New England Review

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NER Author Books

January 2020

January 27, 2020

… a valuable book for sound and media scholars, and for anyone interested in how notions of the cinematic extend into today’s vernacular musical practices. ―Carlo Cenciarelli, Lecturer in Music, Cardiff University, UK, and editor of The Oxford Handbook of Cinematic Listening.

From the publisher: What does it mean when a singing voice is detached from an originating body through recording? And how does this affect consumers of recorded song? This book examines the practice of lipsynching to pre-recorded song in both professional and vernacular contexts, covering over a century of diverse artistic practices from early cinema through to the current popularity of self-produced internet lipsynching videos. It examines the ways in which we listen to, respond to, and use recorded music, not only as a commodity to be consumed but as a culturally-sophisticated and complex means of identification, a site of projection, introjection, and habitation, and, through this, a means of personal and collective creativity.

Merrie Snell’s fiction has appeared or is forthcoming in AGNI and Cimarron Review. She holds an MFA in fiction writing from the University of Iowa and, during a lengthy writing hiatus, completed a PhD in music from Newcastle University, Newcastle upon Tyne, UK. Snell’s sound and video installations have exhibited in the UK and Sweden. She lives in England with her husband, dog, and their embarrassment of degrees. Her work has appeared in NER 18.4 and 39.1, in addition to an interview discussing the long interval between the two.

Lipsynching can be purchased from Hart Publishing or your local bookstore.


These dark fractured fables tell stories of strange texture; stories about characters trying to find their way amid currents both small and large in a world in which personal and spiritual intimacy feel dangerously compromised. —Kazim Ali, judge for the Robert C. Jones Prize for Short Prose.

From the publisher: Winner of the Robert C. Jones Prize for Short Prose. Miracles Come on Mondays begins with a voice—stark, chilling, totally captivating—that searches a barren landscape for a single receptive ear …Penelope Cray creates dark and sometimes darkly funny scenes that most resemble the works of Kafka. Cray’s characters strain against the indifference of everyday life until, too tired to yearn anymore, they begin the systematic work of making their worlds mentally and spiritually tolerable. And yet, somehow, there’s joy. This book asks us to let go of our ideas of sense and replace them with something better, something that somehow makes more sense than sense. Cray has written a debut work of fiction that feels entirely new and deeply true.

Penelope Cray holds an MFA from the New School and lives with her husband and two children in Shelburne, Vermont, where she operates an editorial business from home. Three of her pieces were featured in NER 36.4; read her story “Real and True” here, and listen to an oral performance of her story “The Red Painter,” delivered at NER Out Loud here.

Miracles Come On Mondays can be purchased from LSU Press or your local bookstore.


Barber approaches the scrap heap of common discourse as a connoisseur ready to celebrate the vitality of lexicons and vocabularies so encased in custom and context that everyone else has mistaken them (and by implication the aspects of our lives that they evoke) for dead. —Langdon Hammer, poetry editor of the American Scholar.

From the publisher: In David Barber’s third collection of poetry, the past makes its presence felt from first to last. Drawing on a wealth of eclectic sources and crafted in an array of nonce forms, these poems range across vast stretches of cultural and natural history in pursuit of the forsaken, long-gone, and unsung. Here is the stuff of lost time unearthed from all over: ballyhoo and murder ballad, the lacrimarium and the xylotheque, the Game of Robbers and the Indian Rope Trick, the obsolete o’o, the old-school word hoard, sunshowers and beaters and breaker boys…Reveling in vernacular lingo of every vintage even while brooding on dark ages without end, Secret History chronicles a world of long shadows and distant echoes that bears more than a passing resemblance to our own.

David Barber is the author of Wonder Cabinet and The Spirit Level, which received the Terrence Des Pres Prize from TriQuarterly Books. He is poetry editor of the Atlantic. His poetry has been anthologized in Literature: An Introduction to Fiction, Poetry, Drama and Writing, edited by X. J. Kennedy and Dana Gioia. His work has been supported by fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Bread Loaf Writers Conference, the Massachusetts Cultural Council, and PEN New England. His work has appeared in NER 17.3, 26.2, and 33.4.

Secret History can be purchased from Northwestern University Press or your local bookstore.

Filed Under: NER Authors' Books, News & Notes Tagged With: David Barber, Merrie Snell, Penelope Cray

Awards and Honors for NER Authors

April 23, 2019

Congratulations to all of the NER authors who have recently been honored with awards and fellowships, including Owen McLeod, Penelope Cray, Mark Irwin, Reginald Dwayne Betts, Tiana Clark, Charlie Clark, Geffrey Davis, Jenny Johnson, Sasha Pimentel, and Alison C. Rollins.


Owen McLeod’s poetry collection Dream Kitchen was awarded the 2018 Vassar Miller Prize in Poetry. Judge Rosanna Warren said of the collection, “Owen McLeod knows how to pluck what Pound called ‘the natural object’ from everyday life and endow it with symbolic force. He mingles a sensuous feel for vowels and consonants, with a graceful play of speech rhythms and a gift for revelatory strangeness. I’ve copied out his lines in my notebook for the sheer pleasure of it.” The prize includes $1,000 and publication by The University of North Texas Press.
McLeod is a studio potter and a professor of philosophy at Lafayette College in Easton, Pennsylvania, where he lives; his poem “Uroboros,” was featured in NER 36.4.


