In The Beginning, There Was A Sound
Ashley M. Jones After I was born, I cried for three months straight. My mouth, a great brown crack in the Alabama soil, sprouted wondrous wails. My tongue, a cotton candy spade, licked the air, and it tasted of…
Dispatch: Daegu, South Korea
Elizabeth Riggio The day before my flight I couldn’t eat. I did manage to sleep somehow, perhaps it was from the exhaustion of not sleeping the whole week prior. I can remember my feelings so vividly. I was…
Review of “Writers” by Antoine Volodine and “Works” by Edouard Levé
Matthew McEver As part of its French Literature Series, Dalkey Archive Press has translated and published two works of black humor. The first is from Antoine Volodine, the primary pseudonym of an author who–due to the politically subversive nature…
Review of “In the Kingdom of Ice: The Grand and Terrible Polar Voyage of the USS Jeannette” by Hampton Sides
Robert Olmstead I have read two of Hampton Sides’s books: Ghost Soldiers: The Epic Account of World War II’s Greatest Rescue Mission, the story of the Bataan Death March (Doubleday 2001) and Blood and Thunder: An Epic of…
Review of “American Romantic” by Ward Just
Kevin Welch I’m not one to gravitate towards novels spanning the lifetime of a character. A novel covering more than a ten-year span demands attention to detail that I, admittedly, am not equipped to handle. I am a standard…
spinster
Ashley M. Jones spin•ster noun \’spin(t)- stər\ 1. a woman whose occupation is to spin I am caught in a revolving door. This is unlike the princess at the wheel, waiting for Rumplestilskin’s tinny laugh and…
Review of “The Spark and the Drive” by Wayne Harrison
Jerome Stenger Most of us will never really know what separates a great mechanic from a decent one. We submit our broken cars and leave. The craft takes place under a hood behind a garage door. We return later…
Review of “Agostino” by Alberto Moravia
Julia Stone Alberto Moravia’s explicit novella of a 13-year-old boy struggling with an Oedipal complex was written in 1942, but Fascist censors banned its publication. The novella became a best seller when it was published in 1944. Michael F.…
Review of “Every Day Is for the Thief” by Teju Cole
Elizabeth Riggio What makes Teju Cole a brilliant novelist is his ability to turn the most minute details into something important and relevant, details that, in other instances, might seem overindulgent and unnecessary. Small details can easily create a…
If I were a phoneme,
Kathleen Nalley At first, there would be sin. We’d sing praises for our bodies, the ripple of touch, the blushed skin, the sinuous angles we move within, tensing, tensing, testing the…