Have you been reading the Lit Blog Co-Op this week? If you haven’t, here’s what you’ve missed: a podcast interview with Ander Monson, the author of Other Electricities, a discussion about the book, a review, and, finally, an appearance by the writer himself. Next week will be devoted to All This Heavenly Glory by Elizabeth Crane. So tune in!
The Lit Mag Roundup is a new, quarterly feature at Moorishgirl.com, in which North Carolina-based fiction writer Katrina Denza shares her literary discoveries of the season.
I bought my first literary journal subscription in 1999. A longtime reader of novels, that was the year I’d begun to explore writing. I don’t remember where I first saw an issue of Story, but after I read a copy, I fell in love with the short story form and subscribed. I still have on my desk an old issue of the now-defunct magazine, edited by Lois Rosenthal and Will Allison, and featuring stories from Tim Gautreaux, Matt Cohen, Ingrid Hill, and the late Carol Shields, to remind me of when my excitement for short stories first ignited.
Now, my bookshelves are filled with literary journals. I subscribe to at least twenty a year, and piled in stacks all over my house are samples from over sixty journals. They are as important to me as the short story collections and novels with which they share shelf space. This is all well and good for me, but if I were to ask some stranger on the street if he’s heard of a particular literary journal, most likely his answer would be no. I wonder how it is that such amazing work is left to collect dust in the few bookstores that carry them, or kept insulated in the academic world. If books are the showy muscles of the literary world, then journals are the blood: hidden, self-renewing, and essential.
The vast array of print journals is staggering. Some are associated with universities, others are independent. Some journals such as Zoetrope: All Story; Orchid; Land-Grant College Review; and One Story print all fiction. Many journals, like Missouri Review; AGNI; The Kenyon Review; Virginia Quarterly Review; and others of similar quality offer an excellent mix of fiction, essays, poetry, art, author interviews, and book reviews. Some focus on poetry (Borderlands, Poetry, and Beloit Poetry Journal). Still others specialize in offering short-shorts (Vestal Review, Brevity, Quick Fiction, SmokeLong Quarterly) or a mix of poetry and prose poetry (Cranky, The Bitter Oleander, Parting Gifts). There are journals that showcase women (Iris, Calyx, Emrys Journal) and others that feature stories about, and for, mothers (Brain, Child and Literary Mama). Most are glossy covered, some are stapled together, some have unique packaging (McSweeney’s), and one even has an artful hand-bound format (Spork). The choices seem unlimited, something for everyone.
Because I’m a visual person, I’ve picked up a journal solely on the vibrancy of the cover. Some journals I buy out of curiosity and a few get my subscription money simply because one of their fiction editors went out of their way to be encouraging or supportive of my work. A journal’s reputation may induce me to pick up a copy or subscribe for a year, but it’s not what keeps me going back for more. Here’s what does it for me: excellent, attainable fiction and poetry, beautiful art, and an encouraging, courteous staff. There are many I love–it would be hard to name favorites. And like my books, I buy more than I could possibly read with the thought I’ll get to them eventually. In this new year I plan on getting to know them better and sharing my discoveries. I’ll begin with two recent examples of literary excellence:
Bill Lychack writes in to recommend The Lost World of the Kalahri by Laurens Van Der Post. Says he: “Surely, it must be true, everyone has a book that truly changes their lives. There’s always a context to how this book finds you-a context which probably isn’t that interesting or magical to anyone except yourself-so I’ll spare you the story of how a stranger handed me this book, how forlorn and lost I must have seemed, how this strange quest of Van Der Post’s spoke directly to me. But I would, if I could, give you a copy of the book, if I saw you in such a state right now in front of me. And I’d make you wait a moment until I found a brief passage I’ve all but memorized. I’d tell you that you don’t need any context for it, but then I’d probably say that, in the book, Van Der Post, who’d dreamed from boyhood of finding the nearly-exterminated Bushmen, had just committed to organizing his expedition into the Kalahari desert of what is now Botswana: I’d tell you it’s a spiritual quest for him and would read this to you:
In fact all the aspects of the plan that were within reach of my own hand were worked out and determined there and then. What took longer, of course, was the part which depended on the decisions of others and on circumstances beyond my own control. Yet even there I was amazed at the speed with which it was accomplished. I say ‘amazed,’ but it would be more accurate to say I was profoundly moved, for the lesson that seemed to emerge for a person with my history of forgetfulness, doubts and hesitations was, as Hamlet put it so heart-rendingly to himself: “the readiness is all.” If one is truly ready within oneself and prepared to commit one’s readiness without question to the deed that follows naturally on it, one finds life and circumstance surprisingly armed and ready at one’s side.
“Then I’d hand the book to you and simply disappear, just as someone handed the book to me and never appeared again. And maybe you’d read it. And maybe it would speak to you the way it did for me. You never know. ”
William Lychack is the author of The Wasp Eater, a novel.
If you’d like to recommend an underappreciated book for this series, please send mail to llalami at yahoo dot com.
I’ve pre-posted a few items for you to appear while I’m in Michigan. I will be back tomorrow, though posting is unlikely to resume until late in the day. Back soon.
Over at the New York Review of Books, Nicholas Kristof offers his thoughts on two recents books about Darfur, Julie Flint and Alex de Waal’s Darfur: A Short History of a Long War and Gerard Prunier’s Darfur: The Ambiguous Genocide. He cites the willingness of the media (his newspaper, the New York Times, included) to ignore the Nazis’ extermination of Europe’s Jewish population during the Second World War as being the rule rather than the exception. Most genocides (Armenia in 1915, Rwanda in 1994, Cambodia in the ’70s, Bosnia in the ’90s) take place largely unnoticed. In the case of Darfur, the genocide is attracting even less notice because it is taking place “in slow motion.”
