Copies of the new issue shipped from the printer December 7 but have been delayed in the postal system. We apologize for the delay and thank you for your patience!

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September 2020

New Books by NER Authors

September 28, 2020

“Short, sharp, and quietly brutal. . . . [What Are You Going Through] is concerned with the biggest possible questions and confronts them so bluntly it is sometimes jarring: How should we live in the face of so much suffering? Dryly funny and deeply tender.”—Kirkus, STARRED review

From the publisher: A woman describes a series of encounters she has with various people in the ordinary course of her life: an ex she runs into by chance at a public forum, an Airbnb owner unsure how to interact with her guests, a stranger who seeks help comforting his elderly mother, a friend of her youth now hospitalized with terminal cancer. In each of these people the woman finds a common need: the urge to talk about themselves and to have an audience to their experiences. In What Are You Going Through, Nunez brings wisdom, humor, and insight to a novel about human connection and the changing nature of relationships in our times. A surprising story about empathy and the unusual ways one person can help another through hardship, her book offers a moving and provocative portrait of the way we live now.

Sigrid Nunez is the author of the novels Salvation City, The Last of Her Kind, A Feather on the Breath of God, and For Rouenna, among others. She has been the recipient of several awards including a Whiting Writers’ Award, the Rome Prize in Literature, a Berlin Prize Fellowship, and the 2018 National Book Award for her New York Times-bestselling novel The Friend. She lives in New York City. Her fiction appeared in NER 18.3.

What Are You Going Through can be purchased at Bookshop.org or your local independent bookstore.

“What Scholastique Mukasonga accomplishes with this collection is nothing short of alchemy… Mukasonga is a genius and her work should be savoured again and again.” — Diriye Osman, author of Fairytales For Lost Children

From the publisher: Scholastique Mukasonga’s autobiographical stories rend a glorious Rwanda from the obliterating force of recent history, conjuring the noble cows of her home or the dew-swollen grass they graze on. In the title story, five-year-old Colomba tells of a merciless overlord, hunger or igifu, gnawing away at her belly. Her writing eclipses the great gaps of time and memory; in one scene she is a child sitting squat with a jug of sweet, frothy milk and in another she is an exiled teacher, writing down lists of her dead. As in all her work, Scholastique sits up with them, her witty and beaming beloved.

Scholastique Mukasonga was born in Rwanda in 1956 and experienced from childhood the violence and humiliation of the ethnic conflicts that shook her country. In 1960, her family was displaced to the polluted and under-developed Bugesera district of Rwanda. Mukasonga was later forced to leave the school of social work in Butare and flee to Burundi. She settled in France in 1992, only two years before the brutal genocide of the Tutsi swept through Rwanda. In the aftermath, Mukasonga learned that 27 of her family members had been massacred. Twelve years later, Gallimard published her autobiographical account Inyenzi ou les Cafards, which marked Mukasonga’s entry into literature. This was followed by the publication of La femme aux pieds nus in 2008 and L’Iguifou in 2010, both widely praised. Her first novel, Notre-Dame du Nil, won the Ahmadou Kourouma prize and the Renaudot prize in 2012, as well as the 2013 Océans France Ô prize, and the 2014 French Voices Award, and was shortlisted for the 2016 International Dublin Literary award.  Her work has appeared numerous times in NER in translations by Melanie Mauthner, most recently in 41.3. 

Igifu can be purchased at Bookshop.org or your local independent bookstore.

 

(Starred review in Publishers Weekly) In Jeff W. Bens’s blistering latest (after Albert, Himself), Tim “Oak” O’Connor is an enforcer for a West Texas Hockey League team. During a two-month suspension for injuring another player, Oak flies home to Boston for his mother’s funeral. There, he’s ashamed to be seen by Kate, his 14-year-old estranged daughter from a failed marriage. Oak, addicted to painkillers from all the damage the game has done to his body and mind, works odd (and sometimes illegal) jobs, such as stealing copper wiring from a demolition site with his old friend, Slats, now married to Oak’s ex and raising Kate, while reflecting on his years of absence and regrets. Oak gets some hope from a new relationship with Joan Linney, an attorney who defends him after he is arrested for hitting a cop, and bonds with Kip, a 14-year-old boy he rescues from bullying outside a hockey rink. Both Joan and Kip play an important role as Oak struggles to make a new life for himself, both in and out of the rink. Oak is deeply tragic, a man of good intentions who is dogged by bad luck and worse impulse control; the author makes his story an emotionally fraught and enriching one for the reader. Filled with memorable characters, pungent dialogue, and a lean, hard-bitten writing style, Bens’s superb novel brilliantly faces down traditional notions of manhood.

