Collection Of Fiction Research Articles

Jhumpa Lahiri Goes Italian

Jhumpa Lahiri Goes Italian Steven G. Kellman (bio) Any casual runner knows how diabolically difficult it is to traverse 26.2 miles in under five hours. However, in 2011, James Gefke not only completed the 115th Boston Marathon in four hours, 18 minutes, and 29 seconds, he did it while carrying thirty pounds of firefighting gear to honor the memory of a fellow firefighter. Similarly, anyone who has ever tried to write a book might agree with George Orwell's assessment that it is "a horrible, exhausting struggle, like a long bout of some painful illness." Why exacerbate the horror by contending with the additional burden of a foreign language's unfamiliar vocabulary and grammar? Joseph Conrad wrote remarkable fiction not in his native Polish or even his second language, French, but in English, a language he began studying seriously only after settling in England while in his twenties. Conrad likened his literary translingualism to arduous, dangerous labor: "I had to work like a coal-miner in his pit, quarrying all of my English sentences out of a black night." Immigration is a common and compelling motive for switching languages. After news of the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre convinced Ha Jin, who was studying in Boston at the time, not to return home to China, it made sense to adopt the language of the country in which he remained. Ten years later, he won the National Book Award for Waiting, a novel he wrote in English. Louis Begley, Edwidge Danticat, Junot Díaz, Aleksandar Hemon, Viet Thanh Nguyen, and Luc Sante are among many other writers who adopted English after moving to the United States. Translingual transplants to France include Romain Gary, Nancy Huston, Milan Kundera, Alain Mabanckou, and Andreï Makine. Turkish immigrants to Germany who have adopted German as their literary medium include Zehra Çirak, Emine Sevgi Őzdamar, and Feridun Zaimoğlu. Many other writers abandoned the language of their homeland without leaving home; Chinua Achebe, Raja Rao, Léopold Senghor, and Wole Soyinka all adopted as literary medium the language of the European imperial power governing their country. The case of Jhumpa Lahiri differs from them all. Noting how the three most celebrated translingual authors—Samuel Beckett, Conrad, and Vladimir Nabokov—all had closer and longer ties to their adopted languages than she has to hers, Italian, Lahiri writes, in Italian: "Mi chiedo se ci siano altri come me"—"I wonder if there are others like me." There are not. Born in London to immigrants from Calcutta, she counts Bengali as her mother tongue, though she admits to an imperfect command of it. When she was two, the family moved [End Page 121] to Rhode Island, where she grew up and where she began to cultivate a talent for writing in English. After receiving a BA in English literature from Barnard College, Lahiri continued to pursue her interest in English through two MA's, an MFA, and a PhD from Boston University. With two commercially successful collections of short fiction—Interpreter of Maladies (1999) and Unaccustomed Earth (2008)—and two novels—The Namesake (2003) and The Lowland (2013)—Lahiri has received some of the most prestigious accolades in the Anglophone literary world—a Pulitzer Prize, a PEN/Hemingway Award, and a National Humanities Medal, among others. She now confesses to an aversion to speaking, reading, or writing English. "English denotes a heavy, burdensome aspect of my past," she writes, in Italian. "I'm tired of it." ("L'inglese significa un aspetto del mio passato pesante, ingombrante. Ne sono stanca.") Her latest book, a short series of reflections on the author's passion for Italian, discards inglese in favor of italiano. Originally published in Milan in 2015 as In Altre Parole, it was published in the United States in 2016 in a dual-language edition titled In Other Words. Lahiri's Italian text appears on the verso page, its English translation on the recto page. In the very brief "Author's Note" that, she points out, constitutes "the first formal prose I have composed in English since my last book, The Lowland, was completed, in 2012," Lahiri explains that she could not bring herself to translate her work...

