

46 Submission Opportunities including calls for submissions, writing contests, and book prizes.

And time keeps marching on. Happy December! Mother Nature is having fun with us deciding to mix rain and snow together to create a big slushy mess for us in Michigan today. If you’re weather is just as messy, NewPages is here with our first weekly roundup of submission opportunities for December 2023. A perfect excuse to stay indoors and keep those submission goals you set for yourself going as strong as possible. As it is the first of the month, there are a host of new opportunities to enjoy.

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. You also receive our monthly eLitPak Newsletter which features even more opportunities and other literary goodness.

Continue reading “Where to Submit Roundup: December 1, 2023”

Magazine Stand :: Colorado Review – Fall/Winter 2023

Colorado Review Fall/Winter 2023 issue cover image

In her Colorado Review Fall/Winter 2023 essay, “Reconsidering the Sunflowers,” Stephanie Harrison recalls her father’s habit of painting just one side of their family’s house a different color each year and the moment she saw this through fresh eyes: “Something in me had blinked and refocused. It was like the optical illusion I’d marveled over in fifth grade: beautiful woman or hag? Definitely hag. Once I’d seen it, I couldn’t stop seeing it.” A stand-in for her father’s sense of self, the house reflects the elusiveness of his identity — ever-shifting throughout their relationship — and ultimately his struggles with mental health. Questions of identity and self are at the heart of this issue, as characters — and writers — examine themselves closely in pivotal moments and ask some hard questions. This issue also features work by Jonathan W. Chu, Christopher Citro, Timothy Donnelly, Lindsey Drager, K. S. Dyal, Suzie Eckl, John Gallaher, Adam Giannelli, Jacob M. Hall, Chengru He, Karan Kapoor, John Kinsella, Arah Ko, Brandon Krieg, Jami Macarty, Caleb A. P. Parker, Susan Rich, Petra Salazar, Liane Strauss, Amy Stuber, Jaz Sufi, Eugene Stein, Cole Swensen, Sher Ting, Marc Vincenz, Hannah V. Warren, Tana Jean Welch & Brad Wetherell.

Book Review :: Where Are the Snows by Kathleen Rooney

Where Are the Snows by Kathleen Rooney book cover image

Guest Post by Susan Kay Anderson

Kathleen Rooney’s, Where Are the Snows, is dedicated “To the future.” This book of prose-influenced poems seems longer than seventy-three pages. Mainly consisting of long sentences reaching across the page like obsessions, it is beautifully made, with attractive cover and front matter graphics. The Table of Contents seems demure because of its scallop-edged border. Line breaks are not of concern here. Instead, being entertaining is. Underneath the jokes and ironic spins, Rooney blends advice column writing with poetry. Each poem is about a fact or observation and explores every facet as far as the imagination will go. In “The Point in Time or Space At Which Something Originates,” Rooney explores “newness,” the word “new,” and “beginnings.” She writes: “Can beginner’s luck apply from moment to moment? Not sure, but I hope so.” I wouldn’t go as far as saying she uses the techniques of stand-up comedians, but elements are here in what gets turned around. In the poem, “Foretelling the Future by a Randomly Chosen Passage from a Book,” Rooney concludes: “Quick! Somebody give me another assignment. Somebody tell me that what we do matters.” Rooney’s book matters. Laughing during the pain of life matters.

Where Are the Snows by Kathleen Rooney. Texas A&M University Press, September 2022.

Reviewer bio: Susan Kay Anderson lives in southwestern Oregon’s Umpqua River Basin. Her long poem “Man’s West Once” was selected for Barrow Street Journal’s “4 X 2 Project” and is included in Mezzanine (2019). Anderson also published Virginia Brautigan Aste’s memoir, Please Plant This Book Coast To Coast (2021).

