Fiction Editor Research Articles

Disclosing Structures: Scenes of Confession in Pale Fire

Abstract: The role that confession plays in Nabokov's fiction remains poorly understood, though the same can be said for confessional fiction in general. Part of the problem lies in the slipperiness of the word "confession" itself, which is why this essay begins by defining confession as a performative speech act through which the speaking or writing subject seeks to form, reform, and transform herself, addressing herself to another who is called to act as a witness to this creative act of self(trans)formation—a process akin to Nabokov's own description of a poet (not a "loony") who "peels off a drab past and replaces it with a brilliant invention" ( Pale Fire 188). Based on this capacious definition, the paper proposes reading Pale Fire , arguably the most elusive of Nabokov's confessional fictions, as the confession of the fictional editor, Charles Kinbote. Examining Kinbote's note to line 550 of the poem, where Kinbote confesses having been "tarrying on the brink of falsification" from the very beginning, I argue that Kinbote's commentary begins to act as his confession, allowing Kinbote to accumulate the kind of moral self-distance that serves as the basis for his reform. This reading is foregrounded by an analysis of two other interpretive strategies that are common in Pale Fire criticism: the "dialectic" reading that seeks to discover the truth of the text and the "paranoid" reading that promises to uncover a secret, a hidden truth. Whereas both of these strategies position the critic as the one who must disclose a truth that is not confessed in the novel, reading Pale Fire as Kinbote's confession in a deconstructive manner, as I propose doing, allows the novel to be endlessly "unfolded," to use Gilles Deleuze's metaphor, bringing to the fore the materiality of the text itself and the interpretive choices it imposes on its readers.

Public Speaking

Public Speaking Hananah Zaheer (bio) [End Page 18] [End Page 19] Hananah Zaheer Hananah Zaheer is the author of Lovebirds (Bull City Press, 2021). She has published widely, including places such as Best of Net, Best Small Fictions, The Cut, Kenyon Review, Virginia Quarterly Review, Alaska Quarterly Review, and Michigan Quarterly Review, where she won the Lawrence Foundation prize for fiction. She is a Fiction Editor for Los Angeles Review, senior editor for the South Asian Avant Garde (SAAG): a dissident literary anthology and the founder of Dubai Literary Salon, a prose-reading series. Copyright © 2022-2023 Pleiades and Pleiades Press

About the Contributors

About the Contributors

Letter from the Editor

Letter from the Editor

Escort Officer Duty

Escort Officer Duty Laura Joyce-Hubbard (bio) 1.My son conductshis five-inch flaglike a maestro. Then, a littleseparation. Here,he says, his armoutstretched to me.I take the brokenstaff. He holds the frayedfabric like a mask,eyes on the backsof stars. He delights behindcapsized colors.I bite down No. [End Page 92] 2. The hum of the projector: how to salute during transfer. I can tell you now where the star field is supposed to rest on a closed casket. Taught to fold— taut. 3.He’s three, youngerthan his brotherwho is yellingfrom the muddy double slide. Like roll call,he is summoned. AWOL, he ignores. His morning work:sitting on mulch chips,folding triangles. [End Page 93] Pale, chubby fingerstucking edges tighter,making old glory, like a secret notepassed in class. 4. I can tell you now, the morgue has a classroom. The escorts sit at inkwell desks in dress blues. And when a wedding band is plucked from a debris field, it’s returned in a two- inch ziplock. Initials indicate receipt. Here— [End Page 94] 5.Today, my son’s shoelace dragsthrough an oily sheen. A budding pondhas boiled upover the asphalt drain. Other parentshave complained. Once, the schoolmarked the perimeterof the clogwith yellow hazard tape. I bend over,trying to tie his wet,loose laces taut. 6. Upon presenting the colors to the Widow. Four stars will show if I’ve done it right. [End Page 95] I want to crack the long hand on the analog. It’s Widower. I slide into the hearse next to the downed pilot: Kim. 7.My oldest cries out,splayed like a starfishat the bottom of the slide. My youngest runstoward me, wantingme to lift him intothe bucket swing. He’s left his flag.Unattached, it floatsin the pond’s gleaming. [End Page 96] Laura Joyce-Hubbard Laura Joyce-Hubbard’s recent work appears in Boulevard, Ninth Letter, and Tupelo Quarterly. She’s been awarded fellowships by the NEA and Ragdale to attend residencies, including VCCA. Laura is a veteran of the United States Air Force, where she flew C-130s. She is pursuing an MFA at Northwestern University and serves as a fiction editor for TriQuarterly Copyright © 2022 The University of the South

