Fox Hunting Blog

'Writer Grrrls' is a reoccurring series in which Sara Selevitch highlights the important works of women writers.

In the first paragraph of The Argonauts (Graywolf Press), Maggie Nelson writes, “The words I love you come tumbling out of my mouth in an incantation the first time you fuck me in the ass.” 

By societal standards, the core narrative of The Argonauts could fall under the realm of normal. Nelson falls in love, marries, adapts to her new roles as wife and stepmother, and eventually births and raises a child of her own with the help of her partner. 

The details, though, threaten the image of familial conformity. Nelson and her fluidly gendered partner, artist Harry Dodge, conceive their child with the help of a sperm donor. Dodge underwent Testosterone injections during the months Nelson was pregnant, and the two experienced simultaneously changing bodies. The couple rushed to get married at The Hollywood Chapel when it seemed as though Prop 8 would pass in California, before coming home to eat chocolate pudding with Dodge’s son on their porch. 

All of which leads Nelson to wonder:

Is there something inherently queer about pregnancy itself, insofar as it profoundly alters one’s “normal” state, and occasions a radical intimacy with—and radical alienation from—one’s body? How can an experience so profoundly strange and wild and transformative also symbolize or enact the ultimate conformity?

The Argonauts serves as an extended rumination on such questions of normalcy, queerness, family, identity, and love. Nelson’s writing is, as always, remarkably beautiful and sharp. She weaves memoir and criticism and draws upon the words and wisdom of “the many-gendered mothers of [her] heart” to craft fresh and poignant dialogue between many points of view. Such experts include philosophers like Judith Butler, Deleuze, and Lacan; writers like Ginsberg, Emerson, and Susan Sontag; academics like Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick and Lee Edelman; pediatrician Donald Winnicott; porn star and performance artist Annie Sprinkle. Each voice speaks to the myriad paths we must navigate in order to carve out a space of authenticity for ourselves, our own radical states of being. 

Nelson writes: 

A day or two after my love pronouncement, now feral with vulnerability, I sent you the passage from Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes in which Barthes describes how the subject who utters the phrase “I love you” is like “the Argonaut renewing his ship during its voyage without changing its name.” Just as the Argo’s parts may be replaced over time but the boat is still called the Argo, whenever the lover utters the phrase “I love you,” its meaning must be renewed by each use, as “the very task of love and of language is to give to one and the same phrase inflections which will be forever new.” 

I thought the passage was romantic. You read it as a possible retraction. In retrospect, I guess it was both.

Nelson’s concession here is telling of what seems a determined readiness on her part to explore and accept the grey areas wherever they appear, to reject binary thinking, to reexamine supposed mutual exclusivity. This tendency is reflected both in her writing and her life. 

“‘I’m not on my way anywhere,’ Harry sometimes tells inquirers,” as a way to explain his gender fluidity. Not traveling from one fixed destination to the other, but occupying the space in between. “I feel I can give you everything without giving myself away, I whispered in your basement bed,” Nelson writes. 

Though the middle ground is a source of great strength to Nelson in many ways, she worries it takes the form of weakness when it comes to her prose. 

Afraid of assertion . . . My writing is riddled with such tics of uncertainty. I have no excuse or solution, save to allow myself the tremblings, then go back in later and slash them out . . . At times I grow tired of his approach, and all is gendered baggage. Over the years I’ve had to train myself to wipe the sorry off almost every work e-mail I write; otherwise, each might begin, Sorry for the delay, Sorry for the confusion . . . But I don’t intend to denigrate the power of apology: I keep in my sorry when I really mean it. And certainly there are many speakers whom I’d like to see do more trembling, more unknowing, more apologizing. 

It is precisely Nelson’s raw unknowing that makes her writing so compelling. She journeys with the reader, or we journey with her, as she assesses and reassess cultural practices of marriage and gender and child raising, against the backbeat of what she knows to be true: the power of the transitive, the importance of care, the freedom of love.

(Atria Books)

By RJ Casey

I had an Allen Iverson poster up in my childhood room. In it, Number Three was going for an unorthodox layup, hanging almost horizontally in midair to get the ball through the labyrinth of limbs protecting the rim. I rooted for him because he was the epitome of cool when I was in junior high—he had cornrows, he scored a million points a game, he crossed over Jordan! But the coolest of all was his nickname: The Answer. In Kent Babb’s Not a Game, you find out that this nickname is superbly, depressingly ironic. An answer is the last thing Iverson has right now. 

It’s strange to read a biography of someone who’s only forty years old, but when a subject like Iverson has lived so hard, so triumphantly, and then so appallingly, Babb has no problem filling the 300 pages. The chapters alternate between success and failure as the past hurtles closer to the present. This format makes for an agonizing experience, allowing the reader to dissect trends and dangerous motifs that have been reoccurring throughout Iverson’s life. Not a Game is set up for you to see the downfall coming (like Iverson should have), but credit is due to Babb’s research and thoroughness, because you never quite realize how bad it’s actually going to get. 

I give praise to Babb for telling both sides of Iverson’s story in equal depth. A man who kept in touch with supportive tutors and coaches that were there for him in the past, he also showed up to court dates drunk. He took care of his best friend’s three kids after their father died tragically, yet he never attended any of his own children’s school or sporting events. Iverson was a philanthropic charity organizer and a heartless spousal abuser. I know that there are two sides to each coin, but that coin was worth 150 million dollars and Iverson wasted it all on cars and Coronas at P.F. Chang’s. Never have heroes. 

Babb writes, “Relationships within pro sports are dependent on everyone offering everyone else a blank slate, the sins of the past behind them.” Not a Game explains what happens when that slate won’t wipe clean anymore. Too much ill will and bad karma have grimed up the works. 

Not a Game reads like both a tragic obituary (I truly hope it’s not) and a Greek myth. On the court Iverson eluded defenders like Hermes, carried mediocre teams on his back like Atlas, but is most akin to Sisyphus. At one time, through sheer will and intensity, Allen Iverson got the boulder to the top of ledge. Unfortunately for him, his family, and all of us, he lost his grip and let it roll back down again, squashing him flat.

(Nightstand illo by Jensine Eckwall)

'On Our Nightstand' is a weekly reoccurring feature where our contributing writers and staff share with you what book is on their literal or figurative nightstands.

Paul Reilly:

The structure of Mexican-Peruvian author Mario Bellatin’s superb novella Flowers (7Vientos) mirrors its title; it’s constructed of many smaller petals. The metaphor is purposefully obvious: In a brief preface, Bellatin asks us to consider that “every chapter can be read separately, as if dealt with the contemplation of a flower.”

The book itself lives up to its ambitious conceit, and thankfully obviousness never falls into egregiousness. Bellatin, whose early work is translated into English for the first time here, contrasts floral chapter headings with blunt, almost scientific prose. The chapters themselves are abbreviated and opaque in content, suggesting interlocking plots rather than structured ones. The implied universe is beguiling, a collection of loose threads that hang in orbit around a disastrous drug and the birth defects it caused.

With a surgeon’s precision, Bellatin sculpts a masterpiece of interruption. He vivisects a world of amputees, prosthetics, and intimate violence into interrupted chunks. The text, perfectly considered, is rich in pure literary value. One symbol in particular stood out to me: a jewel-encrusted prosthetic leg worn by the narrator is a direct reference to his Muslim faith, but also directly reflects the bedazzling of Bellatin’s plastic prose with colorful headings.

Early in the novella, the narrator describes an “altar,” an event where a group of amputees and other outcasts gather in a secret location for an undisclosed but suggestively violent celebration of their condition. Flowers peeks in on this secret world without letting us beyond the peephole. If “satisfying frustration” were a sensible quality, this book would have it in spades.