Magazine Stand :: Consequence – Fall 2023

cover of Consequence Volume 15.2

Consequence Volume 15.2 (Fall 2023) features works from authors and artists from around the world who offer hard-won truths and insights into the realities of war and geopolitical violence. These realities include a young transgender man making sense of his father’s experiences while fighting in Korea, the multiple perspectives surrounding US soldiers being spit on when returning from Vietnam, and the history of a country as revealed to a young woman by anonymous, pre-WWII photographs. There are also works that address the ways we express these realities in the latest installation of our “What is War Poetry?” series. Earlier installations focused on these expressions via The Iliad and the Bhagavad Gita. In this iteration, writers explore these depictions through a different lens, through texts and ideas that could be construed as antiwar. The editors are excited to share this volume!

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 in our monthly roundup or featured on our blog and social media, please contact us.

Magazine Stand :: The Malahat Review – Issue 224

The Malahat Review 224 issue cover image

Established in 1967, The Malahat Review is a quarterly literary magazine dedicated to publishing the best poetry, fiction, and creative nonfiction by Canadian and international writers. Their current fall issue #224 showcases cover art by Cammie Staros, Far Horizons Award for Short Fiction winner Eleanor Fuller, and new work by Odette Auger, Chee Brossy, Alicia Gee, Karine Hack, Warren Heiti, Mark Anthony Jarman, Joseph Kidney, Y. S. Lee, Winshen Liu, Sadie McCarney, Matt Robinson, Kawai Shen, Sun Tzu-Ping (translated by Nicholas Wong), Rhea Tregebov, and Olivia Wenzel (translated by Sylvia Franke). Visit their website for more info and to sign up for their email list to receive their monthly newsletter with author interviews, contest entry deals, info on upcoming issues, and more.

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 in our monthly roundup or featured on our blog and social media, please contact us.

Sponsored :: New Book :: Strange Attractors

cover of Strange Attractors: The Ephrem Stories by Janice Deal

Strange Attractors: The Ephrem Stories, Fiction by Janice Deal

New Door Books, September 2023

In Janice Deal’s linked story collection, everyday people navigate the uncertainties of life in the American heartland, seeking order in chaos with a very human mix of resilience and folly.

At first glance, the fictional Ephrem, Illinois, seems a friendly, familiar town—it draws you right in, even if you don’t need supplies at the mall or a snack at Brat Station. But as you come closer, you discover people who are complex and unpredictable. Life itself is capricious, and loneliness can turn a person strange. Yet there’s much affection here, small and large examples of human kindness.

For years, Janice Deal has been publishing award-winning stories about Ephrem. (Reviewers have compared them to Anton Chekhov, Sherwood Anderson, and Flannery O’Connor.) Now assembled for the first time, these extraordinary tales offer a masterful snapshot of life in today’s small-town America.

Janice Deal is the author of a novel, The Sound of Rabbits, and a previous story collection, The Decline of Pigeons. Stories from Strange Attractors have won The Moth Short Story Prize and the Cagibi Macaron Prize. Janice has also received an Illinois Arts Council Artists Fellowship Award for prose.

Magazine Stand :: The Fiddlehead – Autumn 2023

The Fiddlehead issue 297 cover image

The Fiddlehead No. 297 (Autumn 2023) features poetry, fiction, creative nonfiction, and reviews written by some of the best new and established writers. Contributors include Anne Marie Todkill — winner of our 2023 Creative Nonfiction contest — Jack Wang, David Ly, Annick MacAskill, Bryn Harris, and many more. Visit The Fiddlehead website to see a full list of contributors, read excerpts from selected works, and order a copy of No. 297. Cover art is Fall Canoe Route by Réjean Roy.

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 in our monthly roundup or featured on our blog and social media, please contact us.

