New England Review

New Books from NER Authors & Middlebury College Faculty

March 2022 (Part 2)

March continues to be a busy month for New England Review authors! Here are six more recent releases to ease you into the spring season. Check out part 1 of our March author roundup here.

Megan Mayhew Bergman’s latest collection of fiction, How Strange a Season (Scribner), captures women’s struggles and interactions with the natural world as they navigate inherited challenges. Although each story stands alone, How Strange a Season is strikingly cohesive and layered in its exploration of intimacy and grief. Mayhew Bergman is a professor in literature and environmental writing at Middlebury College and is the director of the Bread Loaf Environmental Writers’ Conference.

Robert Lopez blurs the line between reality and perception in A Better Class of People (DZanc Books), a series of linked stories set in a distorted version of New York City. As we follow a man riding the subway “through the chaos of an ordinary commute,” Lopez shuffles back and forth through time and space to show the man in other disturbing situations, illuminating topics like immigration, police brutality, and sexual harassment. Lopez’s work has appeared in multiple issues of NER, most recently in issue 41.1.

Set in the backdrop of the Bahamas, Allegra Hyde‘s Eleutheria (Vintage) tackles the challenges of climate change through a thrilling utopian lens. In this debut novel, a troubled Willa Marks moves to Eleutheria to work at Camp Hope among a group of eco-warriors and their leader, Roy Adams. When she arrives in the Bahamas, she’s met with the startling realization that Adams is missing and Camp Hope’s mission is at risk. Willa yearns for hope and urgent action in this illuminating and timely tale. Hyde’s short story “Shark Fishing” appeared in NER 35.4.

Through a series of riveting mysteries, Dennis McFadden’s Old Grimes Is Dead (Summerhill Publishing) shares the fascinating resurrection of a Black man by a group of white doctors in western Pennsylvania in 1857. Although famous (or infamous) at the time, this antebellum tale is based in part on historical fact, bringing to life forgotten pieces of American lore and real characters from the past. This novel includes “Little Brier,” an excerpt originally published in NER 35.3.

From third person accounts to essays in the form of notes, instructions, and extended meditations, Matthew Vollmer’s collection This World is Not Your Home (EastOver Press) offers creative nonfiction in a variety of forms. One essay offers instructions for how to write a love story while another describes a spectacular cosmic phenomenon experienced by a husband and wife on a walk after dark. Vollmer’s work has appeared in multiple issues of NER, most recently in issue 33.1.

Ethereal, transitory, and bittersweet, Yanyi’s latest poetry collection, Dream of the Divided Field (One World), proposes that our complex identities embody all of these characteristics and more. As the poet grapples with the wounds left by heartbreak and diaspora, he also deliberates on the rose-tinted manner in which we recall the things and people we love, even as memory creates an image that has little resemblance to reality. Three poems from the collection—“Catullus 85,” “Detail,” and “Dreams of the Divided Field”—were published in NER 42.3.

Visit our page on Bookshop.org for cumulative seasonal lists of NER author releases.

Mid-Week Break

Allegra Hyde Reads at the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference

Allegra Hyde reads her short story “After the Beginning” at the 2017 Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference. The story first appeared in Denver Quarterly, and then in the story collection Of This New World (University of Iowa Press). Her short story “Shark Fishing” appeared in NER 35.4.

Of This New World won the John Simmons Short Fiction Award through the Iowa Short Fiction Award Series. Hyde is the recipient of two Pushcart Prizes, as well as support from The Elizabeth George Foundation, the Lucas Artist Residency Program, the Jentel Foundation, The Virginia G. Piper Center, and the U.S. Fulbright Commission. She currently teaches for the Inprint Writers Workshop in Houston, Texas, and serves as a mentor for emerging writers through the AWP Writer to Writer Mentorship Program.

All Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference readings are available online. To hear more, please visit the Bread Loaf website.

Behind the Byline | Allegra Hyde

 

Allegra Hyde_author photo_2015
Allegra Hyde

 

Welcome to “Behind the Byline,” the column in which we share conversations with current NER writers in all genres.

This month, NER fiction reader Rachel Mullis speaks with author Allegra Hyde.

RM: “Shark Fishing” (which appears in NER 35.4) is a haunting meditation on humanity’s relationship with our environment, spanning centuries through the lens of one small island in the Bahamas. What inspired you to write it?

AH: I’ve wanted to write about climate change for a while. Sometimes I question why I’m sitting at a desk all day making up stories when I could be marching through the streets, waving banners, chaining myself to trees. So in a way the story is the product of my guilt. It’s also a product of my uncertainty: an attempt to illuminate an uncertain future with events of the past. The protagonist, like me, is trying to understand how best to address an environmental crisis that can feel overwhelming.

 

RM: The story reveals fascinating details about Eleuthera’s history. I’m curious what your research process looked like.

AH: I’ve travelled to Eleuthera twice, once as an undergraduate studying renewable energy, and once through a teaching fellowship in Human Ecology. Both trips gave me a chance to observe Eleutheran culture—the fish fries, the Rake and Scrape music, the multi-hour church services—as well as the island’s history. You see history everywhere. It’s inscribed in the landscape. You can walk through abandoned resorts, drive past empty grain silos and colonial architecture, scuba dive in shipwrecks. Even poking around a beach, you might find pieces of Lucayan pottery, hundreds of years old. So by exploring Eleuthera, I was immersed in these layers of overlapping history. Those experiences accounted for much of my research, or at least gave me places to start. I read plenty of books as well. There is a small library of Bahamian history stacked around my desk.

 

RM: In addition to publishing stories and serving as prose editor at Hayden’s Ferry Review, you are finishing up an MFA at Arizona State University. Any new projects planned post-graduation?

AH: One of the things I struggled with while writing “Shark Fishing” was saying everything I wanted to say within a reasonable page length. Even around 8,000 words, the piece often felt like it was bursting at the seams. Maybe that’s one of the reasons I opted for a fragmentary structure: to let the white space speak for what I couldn’t fit. There still seems to be more to write, though, so I’ve started working on a novel-length version of the story. Stay tuned.

 

RM: You curate quite an impressive collection of similes on allegrahyde.com. What draws you to comparison above other figures of speech?

AH: There are some simile haters out there—Kafka said “they describe much, but prove nothing”—but to me, a good simile is as delightful as a well-trained bunny, as useful as aluminum foil in an alien invasion, and as indispensable as the pickle that comes with a grilled cheese sandwich.

♦♦♦ 

Allegra Hyde’s short stories and essays have appeared, in addition to NER, in Missouri Review, North American Review, Chattahoochee Review, and elsewhere. She curates similes at www.allegrahyde.com.

 

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