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Editor: D. W. White

Dan White is a graduate of the M.F.A. Creative Writing program at Otis College in Los Angeles and was a Fellow at Stony Brook University’s BookEnds program for the 2020-2021 year. His project at both graduate school and his fellowship was The Seachamber, a literary work exploring a young woman’s consciousness as her inner ambition collides with the constraints of family at the wedding of her younger sister in 1994 Santa Monica. His second novel project, The Winemakers, asks questions about the price of memory and the possibilities of art across a single night in contemporary Los Angeles. He is currently at work on a new manuscript.

In addition to founding and editing L’Esprit, he has served as the Fiction Editor and Excerpts Editor for West Trade Review literary journal since 2020. Outside of the novel form, he writes short fiction, book reviews, and critical essays. His work has appeared in Florida Review, 3:AM, Another Chicago Magazine, Necessary Fiction, and Chicago Review of Books, among several other publications.

His literary tastes gravitate towards fearless, verisimilar, consciousness-forward writing in the High Modernist tradition. While reading, he tends to keep the opening sentence of Mrs. Dalloway close at hand, as it is tattooed on his arm. He especially enjoys innovative, intelligent third-person fiction; unorthodox and sophisticated uses of free-indirect style and other techniques for rendering inner life; work that takes risks, that displays understanding of theory, and that plays with time, memory, and freely-associative thought; quotidian realities of life; and anything in the wonderfully chaotic stream-of-consciousness quartier.

Alongside Mrs. Dalloway, some of his favorite books as representative titles include Pride and Prejudice, The Sound and The Fury, A Confederacy of Dunces, Infinite Jest, Speedboat, Rachel Cusk’s Arlington Park, Lucy Corin’s The Swank Hotel, Lucy Ives’ Life is Everywhere, Aysegül Savaş’ White on White, Emily Hall’s The Longcut, Dorrit Cohn’s Transparent Minds and, bien sûr, Ulysses.

A Chicago ex-pat, he lived in Long Beach, California for nine years, where he taught writing at Otis College and frequented the beach to hide from writer’s block. In an earlier life he earned his J.D. from Southwestern Law School in Los Angeles. In an even earlier one he earned a B.A. in European History from Roosevelt University in Chicago, in the same building where Margaret Anderson founded The Little Review. He has recently returned to Chicago to pursue his Ph.D. at the UIC Program for Writers. His personal site is here and he can be found on Twitter @dwhitethewriter.

Associate Editor: Jessica Denzer

Jessica Denzer is a writer and educator. She received her B.A. in English Literature from Fordham University and her M.F.A. in fiction from Sarah Lawrence College. She is a researcher in residence at the New York Public Library and writes fiction and nonfiction. Her work has appeared in Number Magazine, the Unpublishable Anthology, West Trade Review, she is an Associate Fiction Editor for West Trade Review, and she is a contributing editor and writer for Four Way Review. She teaches writing and literature at Fordham University, Baruch College, and Cooper Union.

Jessica is particularly drawn to winding, language-driven narrative that is both risky and well constructed. In other words, she likes the risk that takes the long road. Her own writing mixes the personal and historical with fiction to develop long winding narratives that stumble around the raw parts of human nature. She writes fiction and non-fiction, as well as scholarly essays, mostly on monsters and strange Edwardian literature. She has a finished novel, Mythologies, which spans the last decade of the 19th century through WWII, following a family who emmigrates from Europe only to be sent back a generation later to fight WWI. She is currently working on several essays and another novel, currently untitled. The second novel follows a 30-something adjunct lecturer, living in New York City and coping with the death of her closest friend while simultaneously having an affair with her friend’s ex-husband. It’s about grief and sex, it’s very juicy but also extremely literary.

Some of Jessica’s favorite books as representative titles include Anne Carson’s Glass, Irony, and God and The Autobiography of Red, Maggie Nelson’s Bluets, Dostoyevsky’s Brothers Karamazov, Roberto Bolaño’s 2066, Proust’s In Search of Lost Time, and Margaret Wise Brown’s Goodnight Moon. Her personal site is here and she can be found on Twitter @jessdenz.