Book Review :: Under the Skin by Linda Villarosa

Under the Skin by Linda Villarosa book cover image

Guest Post by Kevin Brown

Linda Villarosa’s Under the Skin: The Hidden Toll of Racism on American Lives and on the Health of Our Nation exposes the overt and hidden racism that runs throughout the healthcare industry, as well as other health-related concerns—such as the influence of social and physical living conditions on mortality. Villarosa draws on the history of health and medicine to show the variety of ways the then-legalized and socially accepted racism continues to affect how healthcare professionals today see people of color, especially African Americans. What was once obvious and intentional is now built into systems, whether that’s the way research privileges the white body or medical technologies continue the bias against Black bodies. One of her main throughlines is how the medical establishment doesn’t listen to African Americans, especially women, and especially mothers. No matter what their socioeconomic status or education level, African Americans have to work to convince those in the healthcare system that their pain is real, that their suffering needs attention. Time and time again, those pleas are ignored, leading to higher rates of mortality among minority communities, again, especially in maternal deaths. Villarosa ends the book by focusing on the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic, but she also ends with hope that changes are happening, even amid such continued suffering.

Under the Skin: The Hidden Toll of Racism on American Lives and on the Health of Our Nation by Linda Villarosa. Doubleday, May 2023.

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

Where to Submit Roundup: November 24, 2023

45 Submission Opportunities including calls for submissions, writing contests, and book prizes.

Where to Submit Roundup 2023

I hope that you all had a happy and safe Thanksgiving filled with good food and good company. If you’re ready to tackle some more submission goals while munching on all the Thanksgiving leftovers, NewPages has you covered with our weekly roundup of submission opportunities for the week of November 24, 2023. As November will officially be over with next week, don’t forget to get submissions in for November 30 deadlines!

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. You also receive our monthly eLitPak Newsletter which features even more opportunities and other literary goodness.

Continue reading “Where to Submit Roundup: November 24, 2023”

Magazine Stand :: The First Line – Fall 2023

The First Line Spring 2023 cover image

The First Line Fall 2023 issue tasked writers with the line, “As soon as Harriet entered the building, she headed to the seventh floor.” Contributors include Brian Shaw, Gretchen Oliver, Footnotes by Doug Devaney, Georgi Presecky, Ruswa Fatehpuri, Alison Morretta, Vernon McDonald, Harriet Takes a Ride by Mary Corbin, and an essay by A. R. Cochrane. The First Lines for 2024 have been announced along with their deadlines. Visit the publication’s website for complete submission information.

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 in our monthly roundup or featured on our blog and social media, please contact us.

Magazine Stand :: Collateral – 8.2

Online literary magazine Collateral logo

The Fall 2023 (8.2) issue of Collateral is now online for readers to share in the contributions of literary and visual art revealing the impact of military service and violent conflict beyond the combat zone. The publication features poetry by Karen Arnold, Sarwa Azeez, Sarah Colby, Leonore Hildebrandt, James King, Ron Lavalette, Antony Owen, Zara Raab, Siavash Saadlou, Danielle Sellers, J.C. Todd, B.A. Van Sise, and Charles Weld; fiction by J. Malcolm Garcia, Marc Levy, Joseph Porter, and Yuhan Tang; creative nonfiction by MaxieJane Frazier, Barbara Krasner, and Jennifer Eden Rogers; and an interview with featured visual artist Amber Zora.

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 in our monthly roundup or featured on our blog and social media, please contact us.

Book Review :: So Late in the Day by Claire Keegan

So Late in the Day by Claire Keegan book cover image

Guest Post by Kevin Brown

So Late in the Day, Claire Keegan’s latest collection of stories is subtitled “stories of women and men.” That could just as well read, “stories of women who are trying to live their lives and men who attempt to thwart them.” The middle of three stories, “The Long and Painful Death,” originally published in 2007, tells of a writer who just wants to use her two weeks at a retreat to produce new work, but one man intrudes upon her solitude. She reverts to societal expectations of what a woman should do to entertain a guest, ruining her day. The final story, “Antarctica,” first published in 1999, is more extreme in the complications that ensue. It’s the title story, though, that is the gem of this strong collection. Keegan published it last year, and it is a story that speaks to the gender dynamics of our time. The premise is simple, as it follows a man who meets a woman, then proposes to her. However, their relationship doesn’t go as planned, and he has the opportunity to learn about the world and women, but he learns exactly the wrong lesson. Keegan’s style, as always, is sparse and powerful, much like Chekhov, her favorite writer (who makes an appearance in the middle story). Keegan creates women who want to craft meaningful lives in the world, but the men who interact with them do their best to prevent those lives from coming to fruition.