Melissa Ragsdale:

Considering Time magazine declared 2014 “the year of Roxane Gay,” I’m hardly the first to hop aboard the Roxane Gay train. But I just picked up Bad Feminist (Harper Perennial) for the first time and have since nailed her picture to my Leslie Knope-esque wall of heroes. A collection of essays covering feminism, identity, gender, race, privilege, and beyond, Bad Feminist is thought-provoking in a way I’ve never encountered before.

Gay reminds me of my very favorite professors. She both challenges and encourages her readers to consider every angle of an issue and push their thinking to the next threshold. She unpacks the most complex and loaded issues with earnest insight and deep intellect. I’ve found myself quoting her in conversation constantly.

But on top of being smart, Gay exudes a warm, honest, and often funny personality that makes each essay especially radiant. She does a brilliant job of balancing intense subjects with personal anecdotes and pop culture references. For instance, an essay that begins with her obsession with The Hunger Games trilogy transforms seamlessly into a profound piece about rape. Even Gay’s academic essays are lined with her character and her keen attention to modern culture.

'Writer Grrrls' is a reoccurring series in which Sara Selevitch highlights the important works of women writers.

As anyone who’s been alive for more than a few hours will most likely attest, being a human is exhausting. And often terrifying. (For example: experiencing emotions like crippling sadness, having to pretend you have at least a tenuous grasp on reality, talking to other humans, deciding what kind of cereal to buy, and struggling against systems of oppression that seek to silence you.) No one knows what to do and everyone is scared, and nobody communicates these feelings better than my favorite contemporary poet, Melissa Broder.

The author of three collections of poetry—When You Say One Thing But Mean Your Mother (Ampersand Books, 2010), Meat Heart (Publishing Genius, 2012), and Scarecrone (Publishing Genius, 2014)—Broder also recently revealed that she’s behind the achingly funny viral Twitter account @sosadtoday and its accompanying Vice column. She’s set to release a So Sad Today book of personal essays in March of 2016.

Broder’s work deliberately evades classification. She prefers the use of “primal nouns” and to work “outside the constraints of time and space.”

Her most recent collection, Scarecrone, uses repeated imagery of angels, magick, candy, and dust to weave existential stories surrounding a girl full of holes and the ways she tries to fill them. One review of Scarecrone aptly described Broder’s spirit as “entrenched somewhere halfway between the club and the void.” Broder meshes contemporary angst with the mythic and mystic, creating images as unexpected as they are compelling.

From “Judgment”:

If I am not allowed candy I use my body

If I am not allowed my body I use the internet

.     .     .     .     .     .     .     .     .     .     .     .     .     .     .     .

The angels pray over my screens

My angels are probably lonely

Also disillusioned with me

Her poems are filled with shamans and black vomit, anger and fear, the internet and weird sex. And all the while, “emptiness goes heyyy” (“Sand Ceremony”).

In an interview with Weird Sister, Broder said, “I prefer to digest my own critiques of pop culture privately and then shit out universal magick that doesn’t even fucking acknowledge the initial subject or give it any more power.”

“It hurts my heart to put an -ist on my poetry,” she continued. “Any -ist.”  

Broder’s poetry undoubtedly speaks to the female experience, but it transcends empty “girl power” platitudes in favor of more complex commentary.

From vast questioning of the universe,

Every woman is the same woman

Azazel’s mother is his wife

Who am I?

(“Mud Rush”)

to the corporeal manifestations of our most basic fears,

I call it sex

because I don’t know

how else to say

terrified of dying

(“Satisfy the Desolate”)

to the multitudes of selves that we struggle to reconcile.

I talk like I am sister heaven

I am really sister darkness

I am both at once and you are also

(“Daze Bones”)

Broder searches this world and many others for salvation at the hands of self-knowledge, only to ask if perhaps she doesn’t need to know after all.  

From “Hi Humanity”:

I was

scared

my soul

would

never

call and

now it is

calling

and I

am like

shhhh

Scarecrone is both a spell book and a prayer book. Broder’s poems contain luminous revelations, as well as desperate longings, spewed from a narrator unsure of the extent of her powers. Are we human beings having a spiritual experience or vice versa? Are we to hold ourselves accountable for the mess we’re in? Or can the blame be passed along to some great, unnamable force? And at the end of the day, does any of it matter?

(Nightstand illo by Jensine Eckwall)

'On Our Nightstand' is a weekly reoccurring feature where our contributing writers and staff share with you what book is on their literal or figurative nightstands.

Paul Reilly:

George Herriman’s Krazy Kat comic strip may be the most wonderful thing I’ve never been able to finish reading. Trawling through Krazy & Ignatz 1927 - 1928: “Love Letters in Ancient Brick” (Published by Fantagraphics and edited by the late Bill Blackbeard) is maybe my third or fourth time tackling the historic work. Thanks to this book, a parcel of a larger collection itself, my latest attempt finally worked. Wisely, the book only contains full-page spreads with a minimum of editing or annotating, allowing the surreal landscape of Coconino County to unfold in context-free, digestible chunks.

Krazy Kat, like any good newspaper comic, tells a simple story ad infinitum. Ignatz Mouse throws a brick at Krazy Kat; Krazy falls in love with Ignatz, and Officer Pup drags the mouse to jail. When they made their first runs in the Hearst newspapers of the ’20s and ‘30s, Herriman’s cartoons were as reliable as Peanuts.

But Herriman’s style: that’s where the difficulty, and the bottomless treats, come in. Backgrounds change inexplicably from panel to panel, lending the air of a recurring dream to the proceedings. Supporting characters are introduced and discarded just to bring Ignatz’s brick one step closer to Krazy’s skull. “Quotation” marks liberally “adorn” all sorts of “narration” and “dialogue” without “rhyme” or “reason.” Peanuts it was, yet Peanuts it ain’t.

It’s too easy to be put off by Krazy & Ignatz for its repetition, dream logic, or Herriman’s occasionally illegible handwriting. But read enough strips, and all three potential downsides coalesce into something beautiful. Between the snappy, alliterative vernacular and shape-shifting scenery, Krazy Kat transcended its well-worn spot in the funnies by being, at once, dense and fleetfooted.

Joshua Heaps:

My love for comics began with my dad’s old Tintins. Even before I could read, I would lie on my living room floor memorizing each panel. I would always find some detail I had not previously noticed, some tiny line that surely had immense significance and foreshadowing. This adoration, and my collection, grew from there. Piles became stacks became bookshelves of graphic novels.

Unfortunately, when middle school struck, this passion began to wane. It was not that people were ostracizing me for my hobby, but more that life was getting complicated. For the first time, I was noticing girls, pimples, and grades. Comics were just not cutting it anymore; they were no longer the solace they had once been. It was not until my senior year of high school that I rediscovered their world. I was in Philadelphia visiting friends and on a whim, walked into the local comic book shop. The first I picked up was Daniel Clowes’s David Boring (Pantheon Books). In many ways, I have not put it down since.

Unbeknownst to my eighteen-year-old self, Clowes has been a giant in the world of alternative comics since the 1980s. The big three (putting aside pioneers Crumb and Spiegelman) are Chris Ware, Charles Burns, and Daniel Clowes. The former two have been cited on multiple occasions conceding to the latter’s superiority. Clowes’s ability to create a world so similar to our own yet so bizarre and chilling is what makes him great. He fools the reader with a simple technique and a subtle uncanny. Reading a page of his work is not necessarily impressive; it is only when one gets ten or fifteen in that the bizarre story begins to unfold.

(Nightstand illo by Jensine Eckwall)

'On Our Nightstand' is a weekly reoccurring feature where our contributing writers and staff share with you what book is on their literal or figurative nightstands.

