Quarterly Volume V || Fall 2023
Chers amis de L’Esprit,
Bienvenue à our fifth quarterly, Fall 2023! In this edition, we have an especially exciting announcement, calls for submissions, news and updates, a new Editorial Meditation, and more.
L’Esprit launched Issue Three with an excellent reading a few weeks ago; thanks to all who came and participated! We have been realising clips from the reading on Instagram, and have a few more coming soon. Looking forward to April for the Issue Four launch!
More announcements below, and some original writing by our most spectral Editor.
As always we start, in the tradition of Eliot’s Criterion, with A Commentary.
A Commentary
‘No art is mad,’ Roland Barthes says in Camera Lucida (or something like it; apologia to our readers for my only consulting the English), because it is tame. When we perceive the representation of the thing, qua representation, and not the thing itself—this is art, and it is not madness. This, it seems to me, is dubious. There could be no art without madness, for it requires of its creator some special torment through which the world is refracted and wants out. The ordinary manner of seeing life is to not turn it into art; it is instead to live it, or approximate what it might look like to do so. If the world were composed solely of artists, they would have nothing to create.
In Issue Three of our mad little journal, L’Esprit has continued to evolve, or at any rate carry on, in very exciting ways. We have perhaps our most eclectic assemblage of work in this issue, from autotheory to critical work to our staple sustenance of powerful short fiction. We have an essay from the preeminent theorist Violeta Sotirova, whose Bloomsbury Companion to Stylistics, which she edited, I happily devoured earlier this year. Alongside we have an enlightening essay shedding linguistic light on learning second languages and a perspicacious study of a certain notable word in Mrs Dalloway. Much to our delight, we lack not for critical work.
Fiction, naturally, is of no less account in this number, with several elegant and risk-adept pieces that imbue our spirit of revolutionary writing. We’re thrilled to have work from Christopher Linforth, who published with Otis Books, and from Sarah Haufrect, who worked with him on the editorial side—a connection about which I did not know (honestly!), despite being at Otis when they worked together, before the reading last month. Yet more proof of the strange smallness of the literary world.
And we continue to be well-represented across timezones, which continues to present scintillating logistical troubles for organizing our readings. As always, we feature work from the UK and Europe, and our ANZAC streak continues with an excerpt and interview from our Issue Three Featured Writer Ella Baxter. Her pieces are fascinating explorations of the borderline between auto/fiction, and we’re thrilled to be able to present them in the journal.
As L’Esprit continues, slowly but surely, to grow, we’re looking forward to 2024, with much to come. Editor Jessica Denzer will be engaging in a singular study of gender, art, and the marketplace that only she could manage: How Not To Write: On Creative Morality, Artistic Instruction, and the Female Narrative. I am only partially in on the planning, but knowing the author I anticipate a rather elegant immolation of the status quo. Look for this treatise in installments, in true Dickensian fashion, across all four Quarterlies next year. As it has been an aspect of the journal since its Parisian inception to challenge and interrogate the literary world not only through what we publish but what we say, I personally am quite excited for this effort and to see where Jessica takes it.
Our other major announcement, as we have mentioned in a few places so far, is that L’Esprit will be at AWP in February. While we are far too disruptive of institutional convention (read: broke) to actually attend the book fair, we will be hosting an off-site reading. Please join us at Big Mood Wines in Kansas City on Friday, February 9th. We have readers signed up already and have the space for a few more past contributors who would like to attend. We will have more details and announcements as we get closer.
As the weather changes, that is. This Fall Quarterly (released while it still can cling to such a moniker) also includes an Editorial Meditation, previewed below, on death, change, and, bien sûr, ghosts. Hamlet, that most proficient madman, sees one, or says he does, which perhaps comes to the same thing in the end. The desideratum of art can be found in Wittgenstein’s inexpressibility of truth. If we can not look to language for meaning, we must rely on something else, at once more elemental and more enigmatic. In writing, that most chimeric of art forms, truth is found not in language but in words, in the way a thing is articulated. Barthes, it seems, has it wrong; art is the thing, it is the world. And the world, as is apparent, is madness. This we know but cannot say, and so we look to the artists, to the mad, to lend us for a moment a sense of reason.
Consciously,
L’Esprit
D. W. White, 11 November 2023
Call for Submissions
L’Esprit has begun reading for Issue Four, due out in mid-April.
As always we’re especially interested in getting more critical work (be it book reviews, literary criticism, autotheory, or craft essays), and writing in translation. We have a Submittable project dedicated to essay proposals, as well.
See our Submission Guidelines for more details on all of the above.
Best of the Net Nominees
We’re pleased to announce the L’Esprit 2023 Best of the Net Nominees.
