Notes and Errata

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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For The Love Of Story

There’s an irresistible deadpan underpinning Irish writer Maggie Armstrong’s debut novel Old Romantics—if Armstrong’s title choice elicits any preliminary notions of sentimentality, just give her five or six paragraphs to set the record straight. Rendered as a collection of linked short stories, we first meet Old Romantics’ (aptly-named) central character Margaret on her lunch break during a summer internship program.
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On Novels and Forms

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.
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Before The End, There Were Endings

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).
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