NER author Dennis McFadden has published his story collection Jimtown Road, winner of the 2016 Press 53 Short Fiction Award.
From the publisher: These interestingly linked stories are fresh, gritty, surprising, and sometimes laugh-out-loud funny. We’ve published linked story collections in the past, but Dennis’ approach was unique. When I finished one story, I found myself looking forward to the next one, wondering who I was about to meet and how the story would tie in with the others. And the last story brought the entire collection full-circle, right back to the beginning with a very strange twist.
McFadden has been published in Missouri Review, Massachusetts Review, Sewanee Review, PRISM International, and New England Review, most recently in 35.3.
Jimtown Road, published October 1, is available from Press 53.
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NER’s nonfiction editor J.M. Tyree’s latest book, Vanishing Streets: Journeys in London (Stanford University Press) “is distinctly cinematic, describing sweeping landscapes interspersed with tight shots, close-ups, and all the drama and symbolism of character quests with director’s commentary, resulting a fresh portrait of London and an intriguing travelogue.” —Publishers Weekly
Tyree is also the author of BFI Film Classics: Salesman (British Film Institute publishing and Palgrave/Macmillan), and coauthor of both Our Secret Life in the Movies (with Michael McGriff, A Strange Object) and BFI Film Classics: The Big Lebowski (BFI and Palgrave/Macmillan). Our Secret Life in the Movies was selected as an NPR Best Book of 2014. His writing on cinema has appeared in Sight & Sound, the Believer, and Film Quarterly, and he has spoken at both London’s National Film Theatre and the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C.
Tyree was a Keasbey Scholar at Trinity College, Cambridge, and a Wallace Stegner-Truman Capote Fellow and Jones Lecturer in Stanford’s Creative Writing Program. He currently teaches at VCUarts as Distinguished Visiting Professor in Art History and Cinema. His Top 10 List of Documentaries appeared in Sight & Sound’s Greatest Documentaries Poll.
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“Meticulous, written with a harsh language, this is the portrait of a suffocating microcosm in which hierarchies are fixed by the illusion of a social progress that will never arrive. Rabasa dismantles with precision the mechanisms of a false democracy, in which no political alternative is possible.”—Ariane Singer, Le Monde
NER translator Christina MacSweeney, translator of Eduardo Rabasa’s novel A Zero Sum Game (Deep Vellum Publishing), was selected as one of the best twenty young Mexican contemporary authors in the Hay Festival’s México20 project. The publisher writes, “A Zero Sum Game is a biting satire of contemporary consumer society and the cult of the individual, liberally sprinkled with humor and chilling realism. Rabasa’s clear, steady gaze rests on the sophistry and rationalizations that mask the actual situation where, for all the choices we are offered, we have little power over our destinies. Swift would raise his hat to this debut novelist.”
Christina MacSweeney is a literary translator specializing in Latin American fiction. Her translations of Valeria Luiselli’s Faces in the Crowd (2012), Sidewalks (2013), and The Story of My Teeth (2015) were published by Granta and Coffee House Press; Faces in the Crowd was a finalist for the Best Translated Book Award, 2015. Her work has also appeared on a variety of platforms and in the anthology México20 (Pushkin Press, 2015). Her translations of Daniel Saldaña París’s Among Strange Victims (Coffee House Press) and Eduardo Rabasa’s A Zero Sum Game (Deep Vellum) are forthcoming in 2016. Her work has appeared in NER 35.1.
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Allegra Hyde, whose work appeared in NER 35.4, has published her debut collection of stories, Of This New World (University of Iowa Press).
Bennet Sims, judge of the 2016 John Simmons Short Fiction Award, wrote that the work is “an ambitious and memorable debut, in which a dozen different characters, looking for a dozen different paradises, all end up learning some customized version of that ultimate Miltonic lesson: ‘the mind is its own place, and in itself can make a heaven of hell, a hell of heaven.’”
A native of New Hampshire, Hyde received her BA from Williams College and her MFA from Arizona State University. Her stories and essays have been published in New England Review, Gettysburg Review, Missouri Review, and many others. She is the recipient of a Pushcart Prize, as well as a notable mention in Best American Essays 2015. Roxane Gay selected her work for “The Wigleaf Top 50 [Very] Short Fictions of 2015,” and she was a finalist for the 2015 Million Writers Award. She has been awarded fellowships and grants from The Virginia G. Piper Center for Creative Writing, the National University of Singapore, the Jentel Artist Residency Program, The Island School, and the US Fulbright Commission. Her first book, Of This New World, won the John Simmons Iowa Short Fiction Award and will be out this October.