New England Review

  • Current Issue
  • Back Issues
    • Vol. 38 (2018)
      • Vol. 38, No. 4 (2017)
      • Vol. 38, No. 3 (2017)
      • Vol.38, No. 2 (2017)
      • Vol. 38, No. 1 (2017)
    • Vol. 37 (2016)
      • Vol. 37, No. 4 (2016)
      • Vol. 37, No. 3 (2016)
      • Vol. 37, No. 2 (2016)
      • Vol. 37, No. 1 (2016)
    • Vol. 36 (2015)
      • Vol. 36, No. 4 (2015)
      • Vol. 36, No. 3 (2015)
      • Vol. 36, No. 2 (2015)
      • Vol. 36, No. 1 (2015)
    • Vol. 35 (2014-2015)
      • Vol. 35, No.1 (2014)
      • Vol. 35, No. 2 (2014)
      • Vol. 35, No. 3 (2014)
      • Vol. 35, No. 4 (2015)
    • Vol. 34 (2013-2014)
      • Vol. 34, No. 1 (2013)
      • Vol. 34, No. 2 (2013)
      • Vol. 34, Nos. 3-4 (2014)
    • Vol. 33 (2012-2013)
      • Vol. 33, No. 1 (2012)
      • Vol. 33, No. 2 (2012)
      • Vol. 33, No. 3 (2012)
      • Vol. 33, No. 4 (2013)
    • Vol. 32 (2011-2012)
      • Vol. 32, No. 1 (2011)
      • Vol. 32, No. 2 (2011)
      • Vol. 32, No. 3 (2011)
      • Vol. 32, No. 4 (2012)
    • Vol. 31 (2010)
      • Vol. 31, No. 1 (2010)
      • Vol. 31, No. 2 (2010)
      • Vol. 31, No. 3 (2010)
      • Vol. 31, No. 4 (2010-2011)
    • Vol. 30 (2009)
      • Vol. 30, No. 1 (2009)
      • Vol. 30, No. 2 (2009)
      • Vol. 30, No. 3 (2009)
      • Vol. 30, No. 4 (2009-2010)
    • Vol. 29 (2008)
      • Vol. 29, No. 1 (2008)
      • Vol. 29, No. 2 (2008)
      • Vol. 29, No. 3 (2008)
      • Vol. 29, No. 4 (2008)
    • Vol. 28 (2007)
      • Vol. 28, No. 1 (2007)
      • Vol. 28, No. 2 (2007)
      • Vol. 28, No. 3 (2007)
      • Vol. 28, No. 4 (2007)
    • Vol. 27 (2006)
      • Vol. 27, No. 1 (2006)
      • Vol. 27, No. 2 (2006)
      • Vol. 27, No. 3 (2006)
      • Vol. 27, No. 4 (2006)
    • Vol. 26 (2005)
      • Vol. 26, No. 1 (2005)
      • Vol. 26, No. 2 (2005)
      • Vol. 26, No. 3 (2005)
      • Vol. 26, No. 4 (2005)
    • Vol. 25 (2004)
      • Vol. 25, Nos. 1-2 (2004)
      • Vol. 25, No. 3 (2004)
      • Vol. 25, No. 4 (2004)
    • Vol. 24 (2003)
      • Vol. 24, No. 1 (2003)
      • Vol. 24, No. 2 (2003)
      • Vol. 24, No. 3 (2003)
      • Vol. 24, No. 4 (2004)
    • See all
  • Events
  • Subscribe/Order
  • About
    • Masthead
    • Mission and History
    • Reader and Intern Applications
    • NER Award Winners
    • Press
    • Contact
  • Submit