Microscopy, Theatricality, and the Making of Cultural Consensus in the Short Fiction of Santiago Ramón y Cajal

In Cuentos de vacaciones (1905), the collection of short fictions by Spanish histologist and Nobel Prize winner Santiago Ramon y Cajal, scientific and aesthetic discourses merge to interrogate the increasing complexity of life under modernity. This article examines how science and technologies of representation and display (dissection, “the theater of proof,” microscopy) intersect with modern spaces of visuality (theaters, museums, laboratories) in order to construct an epistemology of the human body and its legibility at individual and collective levels of existence. In my reading of “El pesimista corregido,” I argue that the story can be interpreted as a pseudoscientific experiment taking the form of a mise en scene which, as it exposes the constructed nature of human physiology, also foregrounds the centrality of theater and illusion as mechanisms and channels for subjectivization as well as for the production of aesthetic, cultural, and political consensus.

Dirt Under Our Fingernails

Dirt Under Our Fingernails Jaclyn Bergamino (bio) and Kori Hensell (bio) On Women Writing in Alaska by Women Writing in Alaska In the spring of 2016, two women in the MFA program at the University of Alaska Fairbanks sat down to discuss the culture of working and writing in Alaska—more specifically, the phenomenal Alaskan women changing the literary landscape. JB: Last summer, my partner Kris and I sat by the fire outside our cabin on Alaska’s Kenai Peninsula. The sun, while it didn’t set, was dipping into the golden hour, which would last throughout that June night. We sat admiring the way that Mount Iliamna, just barely visible, glowed in that light. There was a crash in the brush behind us and for the first time, I was face-to-face with a moose. Not just one—three. A mother and two newborns. At first, I was in awe, excited and captivated by the sight. I was about eye-level with the babies. I could nearly have walked under the cow without ducking. The calves moved to nurse, but the mother saw us and stepped forward. My partner, a lifelong Alaskan stood up, moved between me and the moose. Her ears bowed backwards at us. “Move slowly behind the truck,” Kris said. I stepped as slowly as I could but within seconds I was inside the cabin, crying. I could not deal with how small I am, how fragile. KH: I’ve always felt inconsequential when it came to my place in the natural world, mainly because I was never really in it. I had no idea what I was signing up for when I made the decision to move the 4,087 miles from Tuscaloosa, Alabama to Fairbanks, Alaska. I was one of those kids who read White Fang and from Jack London’s depiction of the arctic, all ideologies about the “wilderness” were [End Page 9] born. For some background, I am not an outside person. I am a person who doesn’t even goes outside to walk to the mailbox. I enjoy the comforts of air conditioning and heat, a good Wi-Fi connection, plumbing, and cable TV. My hands do not know real labor; they are soft. I am soft and afraid of the woods. It is under these conditions that I have lived my almost thirty years. That said, Alaska and all its challenges is making something new of me. I think it remakes everyone who survives a true winter here. By “winter,” I do not simply mean snow and cold. Here, winter means something different to us; it is a psychological obstacle course that must be maneuvered in the heart, and in so doing, we become rougher, kinder creatures. Alaska experiences between 21 and 24 hours of darkness come December, and it changes us. JB: Alaska is home to a rich literary community these days. There is so much to write about, so much work to be done countering the reality TV narrative of Alaska as a harsh man’s frontier. Writers such as Peggy Shumaker, Nicole Stellon O’Donnell, and Bonnie-Sue Hitchcock have begun exploring what it means to be a woman in the largest, least populated state. As relative newcomers to the state, we can look to these women to help us understand the ways that the landscape is shaping us. Just this year alone, Rosemary McGuire, Linda Martin, and Eva Saulitis have examined these themes in fiction, poetry, and nonfiction respectively, giving us insight into the physicality of working, living, and dying in the Great White North. Rosemary McGuire. The Creatures at the Absolute Bottom of the Sea. University of Alaska Press, 2015. Rosemary McGuire’s recent short fiction collection, The Creatures at the Absolute Bottom of the Sea, builds on her experience as a commercial fisherman and her deep knowledge of Alaskan waters. This basis allows her to defy the idealization of the boreal wilderness and to give a clear, deep look at the ways in which Alaskans interact with the environment and each other. In her opening story “The Lost Boys Longline Co,” McGuire brings to light the connections between work, the body, and the...