What's on your Nightstand this week? Share the book you're reading on Instagram with the tag #FQNightstand and we'll regram your post. You can follow us at @foxingreview.

RJ Casey:

Over the course of a season, a baseball fan can be just as obsessive and scrupulous as any cleric on a five month long D&D trek. Just substitute hit points for WAR, WARP, or any other advanced analytic or replace the 20-sided die with a four-seamed fastball. And like any fervent subdivision of culture worth its salt, baseball also has fanfic. Case in point was the last book up to bat on my nightstand: Damon Agnos’s Sluggerhunt. 

This novelette is about Alex Rodriguez — former all-star golden boy, one-time highest paid athlete in the world, and now steroid-inoculated New York Yankee pariah — and the tension created by his return. While the Yankees brass seems undecided on how to handle Rodriquez’s real-life arrival into the lineup, Agnos has the higher-ups in his book hire a semi-retired French hit-man to take him out. What follows is a cavalcade of errors involving Taylor Swift’s nose, Gérard Depardieu’s appetite for shrimp, and a tearful, pompous hologram. 

Agnos has a knack for pacing the action elements of the story just as well as the absurd. Rodriguez is oblivious to bullets and explosions that barely miss as he’s caught up in his own sociopathic-leaning celebrity status. The climax of the book includes a collection of snipers on the roof of Yankee stadium, some hired to protect Rodriguez and some literally gunning for him, spread only a few feet apart. The utter ridiculousness of a plan that includes a hidden sniper set to stop another hidden sniper hired to take out another sniper is exactly the right kind of unoriginality that a dense executive who’s seen one too many action movies might dream up. The dark-humored plot moves briskly in Sluggerhunt, and the laughs I got alone were worth the 99¢ price of admission. Hey, this book’s a lot cheaper than a beer at the ballpark and not anywhere near as boring as sitting through a whole nine innings!

Joshua Heaps:

It is thanks to Belfast Noir (Akashic Books) that I better understand Northern Ireland’s conflict with England. More importantly, I understand what it is I’m singing about when I scream along to U2’s “Sunday Bloody Sunday.” Like the rest of the anthologies in this series, Belfast Noir is a compilation of dark fiction set against a particular city. In this release, edited by Adrian McKinty and Stuart Neville, the gloomy and volatile capital of Northern Ireland makes its debut. 

(Black Balloon Publishing)

By Jane Robbins Mize

Virginia Zaharieva’s Nine Rabbits was published in Bulgaria in 2008, where it was an immediate bestseller and nominated for both the Helicon Prize and Edward Vik Literary Prize. Yet the novel did not reach English speakers until 2012, when it was translated into English by Angela Rodel and released in the United Kingdom by Istros Books. Last April, Nine Rabbits finally met American audiences in a revised edition republished by Black Balloon Publishing.

In spite of the many changes in language, content, and context, Nine Rabbits is still a compelling and vital publication in the United States. It tells the story of Manda, first as a child in the 1960s, then as a woman coping with her past and present identities in post-communist Bulgaria. In particular, Manda grapples with the fierceness of her emotions toward her work, partners, son, and self as she seeks stability. Remarkably, from within this specificity of character, the novel emerges as a universal story about woman—as artist, lover, mother, and being. 

In fact, Nine Rabbits reads more similarly to a memoir than novel as Zaharieva weaves true characters and events into her fiction. Like Zaharieva, Manda is the granddaughter of a gardener. Also like her author, Manda grows up to become a writer, editor, psychotherapist, and performer. Most often, these autobiographical aspects amplify the believability of Manda’s experiences. Yet they can also foster a mistrust between the reader and author. We begin to ask which characters are imagined and which stories are invented in our attempt to value the real over the romanticized. 

However, the nonfictional details are simply one component of Zaharieva’s greater experiment, in which she unabashedly manipulates language and style to create a unique, blended genre. In the first part, recipes are woven into the narrative to facilitate Manda’s emotions. Later, lines of poetry are embedded within the prose: “It hurts so badly, so badly this cosmic desolation” (143). Throughout the novel, the narrator’s bold voice wanders confidently between storytelling, retrospection, self-analysis, and revelation. 

As readers, we are forced to reconcile the real with the unreal as we balance the novel’s stylistic shifts and emotional upheavals. In many ways, we are forced to experience Manda’s identity crisis and creation alongside her. She writes on a journey through Europe, “Can I explain the juggling act of a woman who had the nerve to work with culture in a country transitioning to capitalism, which has no particular need for art?” (117-18). Manda cannot explain it, but Zaharieva certainly encourages her reader to feel it. 

In an interview with Fiction Writers Review, Zaharieva said, 

My idea is to tell real stories, seek their personal meaning for me, and—by exploring the insight to which I was led—look for the universal message in them that I can share with others. In this sense, Nine Rabbits is a healing book. It talks about the pain and suffering, but also seeks for the ways to deal with it through joy, creativity, spiritual work and courage. 

Nine Rabbits does all this and more. Thanks to Rodel’s masterful translation, we are able to witness the nuances of an individual’s experiences against the backdrop of the challenges faced by many Bulgarians combined with the universal woman’s story. 

Toward the novel’s end, Manda writes, “Just try to tell me God isn’t on the side of abundance!” (154). If this is true, Zaharieva’s novel is certainly on God’s side. Through Nine Rabbits, we are taught to celebrate our abundance of experiences and emotions and to delight in our bodies, our creativity, and our ability to love.

'Writer Grrrls' is a reoccurring series in which Sara Selevitch highlights the important works of women writers.

Plato is said to have called her “the tenth muse.” The Greeks saw her as Homer’s female counterpart. Three thousand years later, “violet-haired, pure, honey-smiling Sappho” (as described by Alcaeus) is still considered one of the great lyric poets. 

Not much about her is known for certain. Born sometime around 620 B.C., Sappho spent most of her life on the isle of Lesbos. She’s said to have married a wealthy merchant name Cercylas, to have had a daughter named Cleis, and to have run a school for unmarried women. Legend has it, her passion for a young sailor named Phaon caused her to jump off of a cliff and end her life. 

Of her nine volumes of work, only about a thousand lines have survived. And yet Sappho’s legacy endures in spite of, and because of, the mystery that surrounds her. 

The narrators in Sappho’s poems express feelings of love and lust for both males and females. Over time, her work has become synonymous with woman-love—hence modern day use of the terms ‘lesbian’ and ‘sapphic.’ Her promiscuous legacy led Pope Gregory to burn much of her work in 1073. Sappho is often heralded today as a feminist icon and a gay role model. 

From [Frankly I Wish I Were Dead]: 

When she left, she wept a great deal; she said to me, ‘This parting must be endured, Sappho. I go unwillingly.’

I said, ‘Go, and be happy but remember (you know well) whom you leave shackled by love.’ 

Sappho is one of the first poets to employ the first-person in her writing. Whereas most poetry to that point was written from the vantage point of various gods and muses, Sappho’s work shifted focus to the individual, transforming poetry into a more confessional, personal form. 

From The Anactoria Poem: 

when the goddess seduced her wits and left her to wander, 

she forgot them all, she could not remember anything but longing, and lightly straying aside, lost her way. 

Despite the difficulties of English translation from her native Aeolic Greek, Sappho’s surviving fragments maintain a stark and urgent beauty. She meditates on desire, wonder, and loss through prose that’s both erotic and sorrowful. 

“What cannot be said, will be wept,” she wrote. 

Critics have engaged in endless speculation vis-à-vis just how autobiographical Sappho’s work was (see Daniel Mendelsohn’s recent piece in the New Yorker, which asks “How Gay was Sappho?”). “Can we be sure that these are really her own feelings? . . . What is ‘personality’ in such a group-oriented society as archaic Greece?” asks André Lardinois, co-author of Sappho: A New Translation of the Complete Works (Cambridge University Press). 

