New Books by NER Authors

November 2022

November 30, 2022

Get those wishlists ready! Six new books by NER authors have recently released, including a collection of short stories, two memoirs, and an essay collection. Browse our Bookshop.org page to support these and other NER authors.

Wendell Berry’s How It Went: Thirteen More Stories of the Port William Membership is out now from Counterpoint. Berry, a 2010 recipient of the National Humanities Medal, returns to his elegant world-building to capture life in fictional Port William, Kentucky between 1931 and 2021. Berry’s work appeared in the 1979 summer issue of NER.

New Directions recently published Ottilie Mulzet’s translation of László Krasznahorkai’s A Mountain to the North, a Lake to the South, Paths to the West, a River to the East, which was hailed as “a vision of painstaking beauty” by NPR. Mulzet won the 2019 National Book Award for her translation of Krasznahorkai’s Baron Wenckheim’s Homecoming, and translated the NER Digital piece “My Gate” by Gábor Schein.

Out now from Yale University Press is Carl Phillips’s My Trade is Mystery: Seven Meditations from a Life of Writing. Phillips is the recipient of several awards, including a fellowship from the Guggenheim Foundation and an Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. His work has appeared in multiple volumes of NER, most recently issue 42.2.

Mary-Alice Daniel’s coming-of-age memoir, A Coastline Is an Immeasurable Thing: A Memoir Across Three Continents, releases from Harper Collins at the end of the month. In a starred review, Publisher’s Weekly described the book as “an incandescent debut . . . a gem.” Daniel’s poem, “A Southern Way of Talking About Love,” was published in NER 33.4.

Charles Holdefer’s latest novel, Don’t Look Back at Me, is now on shelves courtesy of Sagging Meniscus Press. Don’t Look Back at Me chronicles a college student’s discovery of Emily Dickinson’s correspondence with a secret lover, and explores the power of poetry to shape our lives. Holdefer’s work has appeared in several volumes of NER, most recently 37.1.

Robert Cohen’s new essay collection, Going to the Tigers, is available now from University of Michigan Press. A Professor of English at Middlebury College, Cohen’s distinctions include a Pushcart Prize, Guggenheim Fellowship, and a Whiting Writers Award. Cohen’s essay on Stanley Elkin, which appears in Going to the Tigers, was first published in NER 27.4.

Find more books by NER authors on our Bookshop.org page.

Best American anthologies and more

NER Award Winners

November 21, 2022

We are excited to announce that numerous pieces originally published in NER this year have been honored in Best American Short Stories 2022, Best American Essays 2022, Best American Poetry 2022, and Best Spiritual Literature Vol. 7, 2022! The anthologies are available now at Bookshop.org.

Best American Essays
guest editor Alexander Chee, series editor Robert Atwan
Featured Essay:
Jung Hae Chae, “The Gye, the No-Name Hair Salon, the Coup d’État, and the Small Dreamers” (42.4)
Notables:
Susan Daitch, “Three Essays” (42.1)
Daniel Kennedy, “Relax Your Face, Clint” (42.4)
Jesse Lee Kercheval, “Crash” (42.2)
Kat Meads, “Things Woolfian” (42.1)
Jenn Shapland, “You Are Glowing with Crystal White Light” (42.3)
Leath Tonino, “RIP Chuck, But I Doubt It” (42.3)

Best American Short Stories
guest editor Andrew Sean Greer, series editor Heidi Pitlor
Other Distinguished Stories:
Matthew Lansburgh, “Hasina” (42.1)
Debbie Urbanski, “Long May Land Be Bright” (42.1)

Best American Poetry
guest editor Matthew Zapruder, series editor David Lehman
Featured Poem by NER poetry editor:
Jennifer Chang, “The Innocent” (from The Believer)

Best Spiritual Literature
edited by Luke Hankins, Nathan Poole, Karen Tucker
Featured Poem:
Ellen Bass, “During the Pandemic I Listen to the July 26, 1965, Juan-les-Pins Recording of A Love Supreme” (42.2)

Writer's Notebook—From A Forest of Marvels

Skip Horack

November 18, 2022

“How to describe the sensation of awaking inside my novel? To watch Mbuti gather wild honey and mushrooms in one of the few major forests to survive the last ice age?”

The northeastern Democratic Republic of the Congo, the massive Ituri Forest rainforest, and the fifty-three hundred square miles of the Okapi Wildlife Reserve—in addition to being home to nearly ten thousand hunter-gatherer Mbuti Pygmies, this tropical sanctuary supplies crucial habitat for numerous imperiled wildlife species . . . such as a beast that many Victorian-era naturalists, in considering vague rumors of an elusive, horse-sized quadruped inhabiting the region, referred to as the “African unicorn.”

