Quarterly Volume X || Winter 2025
Chers amis de L’Esprit,
Bienvenue à our tenth quarterly, Winter 2025! In this edition, we have a major announcement (!), plus journal news, calls for submissions, publication updates, and two new book reviews
Happy Birthday to Virginia Woolf and James Joyce! As always we start, in the tradition of Eliot’s Criterion, with A Commentary.
A Commentary
For this, tenth, A Commentary, I thought I’d do something a bit different and reprint the Editor’s Introduction we wrote for our new anthology, the hour, irrevocable: A L’Esprit Retrospective. More details on the anthology itself (and its publisher!) are below.
Please enjoy this introduction to our new press, Indirect Books.
On Risk
Jessica Denzer & Dan White
Editorial Introduction
There! Out it boomed. First a warning, musical; then the hour, irrevocable. The leaden circles dissolved in the air.
—Virginia Woolf, Mrs Dalloway
Three years ago, in a Canadian bar in a tempestuous Paris, the idea for a literary journal was first given serious form. Something about writing that dislikes, distrusts, conventions in publishing; that takes chances in style and form alongside content; that does it for a Flaubertian love of the sentence above all. L’Esprit was officially launched a few months later, in the month that marked a clean centenary from the publication of Ulysses, an anniversary shared with Jacob’s Room and The Waste Land. We started with an idea to find work that engaged first and foremost in the type of revolutionary literature that Woolf and Joyce personify, alongside an expansive, sharp approach to criticism that Eliot brought to his own journals. Above all we wanted to champion fearless writing, and see what came of it.
Now, releasing a retrospective anthology following the close of our debut contest prize, the journal has grown beyond whatever we first took to be the shadowy outline of that first form. The present publication, printed in time to mark our third anniversary and with funds raised entirely by reader and contributor support, exemplifies, we hope, where we’re going as much as where we’ve been: the hour, irrevocable looks back at our first five issues, along with the quarterly features between, highlighting some (and by no means all) of the work that has most fully realized the vision with which we began. Some extremely hard decisions were made in selecting the pieces for this number; indeed, it was the process of going through our past issues that most made manifest the overwhelming response we’ve received from the literary community over the past three years. What we have laid out here in this anthology is but a small sample of all the incredible and fearless writing that we have had the honor of publishing over these three years.
While the hour, irrevocable serves as a retrospective of L’Esprit’s incredible writing community, it also marks the next chapter in our project, one that’s been in development since last year: a new independent press, Indirect Books. The idea to launch a press emerged from the same desires that gave rise to L’Esprit—a conviction that the current literary industry hews far too close to the shorelines of commercialism and marketability, to work that holds the reader’s hand while concerning itself with making lukewarm ethical claims over driving real social change through artistic skill. Indirect Books means to champion writing that doesn’t shy away from challenging itself or its reader in order to acquiesce to received notions of “right vs wrong,” “entertainment vs difficulty.” In the publishing of full novels, these acute conditions are heightened to urgent demands. As many have seen, observed, and felt, the paucity in books that truly take chances in literary expression has reached a crisis point, especially in the United States. With Indirect, we hope to do whatever we can to help ameliorate this critical state of affairs.
As with all good things, our timing is informed by fortune. The novelist Michael Nath, a writer who represents all the things we’ve spent the last few years (and few paragraphs) espousing, had an excellent manuscript in need of a publication home; we had a nascent press looking for a debut project. Michael has a lengthy history with L’Esprit, inaugurating our Featured Writer tradition, serving as the Guest Judge for the 2025 Leopold Bloom Prize for Innovative Narration, and supplying essays, short fiction, and excerpts of his (and Indirect’s) forthcoming novel, Talbot & The Fall.
Neither this collection nor the work in it would be possible without all our readers, supporters, and above all contributors–those who entrust us with their art. A sincere merci beaucoup to everyone who has supported fearless writing over the last few years, and made first L’Esprit, and then Indirect, possible at all. We’d like to especially mention the excellent Jennifer Ostopovich, someone who fits into all three of those categories, and provided all of the original artwork found throughout these pages. Jennifer, an Issue One contributor who also drew our house portraits of Woolf and Joyce, starts things off with her process essay, “Brush Stokes,” reflecting on her artistic praxis.