We could spend another three thousand years debating Sappho’s inner desires and artistic intentions. The “truth,” however, has little to no bearing on her work’s significance. Whether or not the narrator is herself, or the feelings expressed her own, Sappho’s poems speak to yearning intensities still felt by audiences millennia after they were written. 

I declare that later on even in an age unlike our own, someone will remember who we are 

She sure was right about that much.

(Nightstand illo by Jensine Eckwall)

'On Our Nightstand' is a weekly reoccurring feature where our contributing writers and staff share with you what book is on their literal or figurative nightstands.

What's on your Nightstand this week? Share the book you're reading on Instagram with the tag #FQNightstand and we'll regram your post. You can follow us at @foxingreview.

Sara Selevitch: 

There comes a time in everyone’s lives, usually around middle school, when they realize that pop music kind of sucks and their dad’s CD collection is kind of cool. For me, this revelation resulted in listening almost exclusively to the Beatles for the better part of three years. From there I fell into an obsessive love affair—first with John Lennon, then with the ’60s as a whole—convinced that I had been born in the wrong time.

Since then I’ve come to understand that the ’60s wasn’t the decade-long love-in I’d thought it was. But its (perhaps overly referenced) spirit still resonates with me, especially after reading Tom Wolfe’s New Journalism classic, The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test (Bantam). 

Before they set out on their first cross-country drive in their infamous, psychedelic school bus, Furthur, Ken Kesey instructs his crew of Merry Pranksters: 

None of us are going to deny what other people are doing, If saying bullshit is somebody's thing, then he says bullshit. If somebody is an ass-kicker, then that's what he's going to do on this trip, kick asses. He's going to do it right out front and nobody is going to have anything to get pissed off about. He can just say, 'I'm sorry I kicked you in the ass, but I'm not sorry I'm an ass-kicker. That's what I do, I kick people in the ass.' Everybody is going to be what they are, and whatever they are, there's not going to be anything to apologize about. What we are, we're going to wail with on this whole trip. 

And that’s how Wolfe presents the Pranksters throughout the book—entirely as they are, in all of their neon, acidic, philosophic, reckless, mischievous, ingenious glory. As a journalistic pursuit, it’s astounding. The amount of time invested, the extent of details described, the number of people interviewed, are all baffling. 

The Pranksters’s major project was creating a movie—“The Movie,” in fact—based on the idea that “everybody, everybody everywhere, has his own movie going, his own scenario, and everybody is acting his movie out like mad.” In filming everything that happened, however, the movie became uneditable. There was simply too much footage. One has to imagine that at times Wolfe felt the same. Yet he managed to take years of material based on the raucous lives of the most vibrant characters imaginable and whittle it down into an engrossing, structured, and beautifully crafted narrative.

Melissa Ragsdale:

Set in post-apocalyptic North Africa, Who Fears Death (Daw Books) is, in a sentence, like if Toni Morrison wrote sci-fi/fantasy. I picked up the book after reading this great interview with Nnendi Okorafor. 

In Who Fears Death, Onyesonwu was conceived through a violent rape and has spent her childhood being shunned because she is an ewu (person of mixed race). Her culture is ruled by racism and a systemic oppression of women. Yet, as Onyesonwu grows up, she begins to discover that she has magic powers, finding agency in a society that has given her none. By using her magic, Onyesonwu inadvertently awakens the threat of her biological father who, a sorcerer himself, becomes hell-bent on destroying her. In spite of this, she sets off with a group of close friends on a journey to confront her biological father and end the heinous pattern of violence and genocide that has taken hold of the world. 

An absolutely refreshing voice in the fantasy genre, Okorafor blends the classic ingredients of magic and adventure with an unmatched awareness of womanhood, identity, and North Africa’s unique cultural climate. This is the kind of book that reading was made for.

RJ Casey:

I’ve been trying to save billions of dollars with one simple step. That is, to actually read the books I’ve accumulated over twenty-eight years instead of being wracked by guilt over dozens of uncracked spines, fearful that a single tectonic twitch might send my entire library crashing onto my dome. So of course, I began this trek with the smallest unread book from the stacks—hence the “Merry Christmas 2009!” inscription from my wife (then girlfriend) Ann on the inside front cover—Kenneth Fearing: Selected Poems. 

This tiny tome of terse, brutal gems is in the American Poets Project series from The Library of America: my favorite non-for-profit publisher of acid-free paper filled shelf dressings. The book is, obviously, the best of pulp author Kenneth Fearing, a hard drinker/novelist by day and harder drinker/poet by night. He writes like William Carlos Williams would if he were a big fan of Dragnet and the verses go down easy even though they are filled with killers, down-and-outs, and noir type-casted night owls. Myself, being a fan of the genre, was immediately struck with the very first poem from 1929 called “St. Agnes’ Eve,” which follows the dramatic demise of an armed-robber named Louie in a shower of bullets. The poem, and Louie’s life, ends like this: 

Louie’s soul arose through his mouth in the form of a 

             derby hat 

That danced with cigarette butts and burned matches 

             and specks of dust 

Where Louie sprawled. 

Close-up on Dolan’s widow. Of Louie’s mother. 

Picture of the fly-specked Monday evening and fade 

             out slow. 

(Nightstand illo by Jensine Eckwall)

'On Our Nightstand' is a weekly reoccurring feature where our contributing writers and staff share with you what book is on their literal or figurative nightstands.

What's on your Nightstand this week? Share the book you're reading on Instagram with the tag #FQNightstand and we'll regram your post. You can follow us at @foxingreview.

Jane Robbins Mize:

Lydia Davis’s Can't and Won't (Picador) was released last April—nearly four years after her mammoth Collected Stories. Davis is the author of seven other story collections and one novel and recipient of a number of awards, including a MacArthur Fellowship. This is all to say that Davis’s oeuvre is extensive and, to some readers, intimidating. I had only read a few stories in the New Yorker and a handful of interviews online and in magazines before opening Can’t and Won’t. I soon discovered that the stories therein aligned with the few things I did know about Davis, a writer interested in simplicity of language and observation above all else.

In a 2008 interview with the Believer Davis said that in writing, “when you take from ‘real life,’ you select and thereby misrepresent, in a way—you distort your material, or, in fact, fictionalize it.” Can’t and Won’t exemplifies this distortion of reality. Many stories are recounts of dreams—both her own and others. Many are translated excerpts of letters written by Flaubert. Some are several pages, while others are just a few sentences long. Regardless of form and content, each story has a strong sense of narration—literal, blunt explanation—made delightful, disturbing, or confounding through Davis’s authorial “selection.”

By de-contextualizing images and events, Can’t and Won’t continually sparked my interest and stimulated my imagination. At times her “misrepresentation” of the mundane led me to boredom. Even still, Davis's newest collection is a book for the curious—for those seeking a playfulness of form as well as the companionship and wit of an insightful observer.

Joshua Heaps:

I spent my first year of college at a small school in upstate New York, a place so homogenous and depressing that I decided to take some time off and move to the Midwest. There was no rhyme or reason to this decision; Minneapolis was just a far off means to an unsure end, a place where I didn’t know a soul. Instead the adventure I was hoping for, working full time in a foreign city was disorienting and lonely. More and more, I found myself turning to books as my only solace. Without Paul Auster, and The Brooklyn Follies (Henry Holt and co.) in particular, I don’t know if I could have gotten through that period in one piece.