So Late in the Day by Claire Keegan. Grove Press, 2023

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/.

New Book :: With Death, an Orange Segment Between Our Teeth

With Death, an Orange Segment Between Our Teeth by Marie-Claire Bancquart book cover image

With Death, an Orange Segment Between Our Teeth by Marie-Claire Bancquart
Translated from the French by Wendeline A. Hardenberg
Orison Books, November 2023

Marie-Claire Bancquart (1932–2019) was a prolific and prize-winning French poet, novelist, essayist, and critic. In her poetry, she combines an erudite vocabulary and references to classical literature with an earthy sensibility and a fascination with experiencing the smallest moments of everyday life fully. The deceptive simplicity of her poems lays bare the mysteries underlying the world we inhabit and our very existence. Wendeline A. Hardenberg’s careful and skillful translations are sure to broaden the audience for this significant poet as yet too little known outside of France.

To discover more great books from small, independent, and university presses, visit the NewPages Guide to Publishers as well as our Books Received monthly roundup. Subscribe to our weekly newsletter to stay up to date!

Book Review :: Good Grief, the Ground by Margaret Ray

Good Grief, the Ground by Margaret Ray book cover image

Guest Post by Jami Macarty

In Good Grief, the Ground, Margaret Ray’s debut collection, “we are in Central Florida.” It is late summer. We are coming of age, making out at the movies, sneaking into a pool, navigating gender tensions and expectations, and “no one is dead yet.” The poet writes personally of “the cusp of childhood” and adulthood and expands socio-politically to “the border / between” a “violent history / of colonialization” and what we “get away with… because” we “are white,” between queer desire and autonomy, between “this woman and wanting” “and wanting to be.” There is “a glow of danger and ferocity pulsing off” Ray’s lines, a ”buzzing-heat-made-into-sound that means” “we change // when we can name things.” But in reality “naming it’s no inoculation against / what happens in every parking lot alone at night.” There are “too many dead women.” In these poems, Ray is the one who carries both her younger and adult selves “across the threshold” where “[c]hildren are made of risk” and “someone says hysterectomy.” Whether we are children or adults, “everything / has always arranged itself into before / and after.” Everyone has to be “fluent in the grammar / of emergency.” The poems emit “the feeling of being ready to go somewhere,” but soon realize “there were never any good exit strategies.” Considering this ground of no exit, do we continue to risk “betting on anything” or do we go about “inoculating … against / hope”? Ray’s poems strive toward “self-sufficient womanhood” to “build the version where memory works,” to “feel at home in this life.” Isn’t that what we all want, dear reader? Margaret Ray’s Good Grief, the Ground “sparkles with impermanence,” “the most delicious tingling.”

Good Grief, the Ground by Margaret Ray. BOA Editions Ltd., April 2023

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.

Book Review :: Apogee/Perigee by Leesa Dean

Apogee/Perigee by Leesa Dean book cover image

Guest Post by Susan Kay Anderson

Apogee/Perigee by Leesa Dean is about relationships near and far. What is the poet’s relationship to situations, people, and other everyday items? I see Dean’s poems in a creative, concrete way; and see them as points on an astrology chart, which is circular and the connecting points to various houses/states of being. This is a sacred, esoteric book of poems not to be approached offhandedly. Slowly, by studying these dialed-up, circles of potency, there is a lot revealed, as in these lines from “House of Values”:

[. . . ] movies
on repeat. ice cream on repeat.
dinner at bedtime. toys kept in
Crown Royale bags.