Jeff W. Bens’s story, Golden Day, appeared in NER 19.1 (1998).

The Mighty Oak can be purchased at Bookshop.org or your local independent bookstore.


“Because Biespiel is Jewish (though admittedly ‘retired’) he is compelled to remember. Because he is a storyteller, he caresses the complex characters and places of his past. And finally, because he is a poet, he makes it all sing—gorgeously.” —Lia Purpura, National Book Critics Circle finalist and author of All the Fierce Tethers

From the publisher: Acclaimed poet and essayist David Biespiel tells the story of  the rise and fall of a Jewish boyhood in Texas, and his search for the answer to his life’s central riddle: Are we ever done leaving home? Written in the years that followed the devastation of Houston wrought by three 500-year floods in three years, including the worst flood in Texas history, Biespiel’s account is by turns personal and philosophical, a meditation on time’s inevitable losses and a writer’s hard-won gains. A Place of Exodus is not only a memoir, but an essential companion for anyone who has journeyed far—and equally those who have stayed close to the unresolvable paradoxes of home, the aches of time and heart none of us can escape.

David Biespiel is a contributing writer at the New Republic, the New Yorker, Poetry, Politico, and Slate. He is the author of six collections of poetry, three books of nonfiction, and is the editor of two anthologies. His most recent books include: Republic Café and The Education of a Young Poet. He is poet-in-residence at Oregon State University, a core faculty member in the Rainier Writers Workshop MFA Program, and founder of the Attic Institute of Arts and Letters. Three of his poems appeared in NER 39.4.

A Place of Exodus can be purchased at Bookshop.org or your local independent bookstore.


“Wang sees deeply into his subject. With offhand precision, his stories present a vision of recent China that feels utterly genuine even when he is raucously, indubitably inventing. This is political fiction of a high caliber.”—Sharon Solwitz, author of Once, in Lourde

From the publisher: Steeped in a long history of violence and suffering, Michael X. Wang’s debut collection of short stories interrogates personal and political events set against the backdrop of China that are both real and perceived, imagined and speculative. Wang plunges us into the fictional Chinese village of Xinchun and beyond to explore themes of tradition, family, modernity, and immigration in a country grappling with its modern identity. Further News of Defeat is rich with characters who have known struggle and defeat and who find themselves locked in pivotal moments of Chinese history—such as World War II and the Tiananmen Square massacre—as they face losses of the highest order and still find cause for revival.

Michael X. Wang was born in Fenyang, a small coal-mining city in China’s mountainous Shanxi Province. He immigrated to the United States when he was six and has lived in ten states and fifteen cities. In 2010, he completed his PhD in Literature at Florida State University. Before that, he received his MFA in Fiction at Purdue. His work has appeared in New England Review, Greensboro Review, Day One, and Juked, among others, and they have won an AWP Intro Award and been selected by the Best American Anthology as a notable story of the year. He lives with his wife and pets at Russellville, Arkansas, and is currently an Assistant Professor of English and Creative Writing at Arkansas Tech University. The titular story of this collection first appeared in NER 36.2. Read his “Behind the Byline” interview on the story here. 

Further News of Defeat can be purchased at Bookshop.org or your local independent bookstore.

Filed Under: Featured, NER Authors' Books, News & Notes Tagged With: Jeff W. Bens, Michael X. Wang, Scholastique Mukasonga, Sigrid Nunez

Best American Short Stories 2016

October 3, 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.