The story follows Nathan Glass who has moved to Brooklyn to die. An older man with an ex who hates him and a daughter who couldn’t care less, Glass spends his time writing about life’s misfortune and lusting after his favorite waitress. Coincidence strikes, however, when Nathan runs into his long-lost nephew. From this point on, the seemingly tame story spins out of control. A bizarre series of events ensues including an ex-art fraud’s attempt at one final heist and Glass’s grandniece, who shows up at his door unwilling to talk about where and, more importantly, why her mother is in hiding.

Though Auster’s novels tend to focus on isolation and loneliness, I find his repetition comforting. I know that when I pick up one of his books, I can count on an adventure of realistic yet epic proportions; the kind I dreamed of, and missed out on, in Minneapolis. I am already excited to fall back into his world: one of intrigue, mystery, and a protagonist who is all too willing to brag about an Ivy League education.

Kimberly Whitmer:

As a librarian, I’m always trying to widen my reading net. One area I’m sorely unfamiliar with is mysteries. Though Tana French’s In the Woods (Penguin Books) falls more in line with literary fiction than genre, it was the perfect first foray into the world of troubled detectives and haunting, unsolved murder cases.

In 1984, twelve-year-old Adam Ryan runs gleefully into the woods near his home estate in Knocknaree, Ireland, his two best friends in tow. Night falls without their return, and it isn’t long before search parties are sent out. Adam is discovered with his fingernails dug into the bark of a tree, his shoes filled with someone else’s blood, and his eyes staring off into the distance. His two friends are never found, and he retains no memory of the events that led to their disappearance. Twenty years later, Adam goes by his middle name, Rob, and acts as a detective on the Dublin Murder Squad. When a case involving a murdered young girl in the Knocknaree woods lands in his office, he can’t resist taking it on.

The atmosphere in this book is intoxicating. You can smell the summer season lingering in the woods in flashbacks and feel the tingle at the back of your own neck that it elicits in Rob as an adult. The true heart of the book lies in Rob’s relationship with his partner, Cassie Maddox. Thick as thieves, the two navigate the murky waters of the case as Rob begins to fall apart. I had read in reviews that the ending would be ambiguous, and I decided early on that I didn’t care; I just wanted to see how the trajectory of these characters would unfold.

(Nightstand illo by Jensine Eckwall)

'On Our Nightstand' is a weekly reoccurring feature where our contributing writers and staff share with you what book is on their literal or figurative nightstands.

What's on your Nightstand this week? Share the book you're reading on Instagram with the tag #FQNightstand and we'll regram your post. You can follow us at @foxingreview.

Kimberly Whitmer:

Memoirs by women are a mainstay in my reading wheelhouse. I picked up Ellen Forney’s Marbles: Mania, Depression, Michelangelo, and Me: A Graphic Memoir (Avery) during a recent trip to my local indie bookstore. Set in Seattle, my still strange and new home city, Forney’s story sucked me in right away. 

Just before her thirtieth birthday, Forney was diagnosed with bipolar disorder, which initially came as a shock to her. However, through work with her therapist, she comes to view her long history of bouts of incredible highs followed by seasons of dark, impenetrable lows in a stark, new light. Her manic episodes had once been invigorating; she’d grab the hands of hesitant friends and pull them toward wild, erratic adventures, never noticing their reluctance or her own lack of need for sleep. Her creative energy burned close to the sun and every feeling and idea felt brilliantly colored, vibrant, and pulsing with possibility. The lows that followed were arduous but brushed off as singular events spurred by sudden sickness, dragging on until a small moment of artistic inspiration finally steered her back toward neutral ground. After the diagnosis, these former episodes helped her to pinpoint when new ones began to rear their heads. One of my favorite themes of the memoir is how she explains her therapy and displays the ways she meticulously tracked her every minor mood, creating a map of her interior life. 

Forney navigates turbulent waters with a variety of medication for years while simultaneously battling the fear that achieving balance will stifle or even erase her ability to be creative. Her illustrations thrum with electricity when she’s experiencing mania and pull you deep beneath the tide when she’s depressed. I’m not usually so emotionally affected by graphic memoirs or novels due to the speed at which I plow through them, but Forney’s journey spurred a range of feelings. I felt the weight of her hand as she pulled me along with her, just as she described doing with her friends, and ached for her as deeply as I rooted her on. 

I recommend Marbles for anyone that’s taken a painful but necessary microscope to their own interior machinations as well as those intrigued by the connection between mental health and creativity.

Brandon Jordan Brown:

Danez Smith is winning. Let’s talk about it.

People write poems because they need to. There’s something about poetry that digs at how the world works and how it fails to work properly. Danez Smith is a recipient of the 2014 Ruth Lilly & Dorothy Sergeant Poetry Fellowship, which is essentially the holy grail of poetry for folks who want to write for a living. He’s also putting some other pretty fancy trophies in his case by way of other fellowship and contest awards and some impressive publications. In addition, Smith put out his first full-length collection, [insert] Boy (YesYes Books) to critical praise in 2014.

When you read Smith’s work, you can feel the heart behind each piece. The poems in [insert] Boy are courageous and bold. While reading this book, I’ve noticed the clear influence of “spoken word” style, with its tendency to repeat phrases at the beginning of lines to spin out variations on a theme. Take “The Black Boy & the Bullet” for example:

one is hard & the other tries to be

       one is fast & the other is faster                 one is loud & one is a song               with one note & endless rest

You can tell that Smith writes poetry because he is compelled to create, to wrestle. In this book, he grapples with sexuality, race, pain, desire, death, and what it means to be. Smith’s book is proof that poems can be and do anything.

Paul Reilly:

I moved to Chicago at the start of January 2014, and the single gift in my welcome basket was The House on Mango Street (Vintage), a slim paperback by Sandra Cisneros that seriously shouldn’t have taken sixteen months to read. The book paints a full portrait of the city—or any city, really—through a child’s perspective of the myriad colors and faces that populate her lower-income, mostly Latina West Town neighborhood.* 

Cisneros’s protagonist Esperanza is a first-person narrator worthy of recognition in the First-Person Narrator Hall of Fame. Her family shuffled across various Chicago neighborhoods like a glass bead in Hungry Hungry Hippos, Esperanza details her most recent digs and the surrounding locale with the naiveté of a child, fragile rage of an adolescent, and longing of a person without a home. She profiles each new person in her life in brief chapters, revealing as much about herself as the local color she interacts with. 

Ruthlessly objectified by boys and men on the street despite constant reminders that she is “ugly,” wanting for a “real home” and a true friend despite managing to connect meaningfully with every person on the periphery, Esperanza’s life is constantly plagued by the contradictions affecting a girl getting her first, premature taste of adulthood. The book would be revelatory for clearly and empathetically expressing that perspective alone, but it doesn’t hurt that Cisneros’s prose is a marvel. Gleaning meaning between the lines is an effortless exercise, as Esperanza’s subtle ESL, trips in syntax, and elegant metaphors convey more hidden pain than a thousand purple pages ever could. 

*One last note: The “real” House on Mango Street is only four or five blocks from my own apartment, where I write this capsule review right now. Gentrification is hitting Chicago’s West Side hard in many spots, and I am living proof of that poison. Knowing this, The House on Mango Street takes on another form, like a time capsule of a place that needed a different kind of change than the nonconsensual quality spike it’s experiencing now. In this light, the book is a historical document that mourns as it preserves.

Joshua Heaps:

There is nothing more satisfying than being able to simultaneously browse hundreds of paperbacks and buy a Butterfinger. Supermarket fantasy is where I thrive, surrounded by rows and rows of number one bestsellers. And yet, their shiny covers have a tendency to blur; fantasy can do that. Tolkien’s trilogy unleashed a tidal wave of writers, and it can often be difficult to sort the good from the bad. Mark Oakley’s Thieves and Kings (Ibox Publishing), however, is easily distinguished. Its half-comic, half-prose approach to the genre remains as fresh in my mind as the day I first saw it. With his graphic adventure series, Oakley bravely stakes new territory. 

