NewPages Blog

Amoskeag has released their 30th anniversary issue. Editor Michael J. Brien writes that this issue “represents first time authors along with Puschart Prize nominees, presenting works of survival, nostalgia, hope, hurt, grief, and redemption…,” featuring work by Deborah Brown, Donna Pucciani, SNHU’s MFA Award in prose winner James Seals, the SNHU Undergraduate Prose Winner Amy Fontenot, the SNHU Undergrduate poetry winner Natalie Jones, the New Hampshire High School Poetry Winner Kelsey Jarvis, the New Hampshire High School Prose Winner Emily Bascom, and more.

Along with the issue came an announcement that the next issue, Issue 31 to be released in April, will be the last for Editor Brien. “The University has been blessed with the continuing of this national journal for over