The emotional arcs of stories are dominated by six basic shapes

Advances in computing power, natural language processing, and digitization of text now make it possible to study a culture's evolution through its texts using a "big data" lens. Our ability to communicate relies in part upon a shared emotional experience, with stories often following distinct emotional trajectories and forming patterns that are meaningful to us. Here, by classifying the emotional arcs for a filtered subset of 1,327 stories from Project Gutenberg's fiction collection, we find a set of six core emotional arcs which form the essential building blocks of complex emotional trajectories. We strengthen our findings by separately applying Matrix decomposition, supervised learning, and unsupervised learning. For each of these six core emotional arcs, we examine the closest characteristic stories in publication today and find that particular emotional arcs enjoy greater success, as measured by downloads.

The El despertar de los que duermen: Juan Gómez Bárcena y la nueva narrativa española postcrisis

In this article I analyze a short-stories fiction collection titled Los que duermen, written by Juan Gómez Bárcena in 2012. In my analysis I connect some elements of his narrative shown here with those underlined by the author in the Prologue for Bajo reinta (2013), a compilation of short stories written by your writers in their 20’s. As editor, Gómez Bárcena gives to his readers an accurate description on Contemporary Spanish Literature’s current trends. He portraits the state of the art after the financial crisis of 2008. In Los que duermen, Gómez Bárcena takes the language as the main tool to define the human being and to explore its nature in connection with History, Philosophy, and Myths. As a result, he develops optional endings to traditional mythological stories, and offers the reader disturbing reflections on human evolution, through the use of uchronia, the microhistory, and the reflection on the decay of the linguistic sign.

"Because I could Not Stop for Death" de Mary Caponegro ou la poétique de l’empreinte

In 2001, Jonathan Safran Foer published A Convergence of Birds, a collection of poems and narrative fictions in tribute to visual artist Joseph Cornell. The essay Because I could Not Stop for Death is Mary Caponegro’s poetic response to a shadow box Cornell dedicated to Emily Dickinson, Towards the Blue Peninsula. This article suggests that Caponegro’s text, which takes the form of an apocryphal epistolary exchange between Joseph Cornell and Emily Dickinson, toys with the tension between presence and absence. In the light of Georges Didi-Huberman’s reflection on Benjamin’s dialectical image, we argue that Caponegro replaces the memorial process with the telescoping of heterogeneous times.

Building a Special Collection of Popular and Middlebrow Fiction, 1900-1950

Building a Special Collection of Popular and Middlebrow Fiction, 1900-1950

Rebooting the lyrical short story: Experimenting with viewpoint

Abstract This article examines the writings of short story theorists, Michael O’Toole, Monika Fludernik, Uri Margolin, Bruce Morrissette and John Gerlach, and analyses their findings through comparison with a number of experiments with viewpoint in my recently published short fiction collection Mr Jolly (2016). These experiments include utilizing second-person in order to understand its ability to exploit narrative indeterminacy, as well as other experiments with point of view in order to explore how various narrative modes can enhance dramatic engagement. Finally, the link between viewpoint and other narrative effects is demonstrated through the inclusion of a short story example from the collection.

Place, History and Story: Tony Birch and the Yarra River

This essay examines the three Yarra River stories in Tony Birch’s short fiction collections. ‘The Sea of Tranquillity’ ‘The Chocolate Empire’ and ‘The Toecutters’ all question the historical inscription of the Yarra that favours the culturally dominant account by placing it in relation to alternative stories. The torsion engendered by this questioning is apparent in the stories themselves. They are simultaneously discussions of class-based social exclusion and counter-stories of settlement; settled places are re-inscribed with meanings and histories obscured by the dominant account of ‘settlement’, which it thus critiques. The structure of the contemporary short story, to reveal a truth buried under the mundane details of life, aids Birch’s purpose. The form enacts a propensity to doubling, twinning and contrasting the familiar and the strange, or being at once in the dominant reality of the settler-colonial culture and, by social imposition, in the situation of the other. Hence, Birch’s stories open into narratives drawn from a number of socially marginalised groups, according to class, gender, geography or age. In Birch’s own account of his disillusionment with the institutionally-based academic writing of the post-history wars environment he speaks of embarking on an alternative project to ‘put meat on the bones of history’, a project which involves turning from the Historian’s history to ‘the way that fiction deals with the past and its role in documenting history’: to bring history and story together (‘Trouble’ 235, 241). This essay traces that process in the three Yarra stories.

