Kyle Minor is the author of In the Devil's Territory, a collection of short fiction. Recent stories and essays were published in The Southern Review, Gulf Coast, Arts & Letters, Surreal South, Twentysomething Essays by Twentysomething Writers, and Best American Mystery Stories 2008.
Nine short stories (from Kvashay-Boyle, Kwon, Mikesch, Lacher, Campbell, Gay, Traverse, Kesey, and Danticat), an interview with Harry Mathews, and an e-chapbook of poems by Letitia Trent. Here they are:
1. “Saint Chola,” by K. Kvashay-Boyle.
An excerpt:
Skater. Hesher. Tagger.Lesbo-Slut. Wanna-be. Dweeb.Fag. Prep. What-up.Nerdy. Trendy. Freaky. In a few weeks it’ll be solid like cement, but right now nobody knows yet. You might be anything. And here’s an example: meet Mohammadee Sawy.
2. “Superhero,” by Reese Okyong Kwon.
An excerpt:
When she was very young, her mother had explained her name to her. “You were named after one of the youngest saints,” her mother told her as she brushed her hair. “A martyr. She believed in God, but her father was a strict Roman nobleman and forbade her from praying under pain of death. When she persisted, her father had her whipped until she died. She was twelve or so.
The editors of Copper Nickel, the literary journal at the University of Colorado Denver, have launched Coin, a companion website which mines (forgive me) some of the better work from the literary journal, and presents it alongside ancillary materials (interviews, conversations, essays about the making of stories, etc.) The inaugural issue includes poems from Dan Albergotti, Sandy Florian, Ed Pavlic, and Ginny Hoyle, Snezana Zabic’s essay “Meet Satan,” and, most interestingly, a portfolio of work by and about Michael Copperman, whose story “It” is written, as he describes it, in “black Delta dialect, not reproducing African-American Vernacular English (AAVE) so much as depicting a particular boy speaking it,” although the story’s author self-describes as “a Japanese-Hawaiian Russo-Polish Jew” in his essay “Race, Authenticity, Culpability,” which appears alongside the story.
Ben Greenman’s book What He’s Poised to Do is worth your time. I’m not sure which Ben Greenman wrote it, since there seem to be around 43 Ben Greenmans sharing similar biographical notes. One of them wrote Celebrity Chekhov, in which Chekhov characters are replaced by the likes of Lindsay Lohan, Britney Spears, Alec Baldwin, Kim Kardashian, Oprah, and so on. That Ben Greenman also runs the Celebrities with Character blog, where you can write letters to actual celebrities. Both of these Ben Greenmans READ MORE >
From a 2003 interview with Robert Birnbaum:
RB: And then there are the attacks on writers like Morrison and Salman Rushdie and DeLillo and now young guys like Franzen and Foer and it strikes me that they are being attacked by people who haven’t read them…
PE: It’s always easier to condemn something when you haven’t read it.
RB: But why get so worked up? On the other hand, maybe it’s a good thing that people are passionate about these things.
PE: If that’s really what they are passionate about? If somebody is really offended by the artistic sensibility of some writer that would be a great discussion. But if they are simply jealous of that person’s success or something personal, I don’t get it.
The New Yorker has the same giant bullseye on it that anything that has risen to the level of cultural significance will. It sits at the top of the news chain alongside the New York Times, but its volleys are more focused because it doesn’t publish every day, and instead of shotgunning hundreds of stories a week into the world, it offers four or five high caliber rifle shots. The day a new issue comes out, you’ll hear one or three of the major stories as a headline on NPR or CNN or the networks or even ESPN (the magazine has lately been taking aim at the violence football does to the bodies and minds of those who play.) Also, the numbers: It has the broadest circulation of the few remaining smart people magazines, and because it is the most prestigious magazine in the world and one of the best paying, it can have its pick of writers. It serves, therefore, not just as a mirror to American culture (albeit from a usually-lofty and Eastern vantage point), but also as an influential shaper of American culture. Among its readers are the some of the most powerful among us, and, like it or not, power gets to do the greater share of the shaping. The New Yorker has the ear of some of the shapers.