My first trip to the Okapi Wildlife Reserve occurred in the spring of 2010. For two years I had been writing a novel about a man abducted from the Ituri in the nineteenth century, then brought to North America as a slave. This was my chance to encounter, however briefly, the forest my protagonist had been stolen from. My chance to visit with Mbuti still residing there—members of indigenous Pygmy bands which had served as the inspiration for his fictional tribe. I can only ever know the Ituri and those who live there as an outsider, of course, but I wanted to learn what I could.

For those two years I had forced myself to wait, planning and preparing—contemplating US Department of State “avoid all but essential travel” warnings that spoke of infectious diseases and poor infrastructure, corruption and kidnapping and bloodshed . . . some of the advice helpful (“Ensure that medical insurance includes medevac coverage”), some less so (“If stopped at a roadblock, remain cautious”)—and letting the pages of my manuscript stack up as I accomplished what research I could from afar. Eventually I had a rough-draft hypothesis of sorts, and I hoped, by treating it as such, everything I would witness and experience in the Ituri might somehow be more manageable to process. What had I gotten correct? What had I botched? What layered details, revisions, and brushstrokes could lend the novel added luster and truth?

After days of travel I arrived in the Democratic Republic of the Congo city of Bunia, base for a UN peacekeeping force that is among the largest blue-helmet operations in Africa. The Ituri commences fifteen miles to the west, along the high, ragged edges of the Albertine Rift, and the next morning a pilot/missionary flew me over a plateauing undulation of pastureland and savanna to the hardwood canopy of the Ituri and, finally, the Okapi Wildlife Reserve. An hour later the Cessna bounced down a grass runway, then I spent a week hiking from Mbuti camp to Mbuti camp on trails dimpled with the pugmarks of leopards—and, once, the cloven tracks of a foraging okapi.

How to describe the sensation of awaking inside my novel? To watch Mbuti gather wild honey and mushrooms in one of the few major forests to survive the last ice age? To hear the crashing rumble of fleeing forest elephants and the roars of baboons?

Yes, I had come to a sacred place. But a place threatened for many of the reasons such forests are typically threatened, in addition to reasons more unique to the DRC: the collateral damage of tribal divisions created generations ago by European colonists; the enduring inability, dating back to Congolese independence from Belgium, to establish a functioning government in the tumultuous northeast; the recurring presence of various militia groups and warlords.

Five years ago I returned to the Okapi Wildlife Reserve with the idea for another book in my head. A true book. I wanted to perhaps write about the history, and the present, of this beautiful and tragic place. “From a Forest of Marvels” (NER 43.3), I thought, might make for an appropriate first chapter. An account of how the okapi came to be “discovered”—opening, in essence, with the beginnings of the end.

Skip Horack is the author of three books: the story collection The Southern Cross, and the novels The Eden Hunter and The Other Joseph. Horack is director of the Creative Writing Program at Florida State University—and would like to thank the Okapi Conservation Project (www.okapiconservation.org), and its founder John Lukas in particular, for inspiring and informing the essay “From a Forest of Marvels,” which was originally published in New England Review issue 43.3.

Behind the Byline

Caroline Kim

November 9, 2022

Fiction reader Katy Cesarotti talks with Caroline Kim about cultural identity, dichotomy, and the unsaid in her story “Hiding Spot” (NER 43.3).

Katy Cesarotti: The story opens as Mrs. Lee’s son, Ken, visits home with his girlfriend after two years of estrangement. The first section closely follows Mrs. Lee; later the story hinges to her son, Ken, and we see his childhood home through his eyes. Can you talk about your use of perspective in this piece?

Caroline Kim: I used to think I had to write from only one perspective—first, second, or third—and if close third, stay with a specific character. But the longer I write, the less rigidly I feel about such things. When I began this story I thought it “belonged” to Mrs. Lee because it largely unfolds from her perspective. It wasn’t until I finished the first draft and was reading it back that I even noticed that there were times when the story moved into Ken’s point of view. I hadn’t noticed it at all while I was writing. But it kind of felt like the story was telling me something by the ease with which it moved back and forth between them: that the story didn’t belong to one character or the other but was about their need and desire to connect with each other.

KC: The title, “Hiding Spot,” refers explicitly to Mrs. Lee’s hidden rings. One of the things I loved most about this piece is the balance between concealing and revealing, what’s said and unsaid. How did you think about hiding in this story? What inspired you to explore this theme?

CK: Mrs. Lee has a long relationship with hiding things. Some are tangible and valuable, like jewelry or cash, and some are reminders of the past, like old photographs and letters from Korea. Even more importantly, she’s been able to keep a part of herself hidden from others. An essential piece of herself outside of whatever was expected of her as a woman or a mother or an immigrant.

