New England Review

Best American Short Stories 2016

bass2016Congratulations to Sharon Solwitz, whose story “Gifted” (NER 36.2) was selected by Junot Díaz and Heidi Pitlor for Best American Short Stories 2016!

We’re also thrilled to see a handful of others recognized as “Other Distinguished Stories.”

Rav Grewal-Kök, “The Bolivian Navy” (36.4)

Mateal Lovaas Ishihara, “Crossing Harvard Yard” (36.4)

Carla Panciera, “The Kind of People Who Look at Art” (36.2)

Michael X. Wang, “Further News of the Defeat” (36.2)

As Díaz says in his introduction, a passionate fan letter to the short story itself, “I am as much in awe of the form’s surpassing beauty as I am bowled over by its extraordinary mutability and generativity… the short story’s colossal power extends from its brevity and restraint.” Indeed.

Announcing NER 36.2


With its focus on China, NER 36.2 brings us up close to an old, new world of art and history, nature and poetry. Also in this issue, we traverse our own country from the Atlantic to the Pacific with authors as they remember collective pasts, brave their own presents, and escort the most foreign of foreigners from our halls of ivy to our backroads theaters. The new issue of NER has just shipped from the printer and a preview is available on our website. Order a print or digital copy today!

POETRY

Kazim Ali • David Baker • Christopher Bakken • Joshua Bennett • Bruce Bond • Luisa A. Igloria • Vandana Khanna • Rickey Laurentiis • Katrina Roberts • Ed Skoog • Xiao Kaiyu (translated by Christopher Lukpe) • Ya Shi (translated by Nick Admussen) • Yin Lichuan (translated by Fiona Sze-Lorrain)


FICTION

Steve De Jarnatt • Joann Kobin • Carla Panciera • Sharon Solwitz • Michael X. Wang.


NONFICTION

• Wei An’s ruminations on nature just north of Beijing (translated by Thomas Moran)
• Wendy Willis on Ai Weiwei’s blockbuster show at Alcatraz
• Marianne Boruch discovers the diagnostic value of poetry
• Interpreter Eric Wilson relives the encounters of a Faeroese poet with American activists, academics, and alcohol
• James Naremore considers the considerable Orson Welles at 100, looking beyond Citizen Kane
• Jeff Staiger makes a case for how The Pale King was to have trumped Infinite Jest
• Camille T. Dungy is more than welcomed to Presque Isle as she finds herself in Maine’s early history
• “The Gloomy Dean” William Ralph Inge revisits Rome under the Caesars

Order a copy in print or digital formats for all devices.

 

Carla Panciera Receives Grace Paley Short Fiction Award

Carla Panciera

NER contributor Carla Panciera’s short story collection, Bewildered, has recently been chosen as the 2013 recipient of Grace Paley Short Fiction Award, sponsored by the Association of Writers and Writing Programs.

Bewildered will be published in fall 2014 by the University of Massachusetts Press.

Panciera’s short fiction appeared in NER 27.4 and her story from NER 25.3, “All of a Sudden,” is featured on the NER website.

All of a Sudden

399px-girlCarla Panciera’s short story “All of a Sudden” appeared in NER 25.3 (2004):

I imagined Albinna trolling the aisles of the dime store, the sleeves on a denim jacket her brother’d outgrown rolled over her thin wrists. The saleswomen, older than our mothers, sweaters around their shoulders cape-like, would follow after her expecting her to pocket lip gloss or musk, things she fingered or picked up to smell. There was nothing she thought of stealing. But who else would have known that about her? 

I stopped going places without her. I felt a generous love for her and for myself loving her. When she couldn’t go somewhere because she was ironing curtains, she’d been out that day already, she had to get lettuce at the store, I stayed home, my mother asking: Where’s Albinna today? 

We’d found a rusting truck cap in a back field and dragged an old coffee table into it. She brought a candle and once we tried cigarettes there. Days without her, I’d sit there myself, bring the dog, find something to use as a vase and fill it with wild chamomile. 

You could ask another friend over, my mother said, but I had no wish to do that. 

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