In the Lap of the Atlantic

In the Lap of the Atlantic Anna Lena Phillips Bell Anna Lena Phillips Bell, letter from the editor, Atlantic Ocean, Michelle Donahue ________ Hello from the ocean. Which is to say, hello from a salutary winter beach walk. It's gotten pretty cold here on this coast, but a walk by the shore is often still the ticket. The view and the air never get old—this must be in part because they are already ancient—and this makes them good company. Which is also to say, hello from a set of ecosystems in dire need of support. This year the world's oceans reached the highest temperatures noted since 1958, when record keeping of this kind began, according to a paper in Advances in Atmospheric Sciences. It will take systemic change along with individual action to help our oceans go on as healthy, sustaining, sustained living systems. What action can I take? You? It's a question worth asking and asking again. Which is to say—as our team noted last spring—a magazine that sits nearly in the lap of the Atlantic ought to have an Ocean Issue. And what a delight it's been to read and consider work for it—ranging from the speculative to the research intensive and all around between. In Kim Samek's story "Garbage Patch," against the background of a near-future Seattle whose music scene has been decimated by rising rents, the intrepid Thuy seeks for a way to eat all the plastic she can wish for. In "Sexy Thing," by Amber Wheeler Bacon, a family prepares for an approaching hurricane, and the narrator's sister gets ready to go on a portentous date. The story is related by a boisterous, opinionated, touchingly frank narrator, one with whom I'd like to check in again in a few years to see how she's doing. Patricia Ononiwu Kaishian's "The Magnetism of Eels" traces the journey made by the American eel, Anguila rostrata, from ocean to river and back, and considers language, home, queer advocacy, and finding a sense of place along the way. In "The Last Good Day," Hea-Ream Lee ventures out to find and document a rare plant that grows where an even more ancient ocean once was. In Rajiv Mohabir's longer poem "Humpback Vocalizations," whale song and research on it travel across the page in a watery, magical progression. And save some of an idle afternoon for Molia Dumbleton's story from an East Coast lobster-fishing town, "Before All This." It's got poetic compression along with the expansive feel of a novel, and some of the sentences may break your heart a little. There's much more, including many oceanic poems—from new and [End Page 5] past contributors including Cherene Sherrard, Yuko Taniguchi, and Gretchen Steele Pratt—that would, I suspect, sound even finer if read near a body of water, whether it's an ocean or a bathtub. We hope you enjoy them as much as we have. ________ I'm pleased to share some good news along with this issue. This fall, we welcomed Michelle Donahue—writer, editor, teacher, and novice surfer—to our team as associate editor. She joins us having worked on some magazines I love—Quarterly West, Flyway—and brings a keen and wide-ranging editorial sensibility, not to mention a genuine sense of fun. I'm so glad to have her on board. If you'd like to hear a little about her work and editorial philosophy, check out fiction editor Becca Hannigan's interview with her on our blog. There, Michelle writes, "I've discovered that really my favorite ocean is the one I can currently dip my toes into. I find there's something so calming about the coast, and so humbling. There's no better place to be reminded of our own beautiful smallness." As this issue took shape, I realized that I wanted it to begin with the ocean itself. Thanks to Michelle, it does—she took the photo shown on the facing page at what's now called Topsail Beach. From this body of water to the one you're closest to...

Q&A with James Goldberg, Co-founder of Mormon Lit Blitz

The Mormon Lit Blitz contest has tapped into a rich reservoir of Mormon short-short fiction, reaching a milestone this year with the publication of its first anthology. With a 1000-word limit, final winners selected by a popular vote, and special rounds for translated and translingual work, the contest has yielded a panorama of diverse results during its first decade. Co-founder James Goldberg answers Dialogue's fiction editor Jennifer Quist's questions about this ongoing project to advance the reading and writing of Mormon literature.