New Fiction from NER 38.4

Hit Me by Gregory Spatz

December 19, 2017

Elijah by John Gregory Brown

Sweet was fastest at the game of knuckles, almost undefeatable, with an uncanny sense of how to feint, how long to wait between strikes, and when to drive his knuckles into the flesh of an opponent’s fist, rapid-fire, whap, whap, whap, whap. He’d roll back the sleeve of his jacket to show the shiny circular scar he’d burned into himself with the hot rim of his pot pipe sometime the previous year—a way to mark himself apart, piss off his mom, ask for attention, demonstrate the lasting seriousness of his dedication to being a fuckup, or maybe to prove once and for all that everything was a joke and there was no reason for anything. My Satanic vaccination, he called it sometimes. I don’t even fuckin remember, I was so high, he’d say at others. He’d make a fist and stick it into the circle of friends, waiting for any one of them to accept the challenge. Fist to fist. Feint, fake out, and hit until you whiffed, fist driving through air, then take your turn being hit until you dodged a blow. A game so pure in its primitiveness it never failed to draw them around in a ring. Twin fists hovering, beating, and pressed together like sharks’ heads, or like flesh ball-peen hammers raining down blows, one boy or the other howling with pain and laughter at each direct hit because it stung a little but never that much, not until later, hands barely able to hold a pen, an ache spreading through the fingers and forearm, the skin along the backs of their hands mounded with blue-yellow bruises. “Yee! Fuckin-A YEE!” Sweet would yell, until someone in the group yelled it back like a rallying cry, “Fucking motherfucker YEEEEEEE!” they’d yell back and forth, the rush of sensation tweaking through Sweet from his thighs to his throat like a compressed spring releasing, making him dizzy, buzzing all the bones in his head in concert with the same impulses by which he knew, almost without looking, how to anticipate every move in the little theater of pain made by his fist and another boy’s, the rest of them standing around watching—Come on, come on, bunch of pansies—striking, striking, being struck.

 

Read More

Order a copy today — or better yet, subscribe!

 

Gregory Spatz’s most recent publications are the story collection Half as Happy (Engine Books, 2013), the novel Inukshuk (Bellevue Literary Press, 2012), and the forthcoming collection of linked stories and novellas What Could Be Saved (Tupelo Press, 2019). His stories have appeared in Kenyon Review, Santa Monica Review, Zyzzyva, Glimmer Train, Epoch, and other journals including, once upon a time, the New Yorker. He teaches in and directs the program for creative writing at Eastern Washington University and is a frequent contributor to New England Review.

Filed Under: Fiction Tagged With: Gregory Spatz, John Brown

New Books from NER Authors: Half as Happy by Gregory Spatz

May 13, 2013

Half as HappyGregory Spatz’s new collection of short stories, Half as Happy, has been published by Engine Books. Three of the eight stories originally appeared in NER.

From Publisher’s Weekly: “Spatz writes like a dream, and he is perfectly at home with the focus on the self, the search for a personal truth, and other tropes of contemporary literary fiction.”

From Brad Watson, author of The Heaven of Mercury: “Each story moves and unfolds, deepens and develops beautifully complex textures and moods, not unlike beautiful pieces of music. Spatz has a pitch-perfect ear for the language and an uncanny ability to mine the substance of his characters’ rich lives.”

The recipient of a NEA Fellowship in literature, Gregory Spatz is the author of Inukshuk and other novels. His stories have appeared in The New Yorker, Glimmer Train Stories, and Kenyon Review, among other publications. His work has appeared in several issues of NER (26.3, 27.4, 30.1, and 32.4). His piece “In Praise of Community Orchestras” was also featured in the NER Digital series.

Half as Happy is available from Engine Books and other booksellers.