Kristof argues that the events now unfolding in Darfur, which have their roots in post-colonial problems and in political and ethnic differences, can be solved if the “cost” of conducting genocide is raised.
At one level, UN agencies have been very effective in providing humanitarian aid; at another, they have been wholly ineffective in challenging the genocide itself. That is partly because Sudan is protected on the Security Council by Russia and especially by China, a major importer of Sudanese oil. China seems determined to underwrite some of the costs of the Darfur genocide just as it did the Cambodian genocide of the 1970s. But the UN’s main problem is that it is too insistent on being diplomatic. (…) Sudan’s leaders are not Taliban-style extremists. They are ruthless opportunists, and they adopted a strategy of genocide because it seemed to be the simplest method available. If the US and the UN raise the cost of genocide, they will adopt an alternative response, such as negotiating a peace settlement. Indeed, whenever the international community has mustered some outrage about Darfur, then the level of killings and rapes subsides.
The situation in Darfur has become too dangerous for even aid agencies to stay. If this goes on, the UN estimates that as many as 100,000 people will die per month. Meanwhile, politicians and pundits are discussing whether the term “genocide” really applies.
The Turkish government has dropped its case against Orhan Pamuk. The writer had been accused of “insulting Turkishness” because he had spoken about the (well documented) genocide of Armenians in 1915.
Though I’m sure, dear reader, that you’re relieved to hear that such ridiculous charges have been dismissed, it isn’t actually a victory for freedom of speech. Quite the contrary, it is a loss, because the law which made it possible to try Pamuk (article 301 of the new penal code) is still, apparently, in effect. While it is true that the law is open to interpretation (the prosecutor who brought charges against Pamuk was reported to be someone who was trying to make a name for himself) the fact remains that such prosecutions are likely to continue to happen. The difference is that we probably won’t hear about it.
My review of Vikram Seth’s Two Lives appears in Sunday’s Boston Globe. Part memoir, part biography, the book tells the story of Seth’s uncle Shanti, a World War II veteran who settled in London, and Shanti’s German wife, Henny. Here is an excerpt:
Although Seth did an enormous amount of research for this book, the reader never gets very close to the inscrutable Henny. Seth’s only sources for drawing this intriguing, mysterious woman are his and his uncle’s memories of her, as well as her correspondence. But Henny’s letters are, by her friends’ own admission, rather distant, leaving Seth to speculate on her frame of mind, on her feelings for the German fiancé who abandoned her and for the man whom she married. Because Seth never interviewed her during her lifetime (one gets the sense she would have been too private to want to speak about such things) the resulting portrait doesn’t quite satisfy.
You can read the full review here. (You may be asked to register, in which case you can use bugmenot to get a free login.)
I’d heard about The Colony, John Tayman’s history of the Kalawao leper settlement on Molokai, in Hawaai, from a reader with whom I correspond on occasion, and I was very intrigued. Mary Roach’s excellent review of the book in the Sunday NYTBR has certainly whet my appetite:
The kicker here, the monumental inequity, is that people with leprosy were exiled for no good medical reason. Leprosy is not an especially contagious disease. Only 5 percent of the population are genetically susceptible to it. And even they would probably emerge untainted: only a third of untreated leprosy patients have the disease in its active, infectious state.Yet so great was the hysteria surrounding leprosy that hundreds, probably even thousands, of people who only appeared to have the disease were packed off to colonies. At one point, patients in Kalawao were allowed to request a rediagnosis. Ten out of the first 11 to do so did not have leprosy. A diagnosis of leprosy, accurate or inaccurate, amounted to a criminal conviction. By law, people deemed lepers could be hunted down, stripped of their rights and torn from their families. And most of them were – until well after effective treatment was established, in the 1940′s. The story of Kalawao is the story of an injustice as deep and complete as any in human history.
“The Lepers of Molokai,” an essay that Jack London wrote for Woman’s Home Companion in 1908, and in which he “kept himself in check” about the horrors of the place, is available online here.
That’s it for me this week. I will be spending the weekend working on my novel, finishing Amitav Ghosh’s excellent Incendiary Circumstances, and looking for comedy in Albert Brooks’s latest film. On Monday, I will be reading from Hope and Other Dangerous Pursuits in Lansing, Michigan. Here are the details:
Monday, January 23, 2006
3:30 PM
Reading and Discussion
Michigan State University
255 Old Horticulture
East Lansing, Michigan
The reading is free and open to the public. See you there!
Maud Newton contributes a column to the American Prospect on the continuing relevance of Mark Twain’s satirical writing. For instance, she argues, King Leopold’s Soliloquy presages
the Bush administration’s doublethink rhetoric about the “progress” being made in Iraq. The king bemoans the “tiresome chatterers” who expose to the world his darkest motivations but don’t balance them with the noble ones; who complain–just substitute “democracy” and “elections” for “religion” and “missionaries”–about “how I am wiping a nation of friendless creatures out of existence by every form of murder, for my private pocket’s sake, and how every shilling I get costs a rape, a mutilation, or a life. But they never say, although they know it, that I have labored in the cause of religion at the same time and all the time, and have sent missionaries there — to teach them the error of their ways and bring them to Him who is all mercy and love, and who is the sleepless guardian and friend of all who suffer.”
You can read a portion of the article here. (The rest is for subscribers, I’m afraid.)
