NER 2.2 (1979), Sharon Olds, “Eggs”
Congratulations to the winners of this year’s Pulitzer Prize in journalism, letters, drama, and music. The winners in poetry and fiction this year both published their early work in the New England Review.
Sharon Olds, winner in poetry for her new collection, Stag’s Leap, first appeared in NER 2.2, in 1979, with the poem “Eggs.”
Adam Johnson, winner in fiction for The Orphan Master’s Son, published the story “The Cassini Satellite” in NER 19.3 (1998).
The new issue of New England Review is on its way from the printer, and a sample of the contents is available here on our website, both in WordPress and PDF formats. The full issue can be ordered online right here for only $10, including shipping.
In this issue, A. J. Sherman evokes a childhood summer in 1939, with family friends who would soon be among the earliest casualties of World War II. Michael R. Katz presents the first English translation of a recently discovered “counterstory” written in response to Leo Tolstoy’s Kreutzer Sonata by his wife Sophia Tolstoy. Another first English translation is Nancy O’Connor’s rendering of a startlingly contemporary essay on Flaubert by 19th-century critic Paul Bourget. NER co-founder Sydney Lea considers the effect of his immediate environment on his most intense early reading experiences, and Christopher Shaw follows the trail of William James through the Adirondacks, and along the way explores the relation of wild places to the nature of human consciousness. Emma Lieber takes a close look at how housewives figure in the realist tradition, from Middlemarch to Real Housewives, and Philip F. Gura uncovers an unexpected influence on Emily Dickinson in a long-forgotten American bestseller, Reveries of a Bachelor. On the cover is a painting by Virginia artist Michael Mewborn.
In these pages, you’ll also find new fiction by Kelly Kathleen Ferguson, David Heronry, Reed Johnson, Robert Oldshue, Jan Pendleton, Glen Pourciau, and Chaz Reetz-Laiolo, appearing alongside new poems by Debra Allbery, David Barber, Justin Bigos, Larry Bradley, Traci Brimhall, Mary-Alice Daniel, Ted Genoways, Richie Hofmann, Wayne Johns, Courtney Kampa, William Logan, and Theodore Worozbyt.
We dedicate this issue to longtime contributor Jonathan Levy (1935-2013), playwright, scholar, gentleman, friend: The human voice was music to his ears.
March 6 through March 9
8:30 am. to 6 p.m.
AWP Book Fair
New England Review, Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, Bread Loaf School of English, New England Young Writers’ Conference, Middlebury College Program in Creative Writing: Tables C5-C7
(for AWP conference registrants; free to the public Saturday, March 9)
Friday, March 8: 9:00–10:15 a.m.
New England Review Celebrates Vermont Writers:
Kellam Ayres, Robert Cohen, Castle Freeman Jr., Sydney Lea, Cleopatra Mathis
Vermont is home to more writers per capita than any other state in the nation, and Vermont authors work in a wide variety of aesthetics and styles—some with no particular ties to place and others decidedly rooted. Founded in 1978, New England Review publishes authors from all over the world, but in this reading, we’re proud to present five outstanding writers who live and work in our home state, and whose writing has recently appeared in our pages.
Hynes Convention Center, Room 303
(for AWP conference registrants only)
Saturday, March 9, 3 p.m.
The Teaching Press: Literary Magazines and Learning. (Travis Kurowski, Jay Baron Nicorvo, Carolyn Kuebler, Ben George, Jodee Stanley) Editors from leading literary magazines New England Review, Ecotone, Ninth Letter, and Third Coast discuss the educational benefits of literary magazines on today’s campuses. Topics will include the teaching press, experiential learning environments, learning-based outcomes, and how campus literary magazines are changing 21st-century publishing.
(for AWP conference registrants only)
Hynes Convention Center, Room 313
We’ve just been informed that that “The Ring of Kerry” by Dennis McFadden, which appeared in NER 33.2, has been selected for Best American Mystery Stories 2013, edited by Otto Penzler and Lisa Scottoline. The book will come out this fall.
And three poems from NER have been chosen for Best American Poetry 2013, guest edited by Denise Duhamel (series editor David Lehman). We can’t tell you which poems, but we can congratulate the authors: Laura Kasischke, Adrienne Su, and Paisley Rekdal. The book will be released in September.
Subscriptions and single copies of New England Review are now available through the new Litragger app at iTunes, so you can read NER on your iPad, iPhone, and other devices.
Here’s a preview of the new free app, which “gathers the best small press literature has to offer into one convenient space for people who love great fiction, nonfiction, and poetry.”
Former NER intern and Middlebury graduate Jenn Shapland writes for The Millions about her summer spent cataloguing Wallace’s papers at UT’s Ransom Center.