Thieves and Kings is set in the archetypal land of Oceansend, a medieval place with magic, weird creatures, and a young thief named Rubel. The story unfolds very slowly; a huge and intricate plot that thickens with each character who is brought into the mix. What really stands out, however, is the layout of the series. While some pages are done in traditional comic book style, with panels portraying epic landscapes and beautiful ocean views, others have typed dialogue and description superimposed over the scenes they describe. By including actual text, Oakley forces the reader to interact with his comic as they would any novel. Thieves and Kings is not the kind of series one can digest in a sitting. 

(Poetry Den illo by Jensine Eckwall)

‘Poetry Den' is a reoccurring series in which Brandon Jordan Brown reviews collections that strike his fancy.

Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose. That’s what Jean Baptiste Alphonse Karr said in the January 1849 issue of his journal Les Guêpes. In English, the phrase means “the more it changes, the more it’s the same thing.” I don’t speak French, but I do know that as I turned the final page of Sophie Rachmuhl’s brilliant study of four decades of the Los Angeles poetry scene, this concept immediately came to mind. 

The book, published this year in a joint effort from Otis Books, Seismicity Editions, and Beyond Baroque Foundation, is the culmination of roughly twenty years of research, interviews, and critical study of how various poetry scenes, movements, and literary-cultural centers in Los Angeles came to be, evolved, and/or ceased to exist. A Higher Form of Politics began with the 1988 release of a documentary film project called Innerscapes, 10 Portraits of LA Poets (included with the book). Several years later, Rachmuhl expanded on the world(s) of poetry in LA for her doctoral dissertation—written entirely in French with quotes and poems in English. 

Now, for the first time, we have access to this in-depth study of some of the most overlooked artistic contributions from one of the most well-known cities in the world. Tell me that isn’t a big deal. Of her experience, Rachmuhl writes:

I felt like an explorer and a discoverer, ceaselessly amazed at this bold way of embracing an art for that I thought off-limits. Being an “outsider” was very useful, too, for it enabled me to write with some kind of neutrality and serenity about a poetry that was both intensely personal and intensely public, yet mostly ignored by the literary establishment (universities and the East Coast literary world) and the entertainment industry that so dominated Los Angeles culture . . . 

Reading this as a poet in Los Angeles, I immediately felt a strange sense of connection and disappointment—I can relate to being part of a literary world here that is overshadowed by film and TV, and I am disappointed that nothing has really changed. Each time I tell someone that I’m a writer, they usually ask me what screenplay I’m working on. When I tell them I’m a poet, they smile blankly and nod their head, reminding me that, in most of this city, I’m fairly irrelevant. 

But enough of the depressing stuff. Artists have always found a place from which they are able to critique, energize, and document the human experience. The fact that LA has such a rich history of poets, poetry venues, readings, magazines, anthologies, and more gives all poets in the city something for which to be thankful. We writers in Los Angeles are a part of a beautiful history that—disconnected as it may be by sheer geographic distance, racial and/or social diversity, and varied aesthetics—has provided us a wonderful body of work to savor today.

A Higher Form of Politics begins its task by offering up a brief overview of American poetry from Modernism to the 1980s. “Modernism” is one of those words that many of us often throw around with only a faint idea of what it means. We know it is somewhere after the Bronze Age and before iPhones (hint: it’s basically the first few decades of the 1900s). Rachmuhl provides great information here about the rise of public and private funding for arts initiatives, explaining how many writers were able to establish centers and organizations with the help of money set aside for the arts. 

From there, Rachmuhl moves specifically into the Venice West Beats, black poetry in South Central Los Angeles and Watts, and LA poetry in the ’70s and ’80s. By the time I finished reading the book, I had written down an entire page of poets worth checking out. She examines the contributions of editors and literary movers and shakers like Lawrence Lipton and Stuart Perkoff, cites interview material with the renowned Wanda Coleman, and explores how the 1965 Watts Riots in South LA impacted the black arts movement and the Watts Writers Workshop (including the ideas of poets like Kamau Daáood). She also provides a brief history of Beyond Baroque, the first institution devoted to poetry and publishing in Southern California (slow clap for George Drury Smith), and sheds light on the Women’s Building and East LA poets like Manazar (Manuel Gamboa)—this guy was incredible—before dipping in to the rise of spoken word and coming in for a landing. 

I won’t summarize too much of the book for you. That would take far too long. What I do want to mention is that Rachmuhl does her best to pay close attention to the interweaving narratives that feed and feed off of one another in the city. She rightly notes that poets in LA have historically been separated by miles of freeways, socioeconomic and racial distinctions, and varied camps (as to how much this is influenced by geography and other factors, I’ll leave that for the sociologists). However, nothing happens in a vacuum. Because of the magazines, anthologies, readings, and overall hustle of poetry in the city, there was certainly some “cross-pollination” occurring over the years. 

I’m sure that those who have lived in the city for longer than I have might take issue with some of the classifications and categorizations of those people and movements documented in this book. Sophie Rachmuhl herself states:

the (few) poets I chose to focus on are symbolic of something greater than themselves, though they cannot be representative of the whole scene. This study does not claim to be comprehensive. In particular, the chapters about community poets treat only a few significant poets and anthologies. I am aware that many poets have been left out. I hope my choices will create no controversies or feeling of exclusion, though I think the work of the scholar as well as that of the director of a documentary is precisely to select. Los Angeles’s energy and multiplicity certainly cannot be grasped in one study. 

It’s incredible that some of the poets in the book are still living and breathing today. I’ve even had the pleasure of meeting some of them. So, I suppose poetry in LA is, in the truest sense of the phrase, still alive. In the end, this book is a wonderfully insightful historical survey of how language has been shaped by and also helped to shape the city of Los Angeles. LA poets, in their various workshops, neighborhoods, and pockets, always have been and seemingly continue to be a unique class of artists digging around in the concrete and valleys to shed some light in their corners of the empire.

(Nightstand illo by Jensine Eckwall)

'On Our Nightstand' is a weekly reoccurring feature where our contributing writers and staff share with you what book is on their literal or figurative nightstands.

What's on your Nightstand this week? Share the book you're reading on Instagram with the tag #FQNightstand and we'll regram your post. You can follow us at @foxingreview.

Jane Robbins Mize:

Critically acclaimed upon its release in 1990, Stephanie Vaughn’s Sweet Talk dwindled in popularity until its republication by Other Press in 2012. (My hardback copy came from the library.) But the book—in its deft and eloquent handling of childhood, crisis, and death—is utterly timeless. Revolving around an all-too-normal Midwestern family, the collection inhabits the familiar space between myth and memory. The language is both straightforward and nuanced, and the characters both honest and absurd. The online descriptions say that Stephanie Vaughn is “a writer’s writer,” but I disagree. Stephanie Vaughn is a writer for anyone who finds both beauty and tragedy in the complexity of human relationships. So, Stephanie Vaughn is writer for all.

Kimberly Whitmer: 

I picked up Lauren Groff’s The Monsters of Templeton (Hachette Books) after reading an interview with one of my favorite short story writers, Megan Mayhew Bergman, who listed Groff as an influence. On a sentence level, Groff’s prowess for lyricism and ability to paint a vivid picture is clear from the first page.When 

Willy, our protagonist, returns to her hometown, she is riddled with shame and despair at the sharp dive her life has taken. That same morning, the corpse of a giant, stunning monster emerges belly up in Lake Glimmerglass. I was so enamored with the description of how Willy envisions the town doctor discovering the monster that I read it over and over again, the image it summoned startling me. 