Eric Daffron, “Fragments of an Intermittent Lover”
Kayvan Tahmasebian and Rebecca Ruth Gould, translation of Hormoz Shahdadi’s Night of Terror
Michael Nath, Talbot and the Fall
Night of Terror
Congratulations to Kayvan Tahmasebian and Rebecca Ruth Gould for being named to PEN Presents for their translation from the Persian of Hormoz Shahdadi’s Night of Terror, as extracted in L’Esprit Issue Two!
Submittable
L’Esprit is on Submittable!
Find us here.
Publication Announcements
L’Esprit is once again happy to share a few recent publication announcements and other news from past contributors!
“The Cherry Tree” in Capital City Press by Jennifer Ostopovich
“Obruni” in Gulf Coast by Linette Marie Allen
“The Makeup Lesson” in Made in L.A. Vol. 5 by Sarah Haufrect
Rachel León’s interview with Margo Steines in The Brooklyn Rail
Subscribe to Katherine Strange’s Heretic Hereafter on Substack
And finally, congrats to Ea Anderson for her story “I Want To Be This Girl” appearing in the Summer 2023 Ploughshares!
Félicitations à tous!
Le Traité
In 2024, Editor Jessica Denzer will undertake a four-part, year-long treatise interrogating questions of the marketplace, artistic pedagogy, and what is expected of women in publishing.
Look out for How Not To Write: On Creative Morality, Artistic Instruction, and the Female Narrative beginning in January.
And be warned.
Issue Three at Le Magasin
A reminder that we now offer print and digital editions of all full issues alongside our current online versions. Find everything on the dedicated section of the website, Le Magasin.
Issue Three is now available in print and digital editions!
Issues One and Two are also available in all three formats.
Thanks to everyone for your support of fearless writing!
Editorial Meditation
To conclude, a preview of our latest Editorial Meditation, from Editor Jessica Denzer.
The Dog Belonged to Someone Who Has Died: Ghosts, Trauma, and the Unwillingness to Live
What is a ghost? I recently posed this question to a character in a manuscript I’m currently writing. Or rather, I had her pose it to herself. In contemplating the emergence of an apparition or vision that has begun to haunt her, Anna finds herself meditating on the notion of ghosts; are they not simply memories, she wonders, transparent mimicries of those both living and dead, who have taken up residency in the mind, lying dormant in the unconscious until the moment of their unexpected summoning? No, she concludes. Ghosts are not memories. Memories are memories, or rather, ghostly memories are guilt and desire, logged failures coming to pay you a visit.
Ghosts, on the other hand, are something else altogether.
Fall is the season for the dead. A celebration of decay. Leaves rage before us red and yellow, breaking open like the most beautiful of diseases, their veins prominent, the bulging rivers of oldened skin, their flesh bleeding before browning. It seems fitting that we place all our morbid fantasies in its turning; Halloween and la Dia de Muertos rushing by as we imagine our bodies inside out, our mortality wrapped in costume as if to remind us of our own potential disappearance, or reappearance. Our own spectral possibility grinning at us sinisterly from the faces we’ve cut out of pumpkins. Such a strange habit we have – carving faces onto the inanimate, a picture much like our own, as if the mirror isn’t enough. But the pumpkin has its own mortality. We place the face on an already dying thing and then watch as it shrivels away, as the mask becomes the death mask, a reaper of sorts that draws us to it before we toss it in the garbage. One less pumpkin in the world. A little sacrifice to guarantee another year of our own life.
And perhaps this sacrificial reassurance is necessary. The beautiful decaying fall is the precursor to actual death, to a loss of life – a sucked bone dry cold dark world of winter, where life ceases for a moment and suspends us in the frozen stillness of the truth; that what is lost will not actually return; that spring and summer and fall are gone; that when rebirth happens, as it inevitably does, it will not be the same as the birth last spring, it will be different, it will be another. It will not know you. You will not know you when you die. Or rather, when you die, you will not be reborn into spring, because even spring is not reborn into spring. Time goes on. And our memories, or our ghosts, or our guilt is all that remains.
But what am I saying? What purpose does my saccharine mediation on the cycle of life and death serve? And who does it serve? What indulgence is the life of a writer in constant thought of death and at times a bit of life!
And perhaps ghosts are real.
Or perhaps they are guilt.
Or perhaps they are both. For what is real if not guilt?
I think perhaps what I really should have done is write a poem, a terrible unreadable poem. And then forced you, dear reader, to read it, which would then make you cry at the injustice of it all, the injustice of terrible poetry.
Au Revoir
Keep in touch for all the new happenings around the corner, and we’ve hoped you’ve enjoyed our Fall Quarterly. See everyone soon!
Thank you for your support of fearless writing, and à la prochaine.
Consciously,
L’Esprit
L'Esprit Literary Review 