At first, I did not get that these were astrology charts. They looked like maps with scroll and script writing. When I went back and examined them, it was plain as can be. In these lines, Dean remembers her grandmother’s teachings:

[. . . ] her eyes lit like
bright swans when her mouth
formed the words.

I love, “her eyes lit like bright swans” so much. I can see and feel this image. The mystery, the sacred, and the overcoming of what was endured make for careful reading. If I read nothing else, I would be satisfied.

Apogee/Perigee by Leesa Dean. above/ground press, April 2023.

Reviewer bio: Susan Kay Anderson lives in southwestern Oregon’s Umpqua River Basin. Her long poem “Man’s West Once” was selected for Barrow Street Journal’s “4 X 2 Project” and is included in Mezzanine (2019). Anderson also published Virginia Brautigan Aste’s memoir, Please Plant This Book Coast To Coast (2021).

New Book :: The Capture of Krao Farini

The Capture of Krao Farini by Nay Saysourinho book cover image

The Capture of Krao Farini by Nay Saysourinho
Ugly Duckling Presse, September 2023

The Capture of Krao Farini is part Turing test, part circus flyer. Written in the imagined voice of Krao Farini, a real sideshow performer brought to the United States at the turn of the 20th century, the book dissolves the line between algorithm and spectacle to reveal the ultimate consolation prize – to be acclaimed as human enough. Nay Saysourinho is a writer, visual artist, and recipient of a 2023 Baldwin for the Arts Fellowship. She was previously a Rona Jaffe Fellow at MacDowell and a Short Fiction Scholar at Tin House Winter Workshop. She holds a Berkeley Fellowship from Yale and has received support from Kundiman, The Writers Grotto, and the Tucson Festival of Books Literary Awards.

To discover more great books from small, independent, and university presses, visit the NewPages Guide to Publishers as well as our Books Received monthly roundup. Subscribe to our weekly newsletter to stay up to date!

Book Review :: Let Us Descend by Jesmyn Ward

Let Us Descend by Jesmyn Ward book cover image

Guest Post by Kevin Brown

Let Us Descend, Jesmyn Ward’s latest novel, like other neo-slave narratives—Colson Whitehead’s The Underground Railroad, Toni Morrison’s Beloved, and Ta-Nehisi Coates’ The Water Dancer— uses the mystical and the magical in her portrayal of slavery. Annis is separated from her mother and sold further South into even more brutal conditions. One way she survives is by drawing on the spirits of wind, water, and earth, as well as her ancestors. However, Ward doesn’t use these supernatural elements to make Annis’ existence easier; in fact, Annis often argues with these spirits about what they have done and where they have failed her or her family. Annis must ultimately rely on herself and those around her in order to survive and find a way to exist in a brutal system that consistently tries to break every bond she has, including the one with herself. Ward focuses more on the psychological and emotional effects of slavery than she does the physical abuse, though that’s certainly present. She is more concerned with Annis’ inner life and her relationships with her family and others who are enslaved than she is with recreating the brutality of the system. She ultimately wants to celebrate the resilience of the human spirit rather than relying on the supernatural spirits to provide an unrealistic survival for Annis.

Let Us Descend by Jesmyn Ward. Scribner, October 2023.

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

November 2023 eLitPak :: Contest and Submission Opportunity from Black Fox Literary Magazine!

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Deadline: November 30, 2023
Submit your fiction, poetry, and creative nonfiction to Black Fox Literary Magazine’s Rhapsody of Regret Writing Prize! Deadline: November 30, 2023! We are also accepting free submissions for our winter 2024 print issue. Free subs close on November 30, 2023! Visit our website and view our flyer for more information.

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November 2023 eLitPak :: Amsterdam Review Fall 2023 Issue Now Live!

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Discover the latest issue of Amsterdam Review with poetry, translations, interviews, and visual arts by local and international artists. Featuring an exclusive interview of Allen Ginsberg and Lawrence Ferlinghetti, and works by Rae Armantrout, Laynie Browne, Marin Sorescu, Jocelyn Ulevicus, Paul Cunningham, Ruth Lasters, and many more. View our flyer and visit our website for more information.