Even though the theme of hiding seems so glaringly obvious to me now—it’s even in the title!—I wasn’t aware of it for a long time. Because the story begins with a moment of crisis in Mrs. Lee’s life, when she can’t find the jewelry she thought she had so cleverly hid, it seemed natural to write toward other times and other parts of her life when she felt the urge to hide. Ironically or not, these moments were the ones that revealed Mrs. Lee most clearly to me.

KC: Mr. Lee is a quiet presence in the story, but he fills the space: the bookshelves of his Korean war books, his silences. Can you describe how you approached the two partnerships of the story: Mr. Lee and Mrs. Lee, and Ken and Celeste?

CK: Even though Mr. Lee is not the greatest parent or husband, I have a lot of sympathy for him. Mr. Lee is a person who’s given up due to his difficult life, much of it coming from his experiences as an immigrant. I describe him in the story as “whittled . . . down to someone who only wanted life to be agreeable.” This has led him to become a shell of the person he once was—a person who reacted too often with anger and violence but who also knew how to have fun, enjoy music, was open to life. But now routine is what’s keeping him alive. Because of all this, he’s more tragic to me than Ken or his mother who at least want to keep trying to connect with each other.

In terms of the two partnerships in the story: Mr. and Mrs. Lee and Ken and Celeste, they don’t have much in common. Mr. and Mrs. Lee’s relationship comes from a different time, a different culture. It’s frozen in time. On the other hand, there’s a lot of uncertainty yet in Ken’s and Celeste’s relationship, there’s also hope.

KC: Despite her vivid presence on the page, Mrs. Lee goes without a first name throughout the story. So does Mr. Lee. Ken’s girlfriend is often referred to as “the girl” until he finally reveals that her name is Celeste. Can you talk about naming and identity in this piece in relation to their familial roles?

CK: Great question. As a Korean American writer, I often find myself struggling with names for a variety of reasons. In the first place, Korean and American cultures have different attitudes toward them. In America the individual’s name is extremely important to identity—I think of this whenever I see monogrammed towels—whereas in Korea, one’s relationship to others is what’s paramount. Even now I couldn’t tell you the first names of my relatives—I only know them as “Younger-Aunt-on-Father’s-Side” or “Oldest-Uncle-on-Mother’s Side”. Neither way is better nor worse; they just tell us different things about their cultures.

I also feel conflicted because I’m aware that the minute I give my character a name like “Dongwon” some sense of distance is created. And I can understand why—the name feels unfamiliar because it is unfamiliar. Foreign, on the page as well as the eye, ear, tongue, and mind. As a reader in English only, it looks unfamiliar to me too. At the same time, how else can we make the unfamiliar familiar except by normalizing the fact that in America many of us have foreign-sounding names?

Each story is different and calls for its own negotiations with names, but usually I don’t name my characters until it becomes necessary in the story. In this case, Mrs. Lee’s first name is never revealed because it never comes up—sadly, there’s no one in her life close enough to her to use her personal name.

The reason Mrs. Lee refers to Celeste as “the girl” for most of the story reflects her general feeling of disconnection from American culture. Looking at Celeste, she feels she has no entry into understanding what a young white American girl like her thinks, feels, or cares about and vice versa, that she is unfathomable to Celeste. Even so, she knows she has to try and finally says Celeste’s name out loud for the first time at the end of the story.

KC: By the end of the piece, Ken and Mrs. Lee reach a fragile détente. How do you see the characters’ development over the story—how has their relationship changed, or failed to change?

CK: I feel quite a lot of hope for Ken and Mrs. Lee going forward. It’s not going to be easy or perfect, but they finally establish a connection with each other in the car. Though she’s still enormously worried about him, especially with all the responsibilities of fatherhood headed his way, she recognizes that he’s made real changes in his life. Wanting to show him her support, she gives him her mother’s jade ring and tells him to give it to the person he chooses.

KC: What’s on your to-read list right now?

CK: Recently I went down a Jean Rhys rabbit hole and read all of her novels. I’m now reading a biography of her life. I was powerfully struck by the immediacy of her writing, how fresh and alive it still feels. Her books feel like they could be published today.

Otherwise, I’m mostly doing research reading for my novel which is set in the 1890s, when the Yi Dynasty in Korea effectually ended with the murder of Queen Min by Japanese assassins. So, lots of very interesting history books about that time of the world, when the industrial revolution began changing the East as much as the West, when monarchies began crumbling everywhere or were violently overthrown, and it became no longer possible for Korea to hide as the Hermit Kingdom anymore. Ha! And there we are back to hiding.

Katy Cesarotti is a fiction reader for the New England Review. Her work has appeared in Story and the Southwest Review. She lives in Chicago with a pile of books and some very thirsty plants.

New England Review