Reaching for the awesome and numinous: an interview with horror author Ramsey Campbell

ABSTRACTHorror author Ramsey Campbell completed his first short fiction collection at age 11 and sold his first short story at age 16. While his early work was influenced by H.P. Lovecraft, he would go on to establish a career as a prolific writer of psychological horror featuring an alchemic synergy of the mundane and extraordinary. Among his novels are The Parasite (1980), Incarnate (1983), The Influence (1988), (The House on) Nazareth Hill (1996), The Overnight (2004), Creatures of the Pool (2009), The Seven Days of Cain (2010), Ghosts Know (2011), and Think Yourself Lucky (2014). His short story collections include Demons by Daylight (1973), The Height of the Scream (1976), Cold Print (1985), Waking Nightmares (1991), Alone with the Horrors (1993), Told by the Dead (2003), and Just Behind You (2009). His contributions to horror literature have been recognised with three Bram Stoker Awards, four World Fantasy Awards and 12 British Fantasy Awards. He has also been awarded the Horror Writers Association Lifetime Achievement Award and the World Horror Convention Grand Master Award. In 2015 he received an Honorary Fellowship from Liverpool John Moores University for outstanding services to literature and was presented with the World Fantasy Award for Lifetime Achievement. This interview explores the evolution of his work and career to date.

Writing Home

This essay focuses on Malay Sketches, a collection of flash fiction written by Alfian Sa'at, the only Malay writer in Singapore who has produced a substantial body of work in English. Alfian represents the specific dynamics of Malay identity and inter-race relations in Singapore, where contemporary pressures of globality complicate the colonial legacies entrenched in everyday cross-cultural interactions. In his writing he attempts to prise a gap in the seal between race, religion and language that the state's multiracial orthodoxy insists on enforcing, and to offer instead other permutations. By choosing deliberately to historicize structures of affect and sentiment, Alfian shows how the Singaporean state's official ideology and wide-ranging policies have played a significant role in constructing Malay subjectivities and informing their sense of being at home in Singapore.

What to Take

What to Take Barbara Ras (bio) From the drummer, take the cymbals, the crash, and hi-hatand walk like you’re shining. From the composer take “waterunder snow is weary,” sung by young voices in the timbreof wind blowing through the antlers of reindeer. From the organ-maker take the names of the stops, night horn,vox celeste, and chimney flute, instrumental sustainsthat theoretically go on forever. Eternity eludes the NRAand ants, who cannot hear, but I swear that following Rachmaninoff ’s Second Piano Concerto notefor note while rain sledgehammered the road the firsttime I drove to Swannanoa, got me there safely.From a gypsy, take any castanets offered, and play them first thing to get you out of bed, despitethe news of nine dead in Charleston who invited Dylann Roofinto their prayer service at the Emanuel A.M.E. Churchwhere he repeatedly shot the gun, whose one note is death. Take a chance. Take guns away and ask peopleto hum more, to whistle, if, unlike me, they know how,to talk often, like baby turtles, who startvocalizing inside their eggs. Every river’s original name was water weeping, waterlaughing. Take the call of a cricket or a ricochet of crickets,each with its own thumbprint. Take the cry of a bushbaby at nightthat narrows to next to nothing the distance between it and us, both our wailings scored by loneliness, bothshocking the night air, calling for kin, calling for help to perpetuatethe species. Take a lesson from the bushbaby with its esotericallylarge eyes that see what we don’t see, its paws and mouth that eat whatever they kill. [End Page 598] Barbara Ras barbara ras’s first collection of poems, Bite Every Sorrow, was chosen by C. K. Williams to receive the 1997 Walt Whitman Award. In 1999, Ras was named Georgia Poet of the Year. Her books include One Hidden Stuff andThe Last Skin. She is the editor of a collection of short fiction in translation, Costa Rica: A Traveler’s Literary Companion. She has been on the faculty of the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College. Ras currently lives in San Antonio, where she directs Trinity University Press. Copyright © 2016 The Massachusetts Review, Inc.

I love Myself When I Am . . . What?