I stopped subscribing to the New Yorker for three reasons. First, it’s expensive. READ MORE >
The narrator of Mark Richard’s new memoir House of Prayer No. 2 sees his past self in a fairly distant third person which has access to the interior life of the past self but which more often treats him as though we are looking at him as a clinical specimen:
“He won’t learn, he doesn’t learn, he can’t learn, the teachers tell the mother. He talks back to the teachers, tries to correct their speech. He was rude to kind Mr. Clary when he came to show the class some magic tricks. You better get him tested. He might be retarded. And he runs funny.” READ MORE >
From Gaston Bachelard’s The Poetics of Space:
Psychologists–and more especially philosophers–pay little attention to the play of miniature frequently introduced into fairy tales. In the eyes of the psychologist, the writer is merely amusing himself when he creates houses that can be set on a pea. But this is a basic absurdity that places the tale on a level with the merest fantasy. And fantasy precludes the writer from entering, really, into the domain of the fantastic. Indeed he himself, when he develops his facile inventions, often quite ponderously, would appear not to believe in a psychological reality that corresponds to these miniature features. He lacks that little particle of dream which could be handed on from writer to reader. To make others believe, we must believe ourselves. Is it worthwhile, then, for a philosopher to raise a phenomenological problem with regard to these literary “miniatures,” these objects that are so easily made smaller through literary means? Is it possible for the conscious–of both writer and reader–to play a sincere role in the very origin of images of this kind?
Someone asked me today whether I would be sad if I published (x) book and it alienated people from my community of origin, lost me their affection, etc. (I was raised a Southern Baptist, attended an extreme fundamentalist Christian school where many of the faculty were educated at places like Bob Jones University for the fourteen years preceding college, broke from those places to become an associate pastor in a more moderate tradition briefly after college, worked briefly in religious publishing, finally gave all of it up entirely, and I haven’t believed in god for almost ten years now.) I said that the only time I hear from most people from that time is when I publish something they don’t like & then they reach out “in love” to express displeasure and offer correction. Those who really love me, I said, have been in my life all along, regardless of whether or not they disagreed with me. My friend said he was in a similar place in life as me, but that it wasn’t worth it for him to lose the affection of those who have been in his life since he was a child, especially members of his family. READ MORE >
I was lucky enough to score galleys of Miroslav Penkov’s East of the West, which is due in bookstores in July from Farrar, Straus, and Giroux. I’ve read the stories twice already. They’re knockouts.
Penkov is a Bulgarian writer who writes in English. He studied as an undergraduate at the University of Arkansas, and discovered his talent for storytelling in an Ellen Gilchrist workshop. After graduating, he spent four more years studying at Arkansas in the MFA program, and now he teaches at the University of North Texas. I first read his story “Buying Lenin” in The Southern Review, and I’ve been a big fan ever since.
Here is the promotional copy from FSG:
“A grandson tries to buy the corpse of Lenin on eBay for his Communist grandfather. A failed wunderkind steals a golden cross from an Orthodox church. A boy meets his cousin (the love of his life) once every five years in the river that divides their village into east and west. These are Miroslav Penkov’s strange, unexpectedly moving visions of his home country, Bulgaria, and they are the stories that make up his charming, deeply felt debut collection.
“In East of the West, Penkov writes with great empathy of centuries of tumult; his characters mourn the way things were and long for things that will never be. But even as they wrestle with the weight of history, with the debt to family, with the pangs of exile, the stories inEast of the West are always light on their feet, animated by Penkov’s unmatched eye for the absurd.”
You can learn more about Miroslav Penkov at his website, and preorder his book at Amazon.com or IndieBound. I’ll write more about him here (a review, maybe an interview) when the publication date draws nearer.
Does the color red change the way you look at this photograph? It is difficult to escape the received standard ideas of red: Red as an erotic color, red the color of heat, red for danger, red means stop before you roll into the path of injury, red means embarrassment (but in this case later for the lovers who ought not have been together caught by the camera, their transgressions revealed by the resulting prints, which are made in a red-lit darkroom, and developed in a black-and-white developer bath lit red by the darkroom lamp, so the first time they’re seen they’re blushed [a word which means red has come into the cheeks, and therefore blood] by the red lamp, which means the first time the photographer sees them they already carry the color temperature that calls to mind the heat and the shame he means to initiate), and now we consider the role of the blood in the interpretation of emotions or intimacies, the way the swelling or engorgement of vessels carrying red blood reveals READ MORE >