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November 2023 eLitPak :: Kenyon Review Winter Online Adult Writers Workshops

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Application Deadline: December 10, 2023
Our Winter Online Workshops offer participants a unique opportunity to learn from three faculty members in the same genre over six weeks. Workshops meet every Saturday 2:00–4:00 pm ET starting January 20, 2024 (no meeting on February 10). Workshops are generative, with a focus on creating new work. Visit our website and view our flyer for more information and to apply.

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November 2023 eLitPak :: Poets & Writers Special Subscription Offer

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Poets & Writers Magazine is happy to offer NewPages readers an exclusive offer. You’re invited to subscribe to Poets & Writers Magazine at our guaranteed lowest rate. For only $9.95 (a 79% discount off our cover price), you’ll gain access to the magazine that informs, connects, and inspires the literary community. Every issue is for the serious writer, and reader, like you. Subscribe now.

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November 2023 eLitPak :: Third Street Review – Open for Submissions

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Deadline: November 30, 2023
We want to see your work! Fiction, creative nonfiction up to 1000 words, three poems, and art and photography. Our mission is to explore the edges of things, to find the hidden cracks that let the light shine through. We publish quarterly and are a paying market. Have you got something for us? We can’t wait to see it! Submissions open November 1.

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November 2023 eLitPak :: Join Our Community of Writers! Apply to UNCG’s MFA Program

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Application deadline: December 15 (priority); January 15 (final)
UNC Greensboro’s MFA is a two-year residency program offering fully funded assistantships with stipends. Students work closely with faculty in one-on-one tutorials, developing their craft in a lifelong community of writers. UNCG offers courses in poetry, fiction, publishing, and creative nonfiction, plus teaching opportunities and editorial work for The Greensboro Review. Note our 12/15 priority consideration deadline! Visit our website and view our flyer for more information.

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November 2023 eLitPak :: december seeks submissions for the 2024 Marvin Bell Memorial Poetry Prize

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Deadline: December 1, 2023
Dorianne Laux will judge. Prizes: $1,500 & publication (winner); $500 & publication (honorable mention). All finalists will be published in the 2024 Spring/Summer Awards issue. Submit up to 3 poems per entry. $20 entry fee includes a copy of the awards issue. Submit October 1 to December 1, 2023. For complete guidelines please visit our website and view our flyer.

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November 2023 eLitPak :: New Release from Regal House

cover of Kevin Carey's Junior Miles and the Junkman from Regal Publishing's Fitzroy Books imprint
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Perfect Book for Middle Grade to Adults

Get your copy of Kevin Carey’s Junior Miles and the Junkman today!

“A tender, transformative novel for all who sometimes feel they don’t fit in, for anyone who’s ever been struck down by scamming or bullying, and for anyone who ever suffers profound pangs of loss—you will never forget this terrific story.”
—Naomi Shihab Nye, Young People’s Poet Laureate of the United States 2019 – 2021

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November 2023 eLitPak :: 19th Tartt First Fiction Award

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Deadline: December 31
The Tartt First Fiction Award is in its nineteenth year. The award is open to any American writer who has not yet had a book of stories published. Publication and one thousand dollars awarded. View flyer or visit our website for more information.

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Book Review :: Meltwater by Claire Wahmanholm