Filed Under: News & Notes Tagged With: Best American Short Stories 2016, Carla Panciera, Michael X. Wang, Rav Grewal-Kök, Sharon Solwitz

Michael X. Wang

Further News of Defeat

July 13, 2015

Fiction from NER 36.2 

[View as PDF]

forrest_german_expressionism_revisted_lyonel_feiningerA runner arrived at Xinchun Village two days after the fall of Taiyuan. Out of breath, his Kuomintang uniform soaked in sweat, the soldier collapsed into a fly-infested ditch on the edge of a sorghum field. That evening, San saw him on her way back from tending her family’s two goats, the man lying there snoring, and when she told her parents about him, they didn’t believe her. San, nine years old, often lied to her parents. One week she’d say the Japanese were here, the Russians the next. Her parents knew San hated shepherding and dismissed her pleas to save the young man from becoming pig fodder. After putting her to bed, San’s father slung a hoe over his shoulder and walked across his fields under moonlight to the place his daughter had mentioned. He couldn’t lift the man out of the mud by himself, even after taking off his own shoes and using his bare feet for traction. He ran to the village chief, who sent a neighbor to help him. Together with one man lifting the head and another the legs, they carried him to the granary and dropped him beside sacks of recently harvested sorghum.

The man remained unconscious the entire time. The villagers, observing the soldier clearly in the light, saw that he was only a boy: a scrawny, malnourished teen in a faded uniform and an oversized cap.

“I can’t believe how heavy that kid was,” Bu Dan said, wiping muddy sweat from his brow. Bu Dan’s family farmed the land to the very west of Xinchun and he was his parents’ only son. The strongest man in the village, he was often called upon to perform tasks that others couldn’t: push a stubborn mule, transport tub-sized jugs of rice wine, carry replacement limestones for those worn away at the ancestral shrine.

“The mud weighed him down,” said the village chief. He pointed to the canisters that rattled on the boy’s belt. “We should’ve undressed him first.”

Bu Dan slapped the boy a few times and still he would not wake. The village herbalist was called in and only after inserting slices of ginger into his nose did the boy finally start to shudder. He coughed out thick, brown water. San’s father brought a bowl of rice porridge up to the boy’s mouth and the boy extended his thin neck to drink it.

After thanking the villagers squatting in the darkness in front of him, he broke into tears. “It’s over,” he said. “The Japanese flooded the Yellow River. Taiyuan was sacked.”

The villagers glanced at each other. “What do you want us to do?” the village chief asked.

“I don’t know,” the boy said. He wiped his nose with his sleeve and sank his head below his shoulders. “My lieutenant never tells me anything. I think the Chinese army wants you to stay where you are.”

“That’s a strange message,” San’s father said.

“Useless,” Bu Dan added, running his fingers over his scalp. “So we shouldn’t flee?”

[read more]

Michael X. Wang was born in Fenyang, China. He received his MFA from Purdue, has a PhD in creative writing from Florida State University, and won a 2010 AWP Intro Award in fiction. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in Hayden’s Ferry Review, Cimarron Review, Prick of the Spindle, Day One, Driftwood Press, and Juked, among others. His chapbook, A Minor Revolution, is available from Amazon. He will begin teaching at Spring Hill College in Mobile, Alabama, in the fall. Read more about Michael X. Wang in our Behind the Byline series. 

Image by Allen Forrest, German Expressionism Revisted Lyonel Feininger 2

 

Filed Under: Fiction Tagged With: Allen Forrest, Michael X. Wang

Announcing NER 36.2

July 10, 2015


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.

 

Filed Under: News & Notes Tagged With: Bruce Bond, Camille T. Dungy, Carla Panciera, Christopher Bakken, Christopher Lupke, David Baker, Ed Skoog, Eric Wilson, Fiona Sza-Lorrain, james Naremore, Jeff Staiger, Joann Kobin, Joshua Bennett, Katrina Roberts, Kazim Ali, Luisa A. Igloria, Marianne Boruch, Michael X. Wang, New England Review, Nick Admussen, Rickey Laurentiis, Sharon Solwitz, Steve de Jarnatt, Vandan Khanna, Xiao Kaiyu, Ya Shi, Yin Lichuan

Cover art by Ralph Lazar

Volume 41, Number 4

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Writer’s Notebook—No Ruined Stone

Shara McCallum

Writer’s Notebook—No Ruined Stone

Answering such queries typically falls to novelists. But, being a poet, I felt compelled to ask poetry to respond.

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