New England Review

François Scarborough Clemmons

From the Beginning

New nonfiction from NER 39.2

“Man Making Music in the Forest” by Rebecca Pyle

When I was born, the Sanders-Scarborough clan had lived for several generations in the sprawling, blanched little town of Blackwater, Mississippi, just north of Meridian in the backwater region near the Okatibbee Reservoir and the Alabama border. If you weren’t a cotton farmer or sharecropper, or a smithy who worked for white folks, there wasn’t much else to do there. Some folks got along raising chickens and guinea fowl, some did light farming but could not prosper. Each year they fell further in debt to the landowner, Ol’ Man Sanders.

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from NER 39.2
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François Scarborough Clemmons is a singer, actor, and writer who had a long career as an opera singer, performing with the New York City Opera, Cincinnati Opera, and more. He created and played the role of Officer Clemmons on the children’s TV show Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood and founded and directed the Harlem Spiritual Ensemble. He was Alexander Twilight Artist in Residence at Middlebury College from 1997 to 2013, where he directed the Martin Luther King Spiritual Choir. He is currently working on a series of children’s books and a memoir, DivaMan: My Life in Song.

Castle Freeman Jr.

Eli Don’t Hunt

New fiction from NER 39.2

 

Joe Fisher

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

New fiction from NER 39.2

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—People.com

 

“Window” by Sandeep Kumar Mishra

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.

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from NER 39.2
order a copy today — or better yet, subscribe!

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.

New Books from NER Authors: June 2018

From Mark Twain to George Saunders, Bradley Bazzle’s Trash Mountain joins a long tradition of dark humor, wild inventiveness, and social satire in American letters. ―Maceo Montoya, author of The Deportation of Wopper Barraza.

From the publisher: Trash Mountain reflects on life in small southern cities in decline and an adolescent’s search for fundamental values without responsible adults to lead the way.

Bradley Bazzle’s first novel, Trash Mountain, won the 2016 Red Hen Press Fiction Award. His short story “Gift Horse” appeared in NER 31.4. Bradley grew up in Dallas, Texas, and lives in Athens, Georgia, with his wife and daughter.

Trash Mountain can be purchased from your independent booksellers and online.

In a time when we confront daily the frenetic, desensitizing maelstrom of political rhetoric and a ubiquitous flood of mass media, Bruce Bond reminds us in Dear Reader of the quiet but urgent philosophical and spiritual inquiries, sometimes monstrous and animal, that define and affirm our humanity. —Kathleen Graber, author of The Eternal City and Correspondence 

From the publisher: In his single-poem sequence, Dear Reader, Bruce Bond explores the metaphysics of reading as central to the way we negotiate a world—the evasions of our gods and monsters; our Los Angeles in flames; the daily chatter of our small, sweet, and philosophical beasts.

Bruce Bond is the author of sixteen books including For the Lost Cathedral, The Other Sky, and Black Anthem, which won a Tampa Review Prize  in 2016. Presently he is Regents Professor at University of North Texas. His poem “Blood” was published in NER 36.2.

Dear Reader can be purchased directly from the publisher.

Like the birds that populate so many of his poems, Marcelo Hernandez Castillo’s Dulce is a lesson in song, an instructive repetition of the melodies that shape the inner self. The poems here are for a reader willing to mix and remix, to reimagine themselves in a thousand pieces. —Matthew Shenoda, author of Somewhere Else  

From the publisher: Dulce is truly a lyrical force rife with the rich language of longing and regret that disturbs even the most serene quiet. Surreal and deeply imagistic, the poems map a parallel between the landscape of the border and the landscape of sexuality. Castillo invites the reader to confront and challenge the distinctions of borders and categories, and in doing so, he obscures and negates such divisions.

Marcelo Hernandez Castillo is a Canto Mundo fellow and the first undocumented student to graduate from the University of Michigan’s MFA program. He cofounded the Undocupoets campaign which successfully eliminated citizenship requirements from all major first poetry book prizes in the country and was recognized with the Barnes and Noble “Writers for Writers” award from Poets and Writers magazine. His poems “Pulling the Moon” and “Rituals of Healing” appeared in NER 35.2.

Dulce: Poems can be purchased from the publisher.

Hoagland’s verse is consistently, and crucially, bloodied by a sense of menace and by straight talk. ―The New York Times

From the publisher: Tony Hoagland’s poems interrogate human nature and contemporary culture with an intimate and wild urgency, located somewhere between outrage, stand-up comedy, and grief. His new poems are no less observant of the human and the worldly, no less skeptical, and no less amusing, but they have drifted toward the greater depths of open emotion. Over six collections, Hoagland’s poetry has gotten bigger, more tender, and more encompassing. The poems in Priest Turned Therapist Treats Fear of God turn his clear-eyed vision toward the hidden spaces―and spaciousness―in the human predicament.

Tony Hoagland is the author of five previous poetry collections, including Application for Release from the Dream and What Narcissism Means to Me, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. He lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico. Two of his poems appeared recently in NER 38.3.

Priest Turned Therapist Treats Fear of God can be purchased online.

Norman Lock’s fiction, The Wreckage of Eden, shimmers with glorious language, fluid rhythms, and complex insights. ―NPR

From the Publisher: Powerfully evocative of Emily Dickinson’s life, times, and artistry, this fifth, stand-alone volume in The American Novels series captures a nation riven by conflicts that continue to this day. Lyrically written but unafraid of the ugliness of the time, Lock’s thought-provoking series continues to impress.

Norman Lock is an author of novels, short fiction, and poetry, as well as stage, radio, and screenplays. He has honored with The Dactyl Foundation Literary Fiction Award, the Paris Review Aga Khan Prize for Fiction, and writing fellowships from the New Jersey State Council on the Arts, the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts, and the National Endowment for the Arts. He lives in Aberdeen, New Jersey. His fiction has appeared frequently in NER, most recently with “A Theory of the Self” in NER 34.2.

The Ensemble can be purchased directly from the publisher,  or from independent booksellers.

Well imagined, intricately plotted, and deeply felt, both humane and human. It unfurls like a peony: you keep thinking it can’t get any more perfect, and it does. A stunning feat. —Rabih Alameddine, author of The Angel of History and Koolaids: The Art of War

From the publisher: A dazzling new novel of friendship and redemption in the face of tragedy and loss set in 1980s Chicago and contemporary Paris, by the acclaimed and award-winning author Rebecca Makkai.

Rebecca Makkai is the author of The Borrower, The Hundred-Year House, which won the Novel of the Year Award from the Chicago Writers Association, and Music for Wartime. Her work has appeared in Best American Short Stories, Harper’s, and Tin House, among others. Her story “The Briefcase” was featured in New England Review 29.2.

The Great Believers can be purchased directly from the publisher.

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