“I imagine how it went: the slide of the scull’s knife across the lake, the oar heads casting rings in the water, the red bow light pulsing into the dark. Then, sudden, looming over the doctor’s shoulder, an island where there had never before been an island, the vast belly of the dead beast . . . He neared; the bow-ball of his boat pushed into the rubbery flesh like a finger into a balloon; the pressure of boat versus skin reached a tensile limit without piercing anything; the boat chucked its bow-ward motion, and jerked to stern . . . When he saw the large and terrible eye still milking over with death, the good doctor blinked. And then he fainted.” 

Groff takes what is already an unsettling moment that will shape the course of the novel and zooms into the microcosm of sensations it instills. This attention to detail runs through the book, building the bones of characters all aching with ungainly angles and flaws. Willy, pregnant with the child of her married professor, has abandoned her research in the Alaskan wilderness to flee the fallout. Her mother, a former hippie wild child, has found God, and sees for Willy an unsatisfactory life that mirrors her own—one that fell flat when mistakes cut off the potential at the quick. She reveals to a still-floundering Willy that her father, once described as any one of three men from a commune in San Francisco, is in fact a man who lives in Templeton. One that Willy knows. And one who, like Willy and her mother, is a descendent of the founder of Templeton. 

So far, the monster lies still in Lake Glimmerglass while citizens and media gather around it. Willy’s personal drama and that of the character of Templeton itself take center stage. As I wade deeper into the story, I’m swiftly taken under into the murky history of the town and the unknowable depths of its inhabitants.

Joshua Heaps:   

“Eddie discovered one of his childhood's great truths. Grownups are the real monsters, he thought.” 

I think the only people who dislike Stephen King are those who have not read him. Perhaps it is because his novels are in every grocery store, or because he is worth more than most authors put together, but a certain stigma follows this master of horror. It took me a long time to pick up one of his novels. Yet, within the first ten pages I realized that contrary to popular belief, King is far more than just a cheap read. His character development and ability to weave narratives together is unrivaled in the horror genre and beyond. His magnum opus, It (Viking Press), is no exception. 

While King has published over fifty novels, It remains one of his best known. I think this is because it is his most simple story (despite its 1,000 plus pages); a detailed account of a small New England town plagued by a nightmare. We’ve all driven through places like Derry, suburbs with white picket fences and family parks, and many of us have wondered, however briefly, whether something sinister was hiding below the surface. King reawakens this fear, bringing to life a town with more going on than what meets the eye. No longer was I in my bed in Austin, but running through the streets of Derry and into the jaws of whatever horror awaited me. 

What this terror is, however, is not always supernatural. King’s novel is both a mystery, with a slow buildup and a shocking ending, and a realistic depiction of childhood trauma and past horror. His writing is not just a series of bloodbaths, but a subtle critique on what parents can get away with and what burdens their children are forced to bear. Although Pennywise the Clown is the novel’s primary antagonist, the parents of the seven children fighting him also fall into that role. In many ways, the clown is the least of their worries. 

(Nightstand illo by Jensine Eckwall)

'On Our Nightstand' is a weekly reoccurring feature where our contributing writers and staff share with you what book is on their literal or figurative nightstands.

What's on your Nightstand this week? Share the book you're reading on Instagram with the tag #FQNightstand and we'll regram your post. You can follow us at @foxingreview.

Jordan Smith:

I first read Bird by Bird (Anchor) as a freshman in college. My professor for a Reading Women Writers course recommended Anne Lamott after a particularly emotional office hours meeting, during which I expressed my reservations about creative writing and my confusion over rejecting the religion of my childhood. Lamott is the author of several novels and memoirs in addition to Bird by Bird, but this volume, subtitled Some Instructions on Writing and Life, is by far my favorite. Lamott’s work, full of emotional resonance, has a great comedic bent and levity amidst confessional stories from her own life, breathtaking quotes from other authors, and sincere passages on what it means to be a writer. 

The title comes from a childhood memory, in which Lamott’s father tells her brother to take a bird research project one thing at a time, bird by bird. Yes, the book is likely most useful to those with writerly aspirations, but as its subtitle suggests, it is about far more than writing. The advice is valuable to anyone going through a period of transition. In particular, her advice on taking the time to notice life and people as part of crafting your characters’ histories resonates with me as I try to cultivate a more mindful, attentive approach to my day to day experiences. And her thoughts on sitting down and just doing the work are true of any endeavor, creative or otherwise. Lamott encourages the reader to trust that even though your first draft will probably be terrible, you’ll have glimmers of truth and authenticity that will, after much sweat and diligence, shape themselves into your story or your novel or your poem. I like to think the same is true of my life—that sometimes it feels terrible, but I’m hacking away for those glimmers of truth—as I continue to write draft after draft.

Kimberly Whitmer:

Lately, all I’ve wanted is to dive headfirst into a book set in an immersive, fantastical world. 

And wow, did I find a book to hit that mark. V.E. Schwab’s A Darker Shade of Magic (Tor Books) rings all of my book-related bells. First off, there’s a highly unique universe. The story is anchored among four parallel and remarkably differing Londons, each defined by the levels of magic that inhabit them. Red London thrives, the alternate version of the Thames coursing with live magic. White London runs white-hot with violence, the magic itself battling all inhabitants. Gray London is essentially our world, or one devoid of magic—stale and boring in comparison to Red London. And Black London now exists only as the stuff of nightmarish bedtime stories. 

Protagonist Kell is an Antari; magic is in his blood. He is one of only two left alive of his kind, and only they can traverse the parallel Londons. He acts as both a messenger and a smuggler, and it isn’t long before an object of untold power (and danger) falls into his hands. Soon after, he collides with the fiery, wannabe-pirate Lila Bard, and the two form an unlikely alliance rife with banter. 

Schwab slyly reveals new elements of the world and its magical machinations with an exceptionally skilled hand. The rulers of White London, an eerie pair of vicious twins, are so memorable that it’s hard to get the looming threat of them out of your mind. Kell serves as a thoroughly likable conduit through the world, but it’s the achingly human, tough-as-nails Lila who will steal your heart (…and your wallet). 

(Coffee House Press)

By Sara Selevitch

In his 2014 collection Empty Pockets, Dale Herd tells 83 stories in just over 200 pages. Many of the stories are pulled from former collections Early Morning Wind (1972), Diamonds (1976), and Wild Cherries (1980). Also featuring several new pieces, Herd’s collection spans numerous decades, genres, and lives.

The title story “Empty Pockets” describes the general state of being of Herd’s characters. They exist on the fringe of society, struggling through crumbling marriages, complicated affairs, crippling feelings, illegal abortions. They are diner waitresses and mechanics, teenagers and parents, slighted lovers and would-be revolutionaries. They are students, runaways, junkies. Some live in small towns, others in cities. None of them know where to go.

Herd’s pieces are tightly crafted, many honing in on a single scene or conversation.  His sharp prose cuts cleanly in and out of the lives of his myriad protagonists. The reader is rarely told where these characters have been or how they got to where they are. We are left to guess at scenarios and relationships, but the gravity of the moment is so piercing and so present that the details don’t matter.

“Together Again” is an example of a one paragraph story structured as a one-sided conversation between unnamed characters. “I hope you don’t blow up at this. I don’t think you will because now there are no more secrets between us,” it begins. The text continually alludes to events just beyond the page, leaving us only with the unprocessed emotions of a woman trying to rebuild a poisoned relationship.  She could be anyone; she is everyone. After a while, the stories blend into one expansive narrative. The unnamed “he” in one story seems to speak to the unnamed “she” in another.