Love Myself When Am . . . What? A Response to Shotwell and Sundstrom on Good White PeopleI am very fortunate to have Alexis Shotwell and Ronald Sundstrom comment on my book Good White People.1 Their readings are careful and thought-provoking, helping me revisit some of the book's central claims and reexamine why believe that middle-class white anti-racism is part of the problem rather than a solution to ongoing white privilege and alleged white superiority. Good White People has been controversial, and thus appreciate Shotwell's and Sundstrom's willingness to entertain the risks the book takes to begin developing a new set of raced habits for good white liberals.The title of my response is taken from the collection of Zora Neale Hurston's essays and fiction edited by Alice Walker, Love Myself When am Laughing... and Then Again When Am Mean and Impressive.2 Perhaps best known for her novel Their Eyes Were Watching God, Hurston's non-fiction essays and articles offer equally valuable affirmations of African American life, and of black southern life in particular. Hurston's literary work and political positions have been neglected and misunderstood, especially in comparison with African American men such as W. E. B. Du Bois and Richard Wright, but what stands out clearly in them is Hurston's refusal to apologize for being black and her rejection of the idea of blackness as an affliction. As Hurston explains about herself, I do not belong to the sobbing school of Negrohood who hold that nature somehow has given them a lowdown dirty deal.3 It is no tragedy to be black on Hurston's view, and her work is filled with strong criticism of those (white or black) who think that great sorrow [must be] dammed up in [a black person's] soul4If Hurston's work and life could be boiled down to one thing, it would be selfaffirmation, where is not an isolated individual but a self transactionally constituted by its race, gender, class, and region.5 Hurston loves her complicated, multi-faceted self, period. It doesn't matter whether she is laughing, angry, intimidating, or whatever. This self-love, fueled by joyful affirmation, is incredibly powerful, making Hurston sometimes seem outrageous. What Alice Walker writes about Their Eyes Were Watching God could be said of Hurston's entire body of work: There is enough self-love in that one book-love of community, culture, traditions-to restore a world. Or create a new one.6 It was-and still is-outrageous in white-dominated America for a black woman to think that she could change the world, but Hurston refus[ed] to be humbled by second place in a contest [she] did not design7What then about those white people for whom the contest is designed? What should their relationship to their raced selves be? ask this question not because the white liberal is the primary subject around which political movements, critical philosophy of race, or any other critical approach to race should be organized (cf. Shotwell, 1003-04). As discuss in the book, racial justice movements aren't dependent on white people of any class or type. But here white people are, nonetheless-a big part of the problem and stuck with being white. How are they (we) going to live our whiteness, and might our answers to that question possibly help rather than impede challenges to racism and white domination? In that respect, Good White People is motivated by a simple, existential question, rather than a large-scale political vision for how to organize racial justice movements (although would argue that existential and political questions are not unrelated): how am going to live?Even though it sounds awkward, said raced selves above when talking about white people's relationships to themselves, since striving for so-called colorblindness generally is a bankrupt and harmful strategy for white people to pursue. Sundstrom elaborates this point eloquently, and will return to his comments shortly. …