Announcements

Announcements

Blue Heron

Blue Heron DJ Hills (bio) Is it the squeaky orange plastic of the inner tubesor the splash of Straw-ber-ita cansslipping from drunk grips that startles you into flight? A wild gesture of limbs points you outnearly invisible against the cloudless horizon,proof that the sky and earth were lovers once: blue as summer, featherssoft and stark as peat moss.Take me with you! someone calls as if you would;as if we have anythingto offer in return. [End Page 79] DJ Hills DJ Hills is a writer and theatre artist from the Appalachian Mountains, currently living in Baltimore. Hills's writing appears or is forthcoming in Arkansas Review, Cold Mountain Review, Lunch, and elsewhere, and their plays have been produced in and around Baltimore City. When not writing, Hills reads fiction as the Co-Senior Fiction Editor at jmww. Find them online at www.dj-hills.com Copyright © 2021 Berea College

“Every Novel is a New Country”: A Conversation with Junot Díaz

ABSTRACTJunot Díaz (born on December 31, 1968) is a Dominican-American writer, creative writing professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and fiction editor at Boston Review. He was born in Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic, and immigrated with his family to New Jersey when he was six years old. He earned a Bachelor of Arts degree from Rutgers University, and obtained his MFA from Cornell University. Díaz is the author of the critically acclaimed short story collection Drown (1996), The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (2007), which won the 2008 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the National Book Critics Circle Award, and This Is How You Lose Her (2012), a New York Times bestseller and National Book Award finalist. He received a MacArthur “Genius” Fellowship in 2012, and was also the recipient of PEN/Malamud Award, Dayton Literary Peace Prize, Guggenheim Fellowship, and PEN/O Henry Award. He was appointed chair of the Pulitzer Board in April 2018. This conversation took place at MIT, Cambridge, Massachusetts, on September 6, 2019.

Hurricane Floyd, 1999, and: Abandon

Hurricane Floyd, 1999, and: Abandon Stephen Hundley (bio) Hurricane Floyd, 1999 This is the storm that ruins us,water climbing the stairwell / pulling babyshoes from the basket, heaping bicyclesand palm fronds on the body of a cat. You say: We'll make it back, Baby.We'll make it back, but I know, I knowthis is the storm that slides a handunder the houseskins and pulls / shows you what was stinking where you stuffed it.Shows you: cutie cutie nudies and puffypulped insulation clinging to pinewood trusseslike the ribs of a whale. On the highway our children sleep. And the dog rollson the car floor rooting fries from the seats.And your brother is waiting in Atlantawith beds for the children, who wonder: who will feed our fish? But Baby,this is the storm that takes the porch off.Mud slicks in the carpets, and spartinahangs from the fan. In the living room, she-crabs mount an oak trunk andstrange panties bubble with vodkabottles from the den. Nested in brake lightsahead, your truck is blinking, pulling away. [End Page 95] This is the storm that piles and stacks,black-bags your shit, Baby. Blows itall open. In Atlanta, your brother is waiting.Baby asks: Who will feed our fish? I say: Baby,we let those fish go free. Abandon This dock is coming apart. These boards,gone to sticks and splinters, leaving for yearsin the skin of our feet. They walkoff the water, move three states away. The cleats are grown white from the salt,and if you grip them, and arch your back,the moon will reward you with a mirror.Grey metal galvanized, like memory,even sunk they will not die. Ask me, what becomes of crab traps foreveron the river bottom. The last catch, drawnby chicken scrap. Flipper legs, feather mouths,telescoping eyes, puzzling, puzzling the cageuntil the next catch is drawn by rotted crab.And on and on. The earthen bank falls away. The pilingsslump aside. Come home to find them,the years gone by, washed into the cordgrass.The heron fishes and fiddlers wave. The purse-lipped oysters all around. [End Page 96] Stephen Hundley Stephen Hundley is a former high school science teacher from Savannah, Georgia. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in Cutbank, Carve, Permafrost, and other journals. He serves as the fiction editor for the Swamp and is a Richard Ford Fellow at the University of Mississippi. Copyright © 2020 University of Nebraska Press