Meltwater by Claire Wahmanholm book cover image

Guest Post by Jami Macarty

In Meltwater, Claire Wahmanholm buoys her poems between the loss of a child and glacial ice melt, between “wail / and wishing.” Her poems read like a glossary of “every passing catastrophe,” acknowledging that everything is “made of / vanishing.” And, the poet is “living,” “alive / to notice,” asking, What are the implications of artistic fertility and motherhood when we are killing Earth? Perhaps because the “clock is about to start,” poetic form and sequence are important aspects of Meltwater. In the abecedary poems “O,” “M,” “P,” and “XYZ,” there is an alliterative and assonating accumulation “between mist and milk.” In opposition, words melt “white letters of dread invisible against / their surface of snow” in the eight erasures entitled “Meltwater.” In another series that makes use of variations of the statement “Everything Will Try to Kill You,” Wahmanholm invokes Lucille Clifton’s poem “won’t you celebrate with me.” In her poem, Clifton asserts “something has tried to kill me / and has failed,” but Wahmanholm admits she has “no plan to keep the chemicals separate / from the lake, the acid separate from the rain, the bird from the glass.” A series of four other poems entitled “Glacier” recounts visiting “the bright blue undersides turning over and over in the bay,” which “sounds like a metaphor but isn’t.” Wahmanholm is “talking about water.” The glacial ice melt and sea level rise that will flood coastal areas. Unlike other writers who write about climate crises, I get the feeling Wahmanholm does not write to either avert or despite disaster. Wahmanholm writes “to be ready for whatever [is] left of the world” and what “we suffer the empty universe for.”

Meltwater by Claire Wahmanholm. Milkweed Editions, March 2023.

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.

Where to Submit Roundup: November 17, 2023

42 Submission Opportunities including calls for submissions, writing contests, and book prizes.

Where to Submit Roundup 2023

Happy Friday! NewPages is back with our weekly roundup of submission opportunities just in time for some bad weather rolling in, so the perfect excuse to keep you indoors and accomplishing those submission goals. Plus, you’ll find even more opportunities and goodies in our November 2023 eLitPak Newsletter!

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. You also receive our monthly eLitPak Newsletter which features even more opportunities and other literary goodness.

Continue reading “Where to Submit Roundup: November 17, 2023”

Book Review :: How To by Heather Cadsby

How To by Heather Cadsby book cover image

Guest Post by Susan Kay Anderson

The prose poems in How To by Heather Cadsby are hilarious, and their titles are satisfying enough, let alone the bodies of the poems. Some examples: “How to catch flamboyant bohemians,” “How to tell if it’s different,” and “How to look at a broken fountain.” Each one offers its own non-advice and leads me to hunger for more.

I love how Cadsby plays with expectations. These poems offer surprises that are language-based without being frustrating to read. They are LOL poems, as in this line from “How to know if your venn diagram is pentimento”:

Golf is geometry as is burlesque.

These are funny and my mind creates illustrations or comic images to go with them as I read. I am challenged by this as a reader and also immensely entertained. Not a lot of poetry is funny. Many times, when poets try to be funny, they start rhyming or sound like Dean Young imitators (even though that is a good thing). Thank goodness to have read Cadsby’s inventions, I say to myself, wondering how I will manage to set this book down and get my mind back.

How To by Heather Cadsby. above/ground press, September 2023.

Reviewer bio: Susan Kay Anderson lives in southwestern Oregon’s Umpqua River Basin. Her long poem “Man’s West Once” was selected for Barrow Street Journal’s “4 X 2 Project” and is included in Mezzanine (2019). Anderson also published Virginia Brautigan Aste’s memoir, Please Plant This Book Coast To Coast (2021).

Magazine Stand :: The Louisville Review – Summer 2023

The Louisville Reivew Summer 2023 cover image

The Louisville Review’s Summer 2023 issue Number 93 features Alfred Conteh’s painting Aaron on the cover image and an essay about the work contributed by Alice Gray Stites. Poems by Rosa Nevadovska (1890-1971) open this issue, both in the original Yiddish text—a first for TLR—and in English translation by Merle L. Bachman. This issue offers a wide range of voices and subjects engaged: from an exploration of the too-often-hidden contributions of Black distillers of Kentucky bourbon, in Kentucky Poet Laureate Frank X Walker’s poem, “Masta d’ Steala” to a speculative view of a not-so-distant future deeply impacted by climate catastrophe in J. D. Strunk’s short story “Tokyo, 2031,” to an assertion of reliance and vibrance in advanced age in Alice Bingham Gorman’s poem, “The House of Eighty”—plus much more!

