Alla Gorbunova

Biomass

June 28, 2018

New fiction/translation from NER 39.2
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from Ings & Oughts
Translated from the Russian by Elina Alter

A teacher of literature, a highly spiritual lady, had a husband who was an alcoholic. One day her friend told her: I know this one woman, a psychic, go see her, maybe she can help. So, the literature teacher takes her sad salary and goes to see the psychic. She tells her: so and so, my husband drinks, can you do something. The psychic looks at a photo of the husband and says: he doesn’t have a soul. How’s that? asks the frightened literature teacher. No soul, that’s how, says the psychic. Biomass. [Read more]

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Alla Gorbunova, born in Leningrad in 1985, is a poet, prose writer, translator, and critic. She has published five books of poetry and one book of short prose, and her work has been translated into English, German, French, Italian, Spanish, Serbian, Danish, Swedish, Finnish, Latvian, Bulgarian, Romanian, and Czech.

Elina Alter is a writer and translator in New York. Her work has appeared in BOMB, Paris Review Daily, Modern Poetry in Translation, Guernica, Slice, Brooklyn Magazine, and Southeast Review. She is the editor of Circumference: Poetry in Translation.

Castle Freeman Jr.

Eli Don’t Hunt

June 21, 2018

New fiction from NER 39.2

Ihad no choice, Jane liked to tell her friends. Nobody else would come. Why not?

Deer season, said Jane.

Deer season. Of course.

Nobody would come. Nobody could. Nobody was around, I was told.

Who told you?

The deputy. Deputy . . . Deputy . . . What’s his name, again?

♦

Treat. It was Deputy Treat who set Jane straight. She had walked into the kitchen with her shopping, found the small round hole in the middle of one of the glass panes in the window over the sink. She called the sheriff’s number. They said somebody would be along. Jane waited in the front room. She wouldn’t wait in the kitchen. The hole in the glass was level with her eyes as she stood at the window. She showed it to the deputy. She knew what it was. [Read more]

Castle Freeman Jr. is a longtime contributor of short fiction to NER, most recently with “Enough of Billy” (NER 38.2, 2017). He lives in southeastern Vermont.

from NER 39.2
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Janet Towle

Modal Window

June 19, 2018

New fiction from NER 39.2

This is a modal window. This modal can be closed by pressing the Escape key or activating the close button. Close Modal Dialog. This is a modal window.
—People.com

This is a modal window. On the night before Thanksgiving, four wings of the McAuley family gathered at their eight-bedroom cabin in the mountains to make merry. Discreet black sedans rumbled slowly up the long poplar-lined driveway toward the cabin with its distant bright windows, gold-capped acorns and brilliant yellow leaves crunching beneath the tires, and then children tumbled out of back seats gloveless and hatless and scarfless and coatless, laughing at the pure joy of the cold, their newly visible breath dispersing into the strange opacity of this country night. Elsewhere, perhaps, and at another time of year, their parents would have hustled them inside, but at the cabin it didn’t matter—at the cabin Grandma McAuley stood waiting in the foyer with a festive apron and hot toddy fixings close at hand, and the adults had no compunctions about letting the cousins play tag in the dark beneath the stars.

[Read more]

from NER 39.2
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Janet Towle grew up between forest fires. She has an MFA from the University of Arizona, and her short stories have appeared in Carve, Eleven Eleven, the Normal School, and Passages North.

Sandeep Kumar Mishra is a stage artist, painter, writer and a lecturer in English with Masters in English Literature and Political Science.

Merrie Snell

Shipwreck Stories

March 7, 2018

New Fiction from NER 39.1.

Maybe you know this one already.

I was a double adulterer. Meaning he was married, I was married. We were—all four of us—married. I like marriage.

I do. I trust it. Not the old, woman-as-chattel-type marriage nor the swinging polyamory of artists and gurus, but modern, agile, mutual-respect-and-comfort-type marriage. I am good at it. When I am at it. It’s still the best thing going. The ocean swells are temperate and smooth enough to ride to shore. A seaward glance can tell you all (or most) of what the atmosphere is planning. In the so-called wedded state I am as devoted as the next devoted person. Don’t look at me like that.

[Read more]

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Merrie Snell’s fiction has appeared or is forthcoming in AGNI and Cimarron Review. She holds an MFA in fiction writing from the University of Iowa and, during a lengthy writing hiatus, completed a PhD in music from Newcastle University, Newcastle upon Tyne, UK. Snell’s sound and video installations have exhibited in the UK and Sweden and she is writing a book on music and embodiment. She lives in England with her husband, dog, and their embarrassment of degrees, and is delighted to return to the pages of New England Review after two decades in the wilderness.

New England Review