Cartilaginous Boy

Cartilaginous Boy Stephen Hundley (bio) Cartilaginous Boy There is a shark in the bathtub. I feel it while I soak.The water is blackened, and I am transformed by play in the sugar sands of the road, the green belts of marsh,the wooded islands where so many hog tracks were found. The shark will be my body, and I will never surfaceat dinner's call. I will chase the rays through river bends. Summer has dusted the porch screens yellow, and nightbugs trill to come inside. I am surprised by the tickle of a washcloth on my feet. Between my toes. The stifleof Georgia in July, like living in a giant's mouth. But it is wonderful to wash the body, to wet and wring and scrape,beginning with my boney boy shoulder, my collar's poke, the lumps of ribs, the sharp points of hips. It is a delightto feel hairless skin roughen and grey, prickle to fine grit, to watch the belly whiten and teeth find their serrated edge,while toes curl and fuse. It is a pleasure to wash outdoors with the mosquitoes singing and the dogs hanging their headsover the enameled lip to smell my hair, and my skinny body hidden in the mud and the salt, back cupped by the clawfoot.From still water, my knee peeks. [End Page 34] Stephen Hundley Stephen Hundley is the author The Aliens Will Come to Georgia First (University of North Georgia Press, 2021). His work has appeared in Prairie Schooner, Cutbank, Carve, and other journals. He serves as the fiction editor for The Swamp and is a Richard Ford Fellow at the University of Mississippi. Copyright © 2020 University of Wisconsin Board of Regents

From the Editor

From the Editor Brenda Machosky, PhD An Issue of Transition This current issue of Antipodes fittingly represents the work of the three editors who have guided the journal's production in the past year or so. Volume 32 (2018), a double issue, marked the official end of Nicholas Birns's eighteen-year tenure as editor of Antipodes, and as that volume came to production, Belinda Wheeler lent a diligent hand and a keen eye to the publication of the double issue. An essay or two approved by Nicholas has made its way into the current issue (33.1), with Belinda acquiring many of the essays in this issue. Belinda also provided the editorial guidance for the special section on the work of Alexis Wright. It is from the capable hands of Nicholas and Belinda that I take the reins of the journal Antipodes, with a well-mapped path behind and an open road ahead. In the short time that I have been in this driver's seat, I have gained great appreciation for the hard and constant work of tending the journal. I have benefited not only from Nicholas's and Belinda's examples but also from the insights of longtime poetry editor Paul Kane and reviews editor Rich Carr. Their experience and kindness during the transition has been invaluable. Fiction editor Niki Tulk recently completed two doctoral degrees and is now an assistant professor of theater at Alfred University. We meet the news of her resignation with regret at the loss of her expertise—but also with excitement for all that this new role will bring for her. In addition to coaching fiction writers to publication, Nikki also created an elegant online presence for Antipodes and provided guidance for the new fiction editor, Tiare Picard. The success of this transition also owes much to Tara Reeser, journals manager at Wayne State University Press, and her entire staff, who have all been quite patient with me as I have navigated a steep learning curve. Antipodes was founded by and continues to be supported by the American Association of Australasian Literary Studies (AAALS). The connection between the organization and the journal is foundational, and there will be increasing recognition and demonstrations of this scholarly relationship as Antipodes continues on its path. If you enjoy this journal and all it has to offer in the field of Australasian studies, please consider joining the organization that makes it possible—membership automatically includes a mail (US) or online subscription to Antipodes. The AAALS annual conference takes place in April of each year, and a call for papers is sent out by the prior September. Consider joining AAALS in person as you enjoy Antipodes in print. Visit the website for more information: http://aaals.org/ As this issue goes to press, I am awed and energized by the potential of the scholarship and creativity that awaits publication. The editorial board is diverse in their interests and committed to the journal's quality. We will continue to work cooperatively to disseminate challenging, inquiring, and provocative scholarship and to showcase both established and emerging creative writers. It is an honor to [End Page 5] serve AAALS, Antipodes, and every mind interested in the literature and culture of Australia and of Aotearoa New Zealand. Calls for papers on specific topics will be announced via the AAALS website, the Antipodes Blog, and other venues. Copies of recently published books can be forwarded to Rich Carr to be considered for review. As editor, I am developing a master list of willing peer reviewers (who might also be contacted for book reviews), so if you are interested, please contact me at antipode@hawaii.edu for access to a form registering your fields of interest. I conclude by acknowledging the Hawaiian people, ancestors past, present, and future, on whose 'aina (land) I live and work, and I borrow from their language, until our next meeting in these pages: a hui hou. [End Page 6] Brenda Machosky Editor, Antipodes Professor, English and Humanities University of Hawai'i West O'ahu Copyright © 2020 Wayne State University Press