The anthology’s title, of course, comes from Mrs Dalloway, published in 1925 and so marking its own centenary this year. Probably Woolf’s most known novel, Mrs Dalloway, like the times in which it was written, mark a period of irrevocable change. Modernists, like Joyce, Woolf, and Eliot, all worked within a movement that pushed against conventional notions of art and aesthetic and forced the artist and the audience to rethink their understanding of what language and art could be. What it could do. Risk is required for that kind of irrevocable change. Risk, and courage to say what is true, to communicate the soul.
In her essay Montaigne, published the same year as Mrs Dalloway, Woolf argues that “…beyond the difficulty of communicating oneself, there is the supreme difficulty of being oneself. This soul, or life within us, by no means agrees with the life outside us. If one has the courage to ask her what she thinks, she is always saying the very opposite to what other people say.”
Perhaps it is no coincidence to find ourselves 100 years away from the publication of Woolf’s most impactful work, and once again in an artistic era saturated with commercial consumption. In keeping close contact with our literary ancestors, we hope that L’Esprit—and, in its turn, Indirect—will continue to publish work with courage to push against what is safe and sellable; writing that speaks for the soul rather than the market. Like the Modernists before us, we will continue to carve a small mark on the world, providing whatever space and light we can for writing that pushes beyond convention and embodies the urgent, timeless, risk-adept spirit that first brought the journal into being.
Consciously,
L’Esprit
D. W. White, 2 February 2025
Indirect Books & AWP
We’re thrilled to announce our new press and to be officially launching Indirect Books at AWP in LA, with a reading at The Last Bookstore and a table (T215). Copies of the hour, irrevocable will be available for purchase on-site.
L’Esprit was launched from Southern California, while I lived in Long Beach. LA holds a special place for me and our journal, and I could not think of a better place to open our next chapter–not despite, but indeed because of the terrible circumstances the LA area has faced over the last month.
We can’t wait to celebrate the excellent literary community in LA next month, and see so many friends of the journal.
À bientôt!
L’Esprit AWP Reading
If you’re planning to be at AWP this year, please join us at our off-site reading!
Saturday, March 29th, at 6:00 PM, at The Last Bookstore in downtown LA.
Keep an eye on our socials for more details.
Call for Submissions
We’re still reading for Issue Six, 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.
See our Submission Guidelines for more details.
Creative Writing Quartets
Issue Two contributor Rachel Rodman is running an experiment called “Creative Writing Quartets” and looking for more volunteers. In a Quartet, four writers work in parallel, building on one another’s work over the course of 3 “movements.”
Zoom “performances” last approximately 1.5 hours; anything written in the course of a Quartet remains the intellectual property of the writer.
If interested, contact Rachel at rcrodman@gmail.com.
Publication Announcements
L’Esprit is once again happy to share a few recent publication announcements and other news from past contributors!
While Visiting Babette by Kat Meads from Sagging Meniscus Press (and reviewed for L’Esprit by Devyn Andrews in this Q!)
“I Want to be This Girl” by Ea Anderson in The Pushcart Prize XLIX: Best of the Small Presses
“Genghis Kahn” by G. M. Monks, selected for the shortlist of the Minds Shine Bright writing competition Light and Shadow for the Minds Shine Bright anthology in 2025.
“The Devil and the Mirror” by Joachim Glage in High Horse.
“Two Hybrids” by Rachel Rodman in The Future Fire
“True Princess” by Rachel Rodman in Baubles from Bones
“Hybrid” by Rachel Rodman in Heathentide Orphans (Zoetic Press)
“Not Elsie” by Rachel Rodman in Fabula Argentea
“A Roman Morning” by Anna de Noailles, translated by Diane Josefowicz in Exacting Clam
“‘I Was Not Made to Be Dead’: Translating Anna de Noailles” by Diane Josefowicz in Exacting Clam
Review of Thunderhead by Miranda Darling by Diane Josefowicz in Necessary Fiction
Review of Softie: Stories by Megan Howell by Diane Josefowicz in Necessary Fiction
Félicitations à tous!
Issue Five 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.
Thanks to everyone for your support of fearless writing!
2025 Leopold Bloom Prize for Innovative Narration
L’Esprit is honored to announce the results of the 2025 Leopold Bloom Prize for Innovative Narration, Guest Judged by Michael Nath.