The stories range in intensity, some with higher stakes than others. Each one culminates with an examination of the hand the characters have been dealt. Their reactions range from accepting to cynical to desperate. “Handcrafted Dolls” ends with the protagonist Shane staring up at the night sky. “The night grew quiet. He saw other stars appear. He sketched their lines—Orion, Polaris, Cassiopeia, the Big Dipper—across the dark. There was an order out there. He realized he’s never had a chance.”

Herd’s gritty snapshots of American life are enough to make you wonder if anyone really does.

(Poetry Den illo by Jensine Eckwall)

‘Poetry Den' is a reoccurring series in which Brandon Jordan Brown reviews collections that strike his fancy.

Lately, I’ve been fascinated by the idea that choosing one story means, by necessity, your life will not reflect other stories. You can’t live in Vermont and chop your own firewood while, at the same time, cycling along the highway in Arizona on the only road that connects one city to the next. When I think about life in those terms, there are days when I feel like I might have missed out on worlds of possibilities, while other days I experience a sense of contentment with the way things are. 

Reading the stories Alex Green shares in Emergency Anthems, his debut book of poems out on Brooklyn Arts Press, connected me to the mind of a young guy in coastal Southern California who is sorting through the post-higher ed conundrum that is life. At times, it made me wish I had grown up surfing before I went to school each morning or spent my weekends on some iconic California pier, too afraid to talk to girls in bikinis or whatever it must be like to be an adolescent in that region of the West Coast. Don’t get me wrong, I enjoyed growing up in the South, despite its shortage of waves and surfers bobbing over slow breaks, but those of us who like to read do it because we want to see what it might be like to step into something different, even if just for a few dozen pages. Green really took me there.When writing is truly good, an author can talk about things you've never seen, smelled, tasted, or done, but you’re right there with them. You’re the one whose son got bitten by a shark. It’s your heart that aches because the girl you want to be with is still in love with her dead surfer boyfriend. 

In his book, Green pulls out some pretty neat tricks. He divulges just enough about each character to make the most unique thing about them, the thing he wants you to know, stand out. There is a magician with emphysema, several shark attack victims, a guy with a puppet on the street corner, a Juilliard-trained actor who tries to transform his role in a TV show called “Malibu Silk,” a model who becomes good at yoga after lightning strikes her, and an unhappily married gymnast, to name a handful of Green’s diverse cast. 

Emergency Anthems uniquely portrays a Californian microcosm of life in general—all around the narrator people are dying, relationships fail or never had the chance to in the first place, and there is a pervasive sense of heaviness behind every happy moment. Green’s California is a place where “in July the summer turns to sharks” (“Shark Nocturne”) and “you were the only one who knew that a few weeks earlier [the elderly magician next door] had parked his car somewhere and lost it. When he was too sick to come out for his own garage sale, he told you to give everything away” (“Blue Door Option”). 

Each of the poems stand alone on their respective pages in self-contained paragraphs of prose. Throughout the collection, Green nails the white, artsy, ironic aesthetic of longing, unrequited love, and middle-class angst in the suburban world. For example, from “Dead Surfers and Distant Seconds”: 

The rock climber loves the girl whose boyfriend was killed by a shark. But no matter what he does he’ll always be in second place to the dead surfer who, in his last seconds, stumbled through the waves and back to the beach, blood surging from his side, just to say goodbye to her. Nothing can top that, but he keeps trying anyway. 

If this sounds like a critique, it is, but not because it isn’t a valid aesthetic. Overall, it’s one that resonates with me. I’m white, consider myself artistic, am a romantic, grew up middle-class, and was raised in a suburban environment, and I’d like to think that I have something to offer the world by means of poetry. But at times, it seems like Emergency Anthems becomes too comfortable with its own style, almost to the point of feeling formulaic. The stories are unique and clever, but it might have served Green well to include some variations on how he exhibits his skill, so the reader doesn’t feel as if she is reaching into a hat and merely pulling out different colored rabbits. They may be blue or green or yellow, but they’re all still rabbits. 

In the poem “Why a Scar Is Better than Being Good at Swordfighting,” Green seems to explain perfectly the overall sense of his project: “You’re old enough to understand that funny always loses to a scar.” Yes, there’s an actor who plays a lifeguard who has most of his scenes filmed in a hot tub. And yes, there is a new rabbi at the synagogue who tries to sound cool by referencing rock bands no one listens to anymore. But there are also characters who are the lone survivors of automobile accidents and an old man with emphysema whom “you could hear how the gears of his lungs had snapped and were gone—you imagined them wet and frayed, dangling over the boneless galaxies of his throat” (“Why a Chokehold only Works if the Person Is Standing near You”). These unique characters only serve to highlight the overall sting of pain that seeps throughout the collection. 

All in all, these poems are the anthems you sing in the wake of a disaster, the songs you either have memorized for the occasion or make up as you go along while they come bubbling out of your heart and the shark bite on your side as your surfboard bobs in the waves. Way to go, Alex. 

Favorite Poems: “Dead Surfers and Distant Seconds,” “Last Broadcast, Avery Island,” “Strobe Light Retrospective,” “Solstice Studies,” “Summer of Pitch 77,” “Winter of the Black Drum”

(Nightstand illo by Jensine Eckwall)

'On Our Nightstand' is a weekly reoccurring feature where our contributing writers and staff share with you what book is on their literal or figurative nightstands.

What's on your Nightstand this week? Share the book you're reading on Instagram with the tag #FQNightstand and we'll regram your post. You can follow us at @foxingreview.

Paul Reilly:

Peter Bagge’s Sweatshop, a six-issue satire of newspaper comics recently anthologized by Fantagraphics, establishes its existential norms early and ferociously. The creative offices of the “Freddy Ferret” strip operate within a stinky cloud of malaise, gathering up diverse, young talent and wasting them utterly on a creatively bankrupt enterprise. In the world of Sweatshop, no one is in love, honors are meaningless, and everyone hates their job—especially the loutish, Limbaughlite boss Mel Bowling. 

Satirizing stale newspaper comics ought to be as hoary and miserable as The Lockhorns, but Bagge enlivens his shit sandwich setting by drenching it with colorful grotesquerie, baked upon the finely toasted Kaiser roll of insider specificity. Bagge fills Bowling’s factory with comic archetypes—like the zinester Carrie, superhero-nut Alfred, and delusional white boy Nick—and fleshes them out with gags about samples, inking, focus groups, and conventions. Bagge quotes from industry influences directly in the anthology’s sharpest strip, in which Bowling tries to “snazz up” Freddy Ferret by letting Nick and Alfred draw the same gag in the styles of Chris Ware and Frank Miller, respectively. Of course, this attempt to break the mold fails spectacularly and Sweatshop returns to its dismal status quo. 

Garfield likes lasagna. Linus needs his blanket. Mel, Nick, Carrie, and Alfred are all doomed to fail. Life has constants, and just when they threaten to shimmy forward, Peter Bagge will be there to snap them back into place.

Melissa Ragsdale:

If The Grand Budapest Hotel left you thirsty for more, look no further. 

Delightful, ridiculous, and twisty-turvy, G.K. Chesterton's The Man Who Was Thursday (Penguin Books) is the very definition of a romp. In this novel, the stylings of P.G. Wodehouse meet an Edwardian London world of philosophers, anarchists, secrets, and above all else, spies. 

The book begins with two poets, Gabriel Syme and Lucian Gregory, whose debate over the meaning of poetry quickly gives way to a bet, two vows of secrecy, and the promise of “an entertaining evening.” Every few pages, the plot does a pivot turn, throwing you down new rabbit holes of adventure and wit. At the helm of the adventure is Syme, whose unflappable spirit and quirky repartee make him fit to be played by Stephen Fry or Hugh Laurie during their A Bit of Fry and Laurie days. Yet even among the merriment, Chesterton writes with intellect and imagination, tickling his readers’ minds on every page.