Filed Under: NER Authors' Books, NER Community Tagged With: Gregory Spatz, Half as Happy

New Books from NER Authors

August 13, 2012

Paula Bohince

The Children

“Another writer with Paula Bohince’s gift for the ravishing image—and such writers are very few—would have us on our guard. We are wary of beauty; we have seen too often what beauty leaves out. But Bohince, in her magical capture of the material world, scorns all euphemizing edits; ‘the condom listing against milk-/weed’ is registered as scrupulously in these pages as are the combs of the abandoned hive. Which makes these poems transformative in the true and difficult sense: they bestow on the world the blessing of having-been-seen. And beauty too: ‘Something to recall / as beautiful, in the future. As the sewer was / in summer. Little childhood river.'” (Linda Gregerson)

 

Gordon Bowker

James Joyce: A New Biography

“It is a great boon that British biographer Gordon Bowker, who has written lives of Malcolm Lowry, George Orwell and Lawrence Durrell, should have taken on this task, and better yet that he has produced such a fine portrait of the artist and the man who was James Joyce . . . Instead of being daunted by Joyce having in a sense got there before him, Bowker makes this a strength, as he skillfully presents incidents and experiences both as they happened in life and, suitably transformed to varying degrees, on the page . . . the reader has the best of both worlds, being informed—or in the case of those already familiar with the books, reminded—both of the glories of Joycean fiction and of their roots in his life. Never reductive, genuinely attuned to both Joyce’s fictive methodology and his human qualities, Bowker manages to be immensely sympathetic to his subject while managing to preserve necessary critical distance and acuity.” (Martin Rubin, San Francisco Chronicle)

 

Michael Collier

An Individual History

“Collier’s sixth collection engages with childhood, fatherhood, and family life, in the living present and memorial past, a history explored with brilliantly precise detail and originality of perspective.” (Publishers Weekly)

 

Eduardo C. Corral

Slow Lightning

“[W]e can make of what would blind us a conduit for changed vision, suggests Corral. In these poems, a cage implies all the rest that lies outside it; any frame frames a window through which to see other possibilities unfolding… Like Hayden, Corral resists reductivism.  Gay, Chicano, ‘Illegal-American,’ that’s all just language, and part of Corral’s point is that language, like sex, is fluid and dangerous and thrilling, now a cage, now a window out.  In Corral’s refusal to think in reductive terms lies his great authority.  His refusal to entirely trust authority wins my trust as a reader.” (Carl Phillips, from the Foreword)

 

Norman Lock

Escher’s Journal

“Lock’s work seems to emanate…from an essential strangeness, an estrangement from easily agreed-upon psychologies, from popular culture, from anything resembling a zeitgeist. It is marked by an eerie tonality and an intense, unsettled intellectual curiosity—a Lock novel might take place during any time period, anywhere in the world.” (Dawn Raffel)

 

Padgett Powell

You & Me

“Wonderful…You & Me is by turns hilarious, depressing, gnomic, smutty, and just a far better Saturday night than anything to be had in Jacksonville and Baskersfield combined.” (BookForum)

“…swaggering genius and ribald wit.” (Vanity Fair)

 

Gregory Spatz

Inukshuk

“Inukshuk is a feat of empathy and honesty, a taut tale of fear and resentment and other threats from within, meticulously observed and fearlessly rendered in vivid, authoritative, gripping prose. It’s a virtuoso performance.” (Doug Dorst)

 

 

Craig Morgan Teicher

To Keep Love Blurry 

“A liberating push-back against the idea of economy. More play, more improvisation, and more defiantly deadpan humor – this is the vital shot-in-the-arm American poetry needs.” (D. A. Powell)

 

 

Matthew Thorburn

Every Possible Blue

“If Fred Astaire could write, it might sound like this: practiced, complex, graceful…These are a sequence of anecdotes daring to love again, dreaming in daylight.” (Grace Cavalieri)

Filed Under: NER Authors' Books, NER Community Tagged With: Craig Morgan Teicher, Eduardo C. Corral, Gregory Spatz, Matthew Thorburn, Michael Collier, Norman Lock, Padgett Powell, Paula Bohince