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 in our monthly roundup or featured on our blog and social media, please contact us.

New Book :: High Lonesome

High Lonesome: Poems by Allison Titus book cover image

High Lonesome: Poems by Allison Titus
Saturnalia Books, October 2023

High Lonesome by Allison Titus is a radio left on in a candlelit room, playing softly into the shadows as the hours fall through the evening. Interruptions of static, a slow confetti of grief drifting into the corners, mysterious white noise dispatches. Here is a meditation on estrangement—from an other, from the world, from the self—and its long aftermath spent learning how to cultivate tenderness and devotion in a world “where nobody / is tender enough,” a practice that alternates between sorrow and transcendence. These poems are little ceremonies of attention to a variety of lonelinesses, both human and non-human.

To discover more great books from small, independent, and university presses, visit the NewPages Guide to Publishers as well as our Books Received monthly roundup. Subscribe to our weekly newsletter to stay up to date!

Book Review :: White Cat, Black Dog by Kelly Link

White Cat, Black Dog by Kelly Link book cover image

Guest Post by Kevin Brown

White Cat, Black Dog, Kelly Link’s collection of short stories, draws from Grimm’s fairy tales and uses them as inspiration for new stories. Some of those new stories are quite contemporary, while some read very much like the fairy tales that inspire her—most are a mix of that feeling. For example, the final story, “Skinder’s Veil” is based on “Snow-White and Rose-Red,” but it tells the story of Andy, a graduate student who hasn’t been working on his dissertation. A friend from graduate school offers him a three-week housesitting job at a rural home in Vermont. There are rules, though, in that he must welcome anybody who comes to the back door, but not the front door, including Skinder himself (who seems to be Death, but that isn’t clear). As in fairy tales, Link purposefully omits important information, leaving it to the reader to decide who some characters are or what particular events or places mean. In “The White Road” (based on “The Musicians of Bremen”), for example, the white road seems to be some portal to another place, but it could also simply be the evil that exists within each of us. Though Link has modernized some of the settings and plots from Grimm’s collection of tales, humanity never seems to change.

White Cat, Black Dog by Kelly Link. Random House, October 2023.

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

Magazine Stand :: South Dakota Review – 57.4

South Dakota Review 57.4 cover image

South Dakota Review is delighted to wrap up Volume 57 with a marvelous roster of authors! Volume 57, Number 4 includes poetry by Craig Blais, Maggie Bowyer, Lawdenmarc Decamora, Deidra Suwanee Dees, Aidan Dolbashian, Sean Thomas Dougherty, Joanna Doxey, Kristin Entler, Kennedy Amenya Gisege, Korey Hurni, Evan J. Massey, King Tina, Sara Moore Wagner, Terin Weinberg, Kenton K. Yee, and Hafsa Zulfiqar; fiction by Ryan Burruss and Noah Pohl; creative nonfiction by Alyse Bensel, Anna Oberg, Emily Stedge, Caroline Sutton, and Natasha Williams; and a scholarly essay by Joanna Acevedo. Issues can be ordered here.

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 in our monthly roundup or featured on our blog and social media, please contact us.

Event :: The Common Postcard Auction 2023

The Common Postcard Auction 2023 image of book and postcard

The Common‘s annual postcard auction opens for bidding on Monday, November 13. If you aren’t familiar, it’s an annual fundraiser where you can bid to receive a postcard from your favorite author. This year’s list of 40+ authors includes folks like Anthony Doerr, Gina Chung, Sandra Cisneros, David Sedaris, Rick Russo, Ann Patchett, Viet Thanh Nguyen, Anne Tyle, Alison Bechdel, Julia Alvarez, and Rabih Alameddine just to name a few. Authors always put a lot of their creative energy into writing (and drawing!) these, and they’re always completed by the holidays if you want to buy one as a gift for someone. Bidding closes at noon EST on December 4, 2023.