Introduction

Introduction Claire Messud and James Wood It’s thought that when Cervantes embarked on Don Quixote, he intended to write a short novel. Henry James’ short stories had a way of growing into novellas and novels, a fate he fondly cursed. With Chekhov, it was the other way round: life was too short for the novel. (Though perhaps just long enough for a play.) Lydia Davis, who has written one novel and many very short stories, has said that she wrote her only novel because the material needed the extra space: “the subject was there first, and it required a novel.” Perhaps like water finding its level, form eventually finds its own form, and there is very little a writer can do about it? We like the idea that form cannot be imposed, but is fluid and natural, improvised and up for grabs; that hiding inside each genre is the ghost of another form—the essay always about to become a fiction, the novella dreaming of being even briefer than it already is, the short story espying its larger cousin on the horizon. And in a time when prose writing is enjoying an exciting moment of liberation—when fiction and fact, convention and experiment, rules and disobedience, are productively commingling—we are delighted to have been asked to guest-edit this forty-fifth anniversary issue of Ploughshares. Deliberately, we have followed no particular formal criteria—we’ve just indulged our own agnostic enthusiasm, always excited and always unsure about what exactly fiction is and claims to be. You’ll find here, side by side, stories of only one sentence and long stories that are in the process of becoming novels; works of traditional realist fiction alongside fabulists, aphorists, and experimentalists. There is continuous stream of consciousness, and its apparent opposite, the mere fragment; realism and its supposed enemy, allegory. No matter its form, we sought to include fiction that is vivid, vital, and urgent. If there is an emphasis, it is to bring to Ploughshares an internationalism of voice and material, to suit a reality that is at once local and increasingly global and complex. [End Page ix] So we have chosen eminent writers from Algeria (Kamel Daoud), Bulgaria (Georgi Gospodinov), and Switzerland (Peter Bichsel); rising talents from Norway (Gunnhild Øyehaug), Australia (Cate Kennedy), and the UK (Carys Davies). We include fictions by the exhilarating contemporary American writers Viet Thanh Nguyen (whose first novel, The Sympathizer, won the Pulitzer Prize earlier this year), and Amity Gaige. The endlessly innovative English poet and dramatist Glyn Maxwell has contributed two fantastical literary imaginings, in which John Keats and John Clare live again, seen reading their work to contemporary audiences. And we are publishing four new stories—delicate as clouds, brief as a change of weather—by our living master of the very short form, Lydia Davis, along with Davis’ translations of two pieces by the brilliantly intriguing Swiss writer Peter Bichsel, who is not yet sufficiently recognized in the English-speaking world. An issue like this is a gibbous moon, which presents only an illuminated portion of its available wealth. We’re sad that so much superb fiction has had to be passed over—left, as it were, for now, in the editorial shadow. But we’re deeply excited about the striking collection of writers and fictions that we’ve assembled here, and hope you’ll enjoy each singular and memorable contribution. [End Page x] Copyright © 2016 Emerson College

CONTRIBUTORS

1 9 5 R C O N T R I B U T O R S PAULA BOHINCE’s third collection of poems, Swallows and Waves, will be published this season by Sarabande. BILL CHRISTOPHERSEN’s debut collection of poems, Two Men Fighting in a Landscape, was recently published by Aldrich Press. A traditional musician as well as a writer, he lives and works in New York City. BONNIE COSTELLO is Professor of English at Boston University and the author of many books and articles on modern poetry. She is currently completing The Plural of Us: Poetry and Community in Auden and Others. Her literary essays have appeared or are forthcoming in The Yale Review, The Straddler, The Southern Review, War, Literature and the Arts, and The Gettysburg Review. ABIGAIL DEUTSCH’s criticism appears in Poetry , the Wall Street Journal, the Times Literary Supplement, and other publications , as well as on NPR. In 2013, she won the Roger Shattuck Prize for Criticism. She was a finalist for the Poetry Foundation’s Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Fellowship. DEWEY FAULKNER has taught at Yale and at the University of San Antonio. He has also worked for many years in newspaper, television , and radio as a music critic. VINCENT GIROUD’s Nicolas Nabokov: A Life in Freedom and Music was published last spring by Oxford University Press. He is currently at work on an annotated edition of the complete music criticism of Reynaldo Hahn and on a book about O√enbach ’s Tales of Ho√mann, co-edited with Michael Kaye. MARY GORDON’s many books include novels, memoir, and literary criticism. She is a recipient of the Award for Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters . The Liar’s Wife, four interlocked novellas , was published recently by Pantheon . Her most recent novel is The Love of My Youth (Pantheon). She is the McIntosh Professor of English at Barnard College. BENJAMIN S. GROSSBERG teaches creative writing at the University of Hartford, where he is associate professor of English. His most recent collection of poems, Space Traveler, was published by the University of Tampa Press (2014). His earlier books include Sweet Core Orchard (University of Tampa, 2009), winner of a Lambda Literary Award. DANIEL HALL, the Writer-in-Residence at Amherst College, is the author of three collections of poems, Hermit with Landscape , Strange Relation, and Under Sleep. The former was selected for the Yale Series of Younger Poets; the latter for the National Poetry Series in 1996. JUDITH HALL is the author of four poetry collections, including Three Trios (2007), and the recipient of Guggenheim and Ingram Merrill fellowships. JEFFREY HARRISON’s fifth collection of poems, Into Daylight, was published by Tupelo Press in 2014 as the winner of the Dorset Prize. His poems have recently appeared or are forthcoming in The New Re- 1 9 6 C O N T R I B U T O R S Y public, The Kenyon Review, The Hudson Review, The Southern Review, AGNI, Image , and elsewhere. CLIVE JAMES, journalist, broadcaster, translator , and critic, is author of the autobiographical series Unreliable Memoirs and the study Cultural Amnesia. Recent work includes the essay collection Poetry Notebook : 2006-2014 and Sentenced to Life, Picador (U.K.). GREG JOHNSON’s books include the novels Pagan Babies (Dutton) and Sticky Kisses (Alyson), as well as five collections of short fiction, most recently Women I’ve Known: New and Selected Stories. He is also the author of Invisible Writer: A Biography of Joyce Carol Oates (Dutton), as well as a frequent reviewer of fiction, poetry, and literary biography. CHARLES MARTIN is a recipient of the American Academy of Arts and Letters’ Award for Literature. His Ovid translation won the 2004 Harold Landon Translation Award from the Academy of American Poets . His books include Starting From Sleep: New and Selected Poems (The Overlook Press), What the Darkness Proposes, and Steal the Bacon, all nominated for the Pulitzer Prize. MOLLY McQUADE has published both prose and poetry in The Iowa Review, Parnassus: Poetry in Review, Threepenny Review, and other journals. She recently wrote a letter to Picasso about Jacqueline’s neck, included in her most recently completed project...