Grand Prize Winner || Publication in L’Esprit Issue Six and $500 USD
Helen Mulgrew and the Hollow Tree, Art O’Connor
Second Place Award || Publication in L’Esprit Issue Six and $100 USD
Hiraeth, Colm O’Shea
Third Place Awards || Publication in L’Esprit Issue Six
Nothingbergers, Danielle Barr
Twilight in the Amphitheater, Andy Bodinger
Parallel Monologues, Noémie Boucher
Shortlist
The Interruption, Claude Clayton Smith
An Invitation to the Gulls, Michael Thériault
Ashley and the Ewe, Naomi Afrassiabi
Logan Takes a Lit Test, Beatriz Seelaender
Deja Vu, Neil Weiner
Sharon, Hannah Wyatt
Due Care, Carol LaHines
My Mother Is A Cannibal, Priyanuj Mazumdar
The Devil and the Mirror, Joachim Glage
Crying, Josh Boardman
2025 Clarissa Dalloway Prize for Short Prose
After all the incredible support we received in our first-ever contest, we’re excited to announce our next one!
The 2025 Clarissa Dalloway Prize for Short Prose will be awarded to the best work of prose–fiction, nonfiction, or hybrid work–under 5,000 words. There are other no requirements; we’ll simply be looking for the best work we can find, inspired by the exceptional writing of Virginia Woolf in this, the 100th anniversary of Mrs Dalloway.
$500 and publication to the Grand Prize winner; $100 and publication to Second Place. All entries receive a digital copy of Issue Six and are considered for publication. $10 entry fee.
Keep an eye on our socials and Submittable page for more information; submissions will open during AWP.
The Prize will be Guest Judged by Diane Josefowicz.
Submittable
L’Esprit is on Submittable!
Find us here.
Winter Quarterly Original Work
L’Esprit is pleased to release our latest original work, including fiction, nonfiction, and reviews.
Find excerpts below, and read the full pieces on our website.
Nazareth
Emma Robin Paxson
Fiction
Naz, like Nazareth, was her name. I saw her on a trip back to Sully, the place where I was born, a small half- strip mall city outside of Des Moines. She was working at Kmart. I borrowed my grandparents’ dirt brown Honda Civic and drove through Rockford, through Cedar Rapids, through the plains where the buffalo used to run.
Liminal
Simon Petrie
Fiction
It’s like water-glass, I suggest to her, not properly knowing what water-glass is, nor what it is I’m comparing it to. To be honest, I didn’t hear what she’d said anyway, against the railway station’s turmoil.
Continue reading
Philosophy in Philadelphia
David Capps
Nonfiction
I’ll tell you a Philadelphia story and I’ll try to keep it brief as I know you have better things to do than read a story by a washed-up academic who spends his summers piddling about the pebble shores of the Aegean, no longer so enthralled by the fireworks of ideas.
A Persistent Opacity: Language and Form in While Visiting Babette
Devyn Andrews
Book Review
Much as gazing out a window requires one look through, not at, the glass between, reading a book requires us to see beyond the visual and syntactical arrangement of words on the page. The interface becomes translucent, distance appears to collapse; that perception nonetheless always occurs through a kind of frame is perhaps its ultimate illusion, evidence of that strange and subjective entanglement between the individual and her environment which we call consciousness.
Before The End, There Were Endings: Stranger Than Fiction and the Endurance of the Novel (as Form)
D. W. White
Book Review
In the way of a stray dog following one home, or a young, little-known child asking why on repeat, “commentators” have been wondering, aloud and in ink, what has become, or might become, or should become, of the “form of the novel.” Here at the end of history, 2025, we can of course look back on these questions with the warm expectancy of answers (although we’ll leave them for another time just now). But in those dark days of the previous millennium, when people called each other through heavy spiraling cords to talk about “plots” and “fiction” and “authors” as if they were real, discrete ideas, everyone thought that there was such a thing as the novel, and that it could appear in the many shapes of Proteus, cunning and elusive on his rock. This is the wonderful state of affairs explored and elaborated by Edwin Frank in his new book—what we might call a popular critical history—Stranger Than Fiction, a compendium of the novel in the long twentieth century (from Dostoevsky to Sebald), and a welcome repost to the tired elegies poured over our most elliptical art form.
Au Revoir
We hope you’ve enjoyed our Winter Quarterly; please keep in touch as we head to AWP and the launch of Indirect Books.
Thank you for your support of fearless writing, and à la prochaine.
Consciously,
L’Esprit
L'Esprit Literary Review 