The Sound of Holding Your Breath: Stories

Book Review| April 01 2019 The Sound of Holding Your Breath: Stories The Sound of Holding Your Breath: Stories, Natalie Sypolt, Morgantown: West Virginia University Press, 2018; 152 pp. Shaun Turner Shaun Turner Shaun Turner’s fiction, nonfiction, and poetry have been published in Bayou Magazine, storySouth, and Fourth River, among others. He serves as fiction editor for Stirring: A Literary Collection and co-editor at Fire Poetry Journal and has received an Emerging Artist Award from the Kentucky Arts Council. He teaches writing in Kentucky. Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Journal of Appalachian Studies (2019) 25 (1): 116–117. https://doi.org/10.5406/jappastud.25.1.0116 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation Shaun Turner; The Sound of Holding Your Breath: Stories. Journal of Appalachian Studies 1 January 2019; 25 (1): 116–117. doi: https://doi.org/10.5406/jappastud.25.1.0116 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All Scholarly Publishing CollectiveUniversity of Illinois PressJournal of Appalachian Studies Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. Copyright 2019 by the Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois2019 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

"The Still-Existing Parts of Life," Part I: The Early Correspondence of Eudora Welty and Mary Louise Aswell

"The Still-Existing Parts of Life," Part I:The Early Correspondence of Eudora Welty and Mary Louise Aswell Elizabeth Crews In the introduction to The Norton Book of Friendship, Eudora Welty wrote, "All letters, old and new, are the still-existing parts of a life. To read them now is to be present when some discovery of truth—or perhaps untruth, some flash of light—is just occurring" (37–38). For over forty years, Welty and Mary Louise Aswell, who was the fiction editor at Harper's Bazaar during the early years of Welty's career, maintained a close friendship predominantly through letters. The letters from the first fifteen years of this friendship give insight into the roles of writer and editor or reader, and they reveal the truths of a long-lasting, though primarily long-distance, friendship. The study of these letters is important for several reasons. First, Welty scholars have given a great deal of attention to the relationships and correspondence between Welty and her male friends. Michael Kreyling in Author and Agent focused on the letters between Welty and her agent, Diarmuid Russell. Suzanne Marrs published What There Is to Say We Have Said presenting the correspondence of Welty and William Maxwell, editor of The New Yorker, and with Tom Nolan Meanwhile There Are Letters, which focuses on the correspondence between Welty and Kenneth Millar, a mystery novelist who wrote under the pen name Ross Macdonald. Julia Eichelberger's Tell About Night Flowers examines the importance of gardening and flowers in Welty's 1940–1949 correspondence with Russell and John Robinson, who was Welty's friend from Jackson and longtime love interest. Welty also had many rich and meaningful friendships with women. Pearl McHaney dedicated a chapter to Welty as "letter writer" in her book-length study of Welty's nonfiction and photography, A Tyrannous Eye, in which she addressed Welty's letter writing to both male and female friends. All of these studies are interesting reads and of immense importance for Welty scholars. However, there has been no lengthy study dedicated solely to the correspondence between Welty and any of her female friends, of whom Aswell was one of the dearest. From a practical standpoint, of Welty's [End Page 33] female friendships, the largest archive is the correspondence between Welty and Aswell. The second reason why this study is important is because it highlights the relationship between writer and editor and gives insight into how each worked. After Aswell's death in 1984, her son Duncan Aswell writes Welty saying: Your suggestion of having all the correspondences between Mother and yourself assembled by the Miss. Archives in Jackson makes excellent sense to Mary and me. I don't believe it would be possible to collection [sic] a substantial enough number of Mother's letters to other writers to form a significant record all by itself. The appropriate method of studying Mother's work as editor, it seems to me, is as part of the back-and-forth correspondence with a writer, as would be possible in the arrangement you outlined to me. Someday, perhaps, I will be able to learn how Mother worked by studying the letters she wrote you. I would very much appreciate that opportunity. (Letter, 6 Mar. 1985) Duncan is correct: it is appropriate to study Aswell's work as editor by looking at her correspondence with a writer, and it is appropriate to study Welty's work as a writer in light of her correspondence with an editor. In a letter to Aswell in May 1953, Welty writes how glad she is that Aswell likes The Ponder Heart and says, "The three people whose opinions I hold highest—you, Diarmuid, and Bill Maxwell," which indicates how much Welty valued Aswell as a reader (May 1953). Aswell is the only one of Welty's trusted readers mentioned whose correspondence scholars have not fully explored. These letters show the deep friendship between the two women, but they also show the working relationship between friends serving as writer and as trusted reader. Aswell and Welty were friends from 1941 until Aswell's death in 1984. In the early 1940s when they met, Aswell was...