Tracking down ruins: Anita Desai and the ethics of postcolonial writing

“The Museum of Final Journeys” is the opening novella of Anita Desai’s collection of short fiction, The Artist of Disappearance (2011). The story is about an enigmatic art collection left in a state of ruin and dereliction in an unnamed province of postcolonial India. Yet behind the literary representation of ruins lies a profound meditation on the ethical role of the writer in transmitting the past. Indeed, Desai’s text is an imaginative adaptation of the story of a 19th-century Italian aristocrat, Prince Bardi of Bourbon, and his legendary artistic collection, which is kept today in the Museum of Oriental Art in Venice. By referring to Bardi’s story in transfigured form, Desai addresses the potential of literary works to take care of the past, bring it into the present and preserve it from forgetting and destruction. Desai’s imagery of ruins provides a suggestive exploration of the ethics of postcolonial writing as a form of cultural transmission.

Every Leaf a Mirror: A Jim Wayne Miller Reader ed. by Morris Allen Grubbs and Mary Ellen Miller (review)

Reviewed by: Every Leaf a Mirror: A Jim Wayne Miller Reader ed. by Morris Allen Grubbs and Mary Ellen Miller Nicholas Smith (bio) Morris Allen Grubbs and Mary Ellen Miller, Eds. Every Leaf a Mirror: A Jim Wayne Miller Reader. Lexington, Ky.: The University Press of Kentucky, 2014. 256 pages. Softcover. $30.00. Every Leaf a Mirror: A Jim Wayne Miller Reader is a collection of poetry, fiction and nonfiction that draws from Miller’s accumulated work over decades of artistic and scholarly endeavor. Skillful editing by Morris Grubbs, writer and assistant dean in the Graduate School at the University of Kentucky, and Mary Ellen Miller, the subject’s widow and a poet in her own right, places the power of Jim Wayne Miller’s writing on full display. Like many of his contemporaries in Appalachian literature, Miller had humble beginnings. Raised in the mountains of North Carolina, he grew up not knowing he lived less than fifty miles from the homeplaces of literary luminaries like Fred Chappell, Thomas Wolfe, and Wilma Dykeman. Like that of these writers before him, Miller’s work often focused on the notion of how people cope with the changing world and the underlying questions of what we hang on to, what we leave behind. This reader highlights those themes in a triad of sections divided by genre. The first, devoted to Miller’s poetry, is subdivided, with each portion exploring a different aspect of [End Page 126] his poetic themes and showcasing the range of his thought and craft, including free verse and formed poems with language as fresh as newfound words. The middle of the poetry section is devoted to Miller’s masterwork, “The Brier Sermon”. A free verse that blends styles of epic poetry with fable to achieve a parable quality, “The Brier Sermon” has itself taken on a legendary status in the Appalachian literary community. From a busy sidewalk we see the Brier use episodes including a little boy lost far from home and a hunter who walked over a cliff in an effort to urge passersby to reconsider their notion of place and belonging. He speaks freely to the changing crowd, nettling them over environmental degradation and forgetfulness of their roots while simultaneously goading them to expand their way of thinking from the old “ridge to ridge” view into a more global perspective. This candid tone is the culmination of Miller’s poetic voice and lends a raw power to the message of his sermon. The Brier convinces us that we “must be born again,” and more important, that our rebirth is not only possible but essential, inevitable. We can hang on, he says, like the scared hunter who has fallen over a cliff, or we can let go and be free, choose to return to known earth. The next section of the anthology is devoted to fiction, drawn from two novels and three short stories. Although by no means weak, this is the lesser of the three