Notes and Errata

Dispatches from the Underworld

Moniique Wittig’s Across the Acheron, translated from the French by David Le Vay with Margaret Crosland in a new release from Winter Editions, is an energetic, formally impish, fiercely irreverant novel.
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Misperception & Identity

Existing in the modern world, and particularly in modern America, means grappling with identity. It drives us, defines us, boxes us in.
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One Continuous, Poetic Interrogation of the Now

When we read history, become aware of and engage with it, where does it go? From the page to brain to life, does it sit idly, watching from behind us, or does it breathe inside us? By what force or alchemy does it make itself tangible, legible to us as we continue to forge its path through time? These questions may or may not be relevant as one reads The Cavalier by Nathalie Quintane, but this does…
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All The Slime of the Sea

In two short sentences, Smith positions his gem of a novel within the wider literary tradition of oceanic tales and seafaring stories, calling to mind the ancient, rich, and primordially-soupy themes of purpose and survival, narrative and connection, virility and compulsion, madness and legacy, pregnancy, potential, and change—of men inside fish and oceans inside man.
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Memories and Imagined Futures

A woman finds a letter her partner left her and in her immediate response, she sits and she thinks. What has happened? What will happen? These questions open a great chasm of causality that opens up the story’s world.
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On Casual Cruelty

We don’t normally think of cruelty as casual; we think of it as planned, pre-meditated. It’s easier this way, in a psychological sense, to disallow the possibility that wounding can occur without intention. There is no way that I, a good person, can be cruel without noticing, right?
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Only A Shopping List

Vegetables because I told her I’d eat healthy while she is away; she made me promise especially, which I know was a way for her to tell me that she loves me; like my promising her was a way for me to tell her that I love her;
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The Thing Is Never the Thing

Be more direct, you said. There is no distinct voice here, you said, annihilating my existence as if it were nothing. As if voice ever materializes, as if voice isn’t dispersed endlessly across the winds, the words, singing quietly in unstable rhythms and far-flung allusions, part-alive in half-lit memories, slinking into the veiled ethereal core of time-escaped being.
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Awake at the Wheel

I gamble on a new day in the cold diaphanous dawn while my namesake, many crooked borders away, waits on consignment for proper prayers on his behalf. I think there are none, sacred or otherwise, that can really get the job done, nothing between him and that arbitrary draw.
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Where’s An Old Broad Go To Get Into Trouble

You girls know a place with a good crowd. Have a big steak. Couple martinis. Cigarette smoke like in the real world. Don’t you think. Ditch all this beige. Grab a lipstick, you two’ll come with. Fill’er up. Then we go dancing. I still got the hips for it.
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