#jared hohl

Recommended by The Agriculture Reader

Issue No. 96

Early in the gray morning, the crop dusters gathered in the pilot’s lounge of the Riperose Municipal Airport and saw a big summer storm approaching. It swirled on the radar in pixelated green, moving east across the image of Iowa. The crop dusters declared a whiskey front and immediately set about pissing the day away.

The bi-fold hydraulic door of hangar ten opened with a de-pressurizing whoosh of air. Keith Custer, the young on-site groundskeeper, went over and turned on the big overhead lights. One of the baby-faced southern pilots brought in a brand new grill.

Read the rest of the story at electricliterature.com.

About the Author

Jared Hohl is from Iowa and now lives in New York. His fiction has appeared in Monkeybicycle, The Agriculture Reader, H.O.W. Journal, Torpedo Magazine, Washington Square Review, and in the anthology The Apocalypse Reader. He has recently finished writing the novel The Dead Generations and can be reached at thedeadgenerations [at] gmail.com.

About the Guest Editor

Over the course of six issues in approximately eight years, The Agriculture Reader has published a vast range of poetry, fiction, nonfiction, visual art, and unclassifiable fare by writers and artists such as Ben Lerner, Diane Williams, Ariana Reines, Joshua Cohen, Matthew Zapruder, Scott Teplin, Karl Larocca, Paul Violi, Eileen Myles, and Mary Jo Bang. We are always in search of new voices (and forms) but also take a distinct pleasure in publishing the same people over and over: Mike McDonough, Noelle Kocot, Jared Hohl, Anthony McCann, and Leopoldine Core are all repeat offenders, or, as the in-house lingo has it, Returning Champions. The early issues were hand-assembled and are now impossible to find. Since AGR3 we’ve printed in editions of 500 with letter-pressed or otherwise hand-detailed covers (drawings, cutouts, stickers, stamps). The staff consists of five people living in four different states. We are collected by some libraries and museums, including MoMA. The only thing we’ve ever had in Best American Poetry was a piece of short fiction. We don’t want the most readers: we want the best ones. AGR6, our brand new issue, is our first in dos-à-dos format. It flips over! The A side is a full-length poetry collection, The New Music by Greg Purcell, illustrated by Eliana Perez. The B side, in traditional anthology style, is illustrated by Mary Wagner and features work from a dozen fantastic writers ranging from Ralph Waldo Emerson to Frances L. Gill, whose short story “Fugue for Aspirations” marks her publishing debut. The new issue and select back issues and art books are available for purchase at the X-ing Books website.

About Electric Literature

Electric Literature is an independent publisher working to ensure that literature remains a vibrant presence in popular culture. Electric Literature’s weekly fiction magazine, Recommended Reading, invites established authors, indie presses, and literary magazines to recommended great fiction. Once a month we feature our own recommendation of original, previously unpublished fiction, accompanied by a Single Sentence Animation. Single Sentence Animations are creative collaborations: the author chooses a favorite sentence and we commission an artist to interpret it. Stay connected with us through our eNewsletter (where you can win weekly prizes), Facebook, and Twitter, and find previous Electric Literature picks in the Recommended Reading archives.

"The Dead Generations" Copyright © 2014 Jared Hohl. Originally published in The Agriculture Reader with the title "The Invaders’ Retreat." Reprinted by permission of the author.

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"The crop dusters declared a whiskey front and immediately set about pissing the day away."

From "The Dead Generations" by Jared Hohl, recommended by The Agriculture Reader.