sections. The language is evocative and heavy with poetic image. Here we see most clearly reflected Miller’s abiding love and understanding of a people and place which arises only after considerable discord between a vanishing way of life and the double threat of increasing globalization and environmental destruction. Always we find ourselves returning to the theme of memory, the conflict of choosing what we will keep and what we will relinquish. [End Page 127] Despite Miller’s work being centered on belonging to a particular place, his fiction is reminiscent of immigrant stories in that even in familiar environments the characters often feel a sense of displacement. In the excerpt of “His First Best Country” we see Professor Wells—as a prosaic Brier—struggle with his own homecoming and unable to reconstruct his remembered self. He then takes to the road, and through encounters in real world places such as the Highlander Center in the mountains of Tennessee, Wells develops his perspective on what it means to be both intimate with, and simultaneously divorced from, a home. The anthology’s last section is its gem. In these essays and interview with Appalachian scholar Loyal Jones, we see Miller revealed in his...

Transvestite Museum of Peru

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ESTATUAS DE SAL: URDIMBRES PARA UNA TRA(D)ICIÓN DE ESCRITORAS CUBANAS

A fines de la decada del ochenta, las producciones de escritoras cubanas comienzan a adquirir visibilidad a partir de las actividades llevadas adelante por grupos de academicas, escritoras y artistas que, con o sin apoyo institucional, se organizan y programan acciones para promover la asuncion de una conciencia de genero y lograr presencia publica de sus historias y de sus realizaciones culturales. Una muestra de este cambio es la publicacion, en 1996, de Estatuas de sal . Cuentistas cubanas contemporaneas por Mirta Yanez y Marilyn Bobes, la primera recopilacion de textos narrativos de escritoras cubanas. Este articulo analiza las estrategias de seleccion y organizacion de los materiales literarios incluidos en Estatuas de sal porque, aunque las compiladoras no califican el libro como antologia sino como “panorama literario”, se observan criterios que contribuyen a promover obras y escritoras y a introducir voces y textualidades que pugnan por ingresar al circuito de obras del ambito cultural cubano. Al mismo tiempo, esta operacion coloca en la palestra a un grupo de escritoras contemporaneas a la publicacion del libro y proyecta el porvenir de la narrativa escrita por mujeres. PALABRAS CLAVE: literatura cubana; escritoras; antologia; tradicion; siglo XX

The Condition of Special Library Services for People with Disability in "Children with Disability Foundation" (YPAC) Surabaya

The Research about library services for people with disabilities is still found rarely, therefore, in this research case, the researcher try to discuss the title in order to enrich the librarianship scientific. This research uses a quantitative approach with the descriptive type. Some findings of the data presented in this research case is about the collection, type of service, the library manager and the library space of Surabaya’s YPAC. In Surabaya’s YPAC is available only in hard copy collections amounted to approximately 1000-1500 ex, that dominated the collection of fiction (stories/illustrated fables). The condition of most of the collection is very alarming because it was never noticed, classified specifically and many collections are laid out horizontally as high book shelf height exceeds available. YPAC library runs only circulation services manually, and organized by teachers who graduate from educational of school for disabled (SLB). Regarding the library are in good condition and clean, there are 4 and 3 units of rack collection of tables and chairs, but the air circulation is not good because the ventilation system only comes from a window so that the temperature inside the room pretty hot.