This Old Man: All in Pieces by Roger Angell

Reviewed by: This Old Man: All in Pieces by Roger Angell Mike Broida (bio) Roger Angell, This Old Man: All in Pieces (Anchor Books, 2015), 320 pp. To live a "long and happy life" is one of those stock phrases with interchangeable parts: one might wish for a "long and productive" life or a "long and healthy" life or even the Trekkie motto to "live long and prosper." But what does it mean to live a long life, well after most of one's friends, colleagues, and loved ones are gone, and why do we desire it so? Born in 1920, nonagenarian and longtime New Yorker editor Roger Angell confronts the beauty and pain of this "long life" in This Old Man: All in Pieces, which Angell refers to as "a portrait of my brain at 94: a different serving, with good days and bad days in there, some losses and recurring afterthoughts right next to a midnight haiku, a fugitive great movie, a party conversation reborn." Angell is perhaps the last of The New Yorker's old guard of editors and writers; his mother, Katherine White, was an editor, and his stepfather, E. B. White, a frequent contributor. As an autobiographical retrospective, This Old Man presents a sort of writerly memento of life in and around the famed and quasi-secretive magazine. Filling the nooks and crannies between Angell's longer features and articles are inter-office memos, cartoons from the magazine, notes for the annual Christmas poem "Greetings, Friends!", and letters to numerous writers—including a charming correspondence with the poet Philip Levine and a kindhearted rejection letter to Ann Beattie, in reference to a story where "no one here [at The New Yorker] could recognize these people; they don't seem to have any connection with real life." In his tribute to former colleague William Maxwell and the bevy of famous writers he worked with, Angell sneaks in his own philosophical convictions about writing and its tug on the human spirit: I believe, rather, that their stories [those of Maxwell's authors] are the same stories that we tell ourselves, each of us, over and over, every day and every night, returning to our distant or recent past, possibly in search of happiness but much more often in the hope of finding an unexpected window or bend in the path there. We want our stories to come out differently, but they never do. [End Page 335] The assembled mass of essays makes Angell's collection feel part tip sheet—as in pieces like "Storyville," about his time as fiction editor for The New Yorker—and part history of the magazine, replete with tributes to men and women of yore: Harold Ross, Donald Barthelme, Edith Oliver, William Maxwell, and John Updike, among others. This rosy nostalgia—many of the pieces have the candor and warmth and soft edges of a story told by one's grandparent—suits Angell's preferred subject, baseball, nicely. As a sport, the "national pastime" is ripe and romantic in American consciousness. There is great power in Angell's ability to recast many of the long-ago greats who were never immortalized by the advent of the video camera. One is "The Heater from Van Meter," Cleveland Indians pitcher Bob Feller, nemesis and archrival to Angell's boyhood Yankees: "He'd glare in at the batter over his upraised left shoulder, kick his front leg straight across, and clamp down in late delivery and at the same instant, it seemed, the catcher was straightening up with the ball in his mitt again." Many of Angell's more recent pieces on baseball take a short form, often whimsical and nostalgic, such as a tribute to Derek Jeter after his retirement, as noted in "S'Long, Jeet" (a "Talk of the Town" piece), or recaps of World Series sagas in "The Best" or "Post Patsy," where "A World Series opening game always feels like a kid's first trip to Luna Park—a sunlit space, with good things happening all day." Angell's remembrances, from Jackie Robinson to Vladimir Nabokov, fill the implicit obligation of one of advanced age—to be a repository of memory and...