Exquisitely, perfectly sad

April 19, 2012

In Praise of Community Orchestras | By Gregory Spatz

Gregory Spatz

This winter, the adult-beginner community orchestra where my wife, Caridwen, coaches the violin sections and occasionally conducts, undertook one of the most demanding and profound pieces of music I know of: the second movement of Beethoven’s 7th Symphony. This is a piece I grew up listening to – at home, at my grandparents’ house in the Berkshires, summer evenings over their outdoor garden speakers, maybe even a time or two at Tanglewood performed by the BSO. My senior year in high school, I undertook a full-blown harmonic analysis of the piece, mainly because I wanted an excuse to dodge math class, but also because I was hoping to get to the bottom of some kind of nostalgia I’d always felt hearing it – to root that out, and maybe distance myself from it by focusing on the music’s underlying calculus and structure, rather than on the feeling-tones and idyllic pictures of willow trees and summer sunsets reflected in my grandparents’ pond, which the music always evoked for me. I doubt the analysis was very good or thorough, and I’m positive it didn’t lead me to a more meaningful appreciation of the music, but for a while after I did feel a special connection to it, a kind of ownership even, because of that attempted harmonic analysis, and I’d always type out final drafts of college papers with it blaring on my dorm room speakers (or on headphones after roommates complained).

And then I stopped listening to it altogether. Until this winter.

What surprised me, hearing it again as Caridwen worked it up, and later as the adult-beginners performed it, was how relevant it all still felt. And still (for me) steeped in nostalgia; and still, I can’t say what’s at the source of that. Some of it now, of course, is the sadness of looking back at a childhood and a whole world of people that no longer exists – feeling all of that evoked in the drama of those chords and fugue-themes and plaintive call-and-answer sections. Some of it may be inherent in the music itself, a consequence of Beethoven’s own sadness/nostalgia for the world of sound (he was mostly deaf at the time of writing it) – very probably it pulses with longing because he would only ever hear it fully in his head, and one can only imagine how badly he must have wanted to hear it played.

But the real surprise for me this winter, was in the way the community orchestra, despite the piece’s technical and emotional challenges, didn’t feel out-classed by or mismatched with the job of playing it. In fact, I felt their playing of the piece struck an earnestness of feeling that you don’t always hear from a professional orchestra, precisely because of inevitable imperfections in the performance. No question about the defects…and therefore no room in the playing for the vanity or high-gloss artistry and perfectionism that can so often cause classical music to sound fossilized, intimidating or inaccessible to the lay-listener. Did they get inside the piece and articulate it in a way Beethoven would have been pleased to hear? Probably not. But there was a pure awe and pleasure in being immersed in the music that was moving to behold. For me, that kind of engagement is the whole point of making music in the first place. I was glad to be reminded of this – and so unexpectedly, imperfectly – to feel again the power and immediacy of one of the most exquisitely, perfectly sad pieces of music I have ever heard.

*

NER Digital is a creative writing series for the web. Gregory Spatz has been contributing to NER’s fiction pages since 1992. His most recent book publications are the novel Inukshuk and forthcoming short story collection Half as Happy. He is the recipient of a Washington State Book Award and a 2012 NEA Fellowship in Literature, and plays fiddle in the internationally acclaimed band “John Reischman and the Jaybirds.” Visit www.gregoryspatz.com for more info. 

Filed Under: NER Digital Tagged With: Gregory Spatz, In Praise of Community Orchestras

  • 1
  • 2
  • Next Page »

Celebrating our fortieth year!

Volume 39, Number 1
Cover art by Jeanne Borofsky

Subscribe

Confluences

Brancusi’s Bird in Space

Didi Jackson

Brancusi’s Bird in Space

I move around the gold line
of a bird until I see a single feather,
the sky and song inside reflection,
an endless body balanced on beak,
the foot a hackle of bronze. . . .

ner via email

Stories, poems, essays, and web features delivered to your Inbox.

quarterly newsletter

Click here to sign up for quarterly updates.

categories

Navigation

  • Subscribe/Order
  • Back Issues
  • About NER
  • Events
  • Audio
  • NER Out Loud
  • Emerging Writers Award
  • Support NER
  • Advertising Information

Subscribe to Blog via Email

Enter your email address to subscribe to this blog and receive notifications of new posts by email.

Categories

Copyright © 2018 · facebook · twitter