Congratulations to Penelope Cray, whose short story collection Miracles Come on Mondays was selected as the winner of the Robert C. Jones Prize for Short Prose. Judge Kazim Ali said of the collection, “These dark fractured fables tell stories of strange texture; stories about characters trying to find their way amid currents both small and large in a world in which personal and spiritual intimacy feel dangerously compromised. They are philosophical, funny, and frank. Like the fictions of Fanny Howe, Italo Calvino, and Rikki Ducornet, these stories rarely comfort. Then again, as one narrator observes, ‘When some alien sensation rises in the body, it unsettles rather than clarifies.’”
Cray holds an MFA from the New School and lives with her husband and two children in Shelburne, Vermont, where she operates an editorial business from home. Three of her pieces were featured in NER 36.4; read her story “Real and True” here, and listen to an oral performance of her story “The Red Painter,” delivered at NER Out Loud, here.


Frequent NER contributor and poet Mark Irwin was awarded the 2018 Philip Levine Prize for Poetry—an annual book contest sponsored by the Creative Writing Program at California State University, Fresno—for his collection Shimmer. The prize, named after the late poet Philip Levine who taught at Fresno State for many years and served as United States poet laureate from 2011-2012, includes a $2,000 prize and publication by Anhinga Press.
Irwin teaches graduate and undergraduate poetry workshops in the Creative Writing & Literature Program at the University of Southern California, and he lives in Los Angeles and Colorado. Irwin has been a frequent contributor at NER since 1991; read his poem, “Three Panels,” featured in NER 22.1, here and check back in our 2019 summer issue for new poems from Shimmer.


A number of NER authors have been awarded Creative Writing Fellowships in Poetry by the National Endowment for the Arts. The NEA Literature Fellowships program operates on a two-year cycle, alternating between prose and poetry fellowships, which offer $25,000 grants to published creative writers that enable the recipients to set aside time for writing, research, travel, and general career advancement. The 2019 NEA Creative Writing (Poetry) Fellowship recipients include:

Reginald Dwayne Betts (31.4, 34.1, 35.3)
Charlie Clark (38.4)
Tiana Clark (39.2)
Geffrey Davis (39.2)
Jenny Johnson (34.3-4)
Sasha Pimentel (36.4)
Alison C. Rollins (39.3)

Congratulations to all of the 2019 NEA Fellows!

Filed Under: News & Notes Tagged With: Alison C. Rollins, Charlie Clark, geffrey davis, Jenny Johnson, Mark Irwin, Owen McLeod, Penelope Cray, Reginald Dwayne Betts, Sasha Pimentel, Tiana Clark

Penelope Cray

Real and True

January 11, 2016

Fiction from NER 36.4

_Ernest_Williamson__III-The_Love_Seeker

My first wife was my fist. I pummeled my wife into life and made way for myself. When she was spent I took my foot as my second wife. 

With her I ran hard and far and achieved great distances from my beginning. I ate fine foods and my mouth watered, so I took my mouth as my third wife and we lived together for years in our bounty. 

But she grew sour and bored, so I took my eyes as my fourth wife because the eyes cannot see the mouth no matter their contortions. 

But the eyes, prone to slumber, were unavailable half the time, so I took my heart as my fifth wife out of need for a steady presence. I felt I could not live without her so large was my true love for my fifth wife. 

[Read more]

Penelope Cray’s poems and short shorts have appeared in such literary magazines as Harvard Review, Pleiades, Bartleby Snopes, elimae, and American Letters & Commentary, and in the anthology Please Do Not Remove (Wind Ridge Books, 2014). She holds an MFA from the New School and lives with her husband and two children in Shelburne, Vermont, where she operates an editorial business from home.

Filed Under: Fiction Tagged With: Penelope Cray

NER Vermont Reading Series | July 22, 2015

July 6, 2015

 

The NER Vermont Reading Series and the Vermont Book Shop are pleased to present Michael Coffey, Penelope Cray, and Rebecca Makkai, who will read from their poetry and fiction at Carol’s Hungry Mind Café. From as far as Chicago and as near as Shelburne, these three writers represent an extraordinary range of literary imagination. Join us at Carol’s Hungry Mind Café (24 Merchants Row, Middlebury, Vermont) on July 22nd at 7:00pm. Books will be available for signing.

 

Coffey by Nancy Crampton

 Michael Coffey is the author of three books of poems and of 27 Men Out, a book about baseball’s perfect games. He also co-edited The Irish in America, a book about Irish immigration, a companion volume to the PBS documentary series. His fiction and nonfiction have appeared in NER and NER Digital, and his first book of fiction, The Business of Naming Things, is just out from Bellevue Literary Press. He lives in Manhattan and Bolton Landing, New York.

 

Cray_Portrait

 Penelope Cray’s poems and short shorts have appeared in such literary magazines as Harvard Review, Pleiades, Bartleby Snopes, elimae, and American Letters & Commentary, and in the anthology Please Do Not Remove (2014). She holds an MFA from the New School and lives with her family in Shelburne, Vermont, where she operates an editorial business.

 

Makkai photo-cropRebecca Makkai is the author of the new story collection Music for Wartime, as well as the novels The Hundred-Year House and The Borrower (which has been published in nine translations and chosen as a Booklist Top Ten Debut). Her short fiction, which has appeared in NER, was featured in the Best American Short Stories anthologies in 2008, 2009, 2010, and 2011. The recipient of a 2014 NEA Fellowship, she teaches at Lake Forest College, Northwestern University, and StoryStudio Chicago.

Filed Under: Events, NER VT Reading Series Tagged With: Carol's Hungry Mind Cafe, Michael Coffey, Penelope Cray, Rebecca Makkai, Vermont Book Shop


Vol. 43, No. 2

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NER Digital

Rosalie Moffett

Writer’s Notebook—Hysterosalpingography

Rosalie Moffett

Many of the poems I’ve been writing lately are trying to figure out how to think about the future, how to reasonably hope, and what we must be resigned to. How can you imagine the future when the present is so slippery, so ready to dissolve?

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