Writing Women in Northeast China: Melancholic Narrative in Mei Niang’s Novellas

Mei Niang (1920–2013), the pen name of Sun Jiarui, is a female fiction writer, translator, and editor of Funu zazhi (Ladies’ journal). In the semi-colonial Northeast China, Mei Niang’s exploration of melancholic narratives shore up manifold levels of socio-historical discourses that are constructive of women’s subjectivity. Melancholic narrative functions as an inverted mirror of both the author’s cultural displacement from her diasporic experience, and her portrayal of colonial domination of local elites by the Japanese in Northeast China. Also, the author’s depiction of feminine melancholia revokes the modernist ideology of love and its constitutive male-centered discourses, dismantles the social disenfranchisement of women by feudal authority, social prejudices, and the eroding urban materialism. Stylistically, Mei Niang’s second-person texts reinforce the feminine authority in enunciation, and by articulating women’s emotions and afflictions, transmogrify the melancholic narrative into a mode of self-narration and self-empowerment.

Star Making: A Publishing History of Thea Astley

This article focuses directly on Thea Astley’s publishing history from the time of her involvement with Brisbane’s avant garde in the 1950s, her early inclusion in regional collections, and her emergence as a Miles Franklin prize-winning author, through the enabling pen and advocacy of one of Angus & Robertson (A&R)’s finest fiction editors, Beatrice Davis, to the establishment in the 1980s of Astley’s ultimate author-publisher relationship with Penguin Books and her own overseas literary agent. It will also examine the publishing trajectory of selected novels released and re-issued by the University of Queensland Press (UQP) and Penguin Books, and revisit the divides between writer and editor, publisher and publicist, and the dis/enabling inspiration of difference in the tropics, in the context of the gendered histories of publishing at A&R, Penguin Books and UQP.

Donald A. Wollheim’s Authoritative Universe: Editors, Readers, and the Construction of the Science Fiction Paperback, 1926–1969

In the 1920s and 1930s, pulp science fiction editor Hugo Gernsback taught readers of his Amazing Stories and Wonder Stories magazines that “scientifiction,” as he called it, was not mere mechanical romance but a scientific enterprise in itself, with the power to shape and advance technology and the physical sciences. In his philosophy, the mundane act of reading constituted participation in scientific progress.For Gernsback’s readers, however, progress through science fiction took many forms, and participation could involve more than passive reception. During the late 1930s, Donald A. Wollheim, a reader and amateur contributor to Wonder Stories , promoted an alternative philosophy of “sociological” science fiction and created a casual network of aspiring writers, editors, and literary agents among science fiction fans in New York. Through the culture of constant collaboration fostered by his Futurian Society, Wollheim launched a long editorial career devoted to elevating a democratic ideal of sociological science fiction, transferring his focus from the technological objects of science fiction to its social, political, and philosophical significance. In Wollheim’s philosophy, the formulaic thrills of pulp paperback science fiction did not contradict the genre’s authority to contribute to serious discussions of humanity’s potential future and the social problems of the twentieth century.

Dropped Call

Dropped Call* Ebony E. Chinn (bio) You give a diatribe about immigrationlike our relationship is the exception.I begin to lose the signaland I decide not to call you back.You leave a message.An attempt to seal a gapa missed call sought to fill.You talk about Ted Kennedybeing a no good playboylike he’s the one who’s done me wrong.I lose a signal while searchingfor food near Brown’s campus.I tell you this to ease the abandonment.I know that’s not what you wanted.I write now, sometimes about you.I don’t tell you that I’m not eagerto move towards a strong signal.My phone carrier is a scapegoat,it knows the truth.I hang up pretendingI’ll call you back. [End Page 581] Ebony E. Chinn EBONY E. CHINN, a native of New Jersey, studied anthropology and African American studies at Temple University, where she was a McNair scholar. She is a Callaloo Creative Writing Workshop Fellow, an assistant editor for BrickHouse Books, a poetry assistant editor for Drunken Boat, and a fiction editor for The Missing Slate. Footnotes * after McKendy Fils-Aimé Copyright © 2016 Johns Hopkins University Press