[read the essay]I begin with a delicacy that is paralyzing. I fear getting anything out of order, out of place. I fear removing the rubber bands, the paper clips, the numbered Post-it notes. I’m distinctly aware that if I mess up, if I lose the order, the order is lost. That if I damage anything, there is no replacement. This is always the tricky, taxing part of archival work. The sense of responsibility is kind of overwhelming. I have to take out all the staples I find, because they make the paper deteriorate faster. Staples take me about five minutes each, using a thin metal wand, hands shaking. The process feels unnecessarily violent.
On Thursday, January 31, 7 p.m., at Carol’s Hungry Mind Cafe in Middlebury, four writers will read from their work as part of the NER Vermont Reading Series: Eileen Brunetto, Jon Mathewson, Julia Shipley, and Jacob White.
Eileen Brunetto (Cornwall) received her MFA in writing at Goddard College and leads memoir workshops in the Middlebury area. Her work has been published in Pitkin Review, The MacGuffin, and various online venues.
Jon Mathewson (Middletown Springs), has been published in dozens of small-press journals. His poetry collection, While Strangers Insult the Decor, was published by Foothills in 2011.
Julia Shipley (Northeast Kingdom) is the author of Herd (Sheltering Pines Press, 2010) and Planet Jr. (Flyway/Iowa State, 2012), and is the recipient of grants from the Vermont Community Foundation and the Vermont Arts Council.
Jacob White (Johnson) teaches at Johnson State College, where he edits Green Mountains Review. His collection of short stories, Being Dead in South Carolina, comes out later this year.
This event is free and open to the public. Carol’s is located at 24 Merchants Row in Middlebury.
Sponsored by New England Review, with support from Carol’s Hungry Mind Cafe, the Vermont Book Shop, and Middlebury Community TV, the NER Vermont Reading Series provides an opportunity for Vermont writers to read their work in front of an audience, and to acquaint local audiences with the talented writers who live and work among us.
Cleopatra Mathis’s latest book of poems has just been released by Sarabande books. From the publisher: “Influenced by survival lessons from the natural world, Cleopatra Mathis’ Book of Dog traces a harrowing personal journey from hard endings—a divorce, the death of a beloved dog—to the fierce arrival of acceptance and change. All manner of life thrives in these pages—plovers, foxes, the companionable beetle on the bedpost, and the coyotes just beyond her back door.”
Her work has appeared in NER, most recently in 32.1, which includes two poems from this new collection.
Cleopatra Mathis will be reading in our AWP event in Boston this year, “New England Review Celebrates Vermont Writers,” with Kellam Ayres, Castle Freeman Jr., Sydney Lea, and Robert Cohen, on Friday, March 8, at 9 a.m.
Book of Dog is available from Sarabande Books and other booksellers.
From the jacket copy of Linda Gregerson’s new book, The Selvage: “In eloquent poems about Ariadne, Theseus, and Dido, the death of a father, and a bombing raid in Lebanon, and in a magnificent series detailing Masaccio’s Brancacci frescoes, The Selvage deftly traces the ‘line between’ the ‘wonder and woe’ of human experience. Keenly attuned to the precariousness of our existence in a fractured world–of ‘how little the world will spare us’–Gregerson explores the cruelty of human and political violence, such as the recent island massacre in Norway and ‘the current nightmare’ of war and terrorism. And yet, running as a ‘counterpoint’ to violence and cruelty is ‘The reigning brilliance / of the genome and / the risen moon…,’ ‘The / arachnids exoskeleton. The kestrels eye.’ The Selvage is the boldest evidence yet that Linda Gregerson’s unique combination of dramatic lyricism and fierce intelligence transcends current fashions to claim an enduring place in American poetry.”
Linda Gregerson is a National Book Award finalist and Kingsley Tufts Award winner, and her work has appeared in NER since 1982 (4.4), and most recently in 2011 (31.4). You can hear her read from this new book in our Bread Loaf Audio Series.
All of us here at the New England Review mourn the loss of Jake Adam York, who died suddenly on December 16, 2012, at the age of forty. He was an accomplished poet and generous friend to many.
His poem “Self-Portrait as Superman (Alternate Take)” appears in our current issue, and you can hear him read “What Is Given, What Is Made,” “Grace,” and other poems at the Southern Foodways Alliance. His poems are widely available online and in three collections, Persons Unknown, A Murmuration of Starlings, and Murder Ballads.
Volume 34, Numbers 3-4
Cover art by Sean Thomas
Middlebury College is home to both NER and the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference. NER posts an audio highlight from Bread Loaf's many readings and lectures as a regular feature on this site. Here are two poems by Jennifer Chang, "There are Too Many Other Birds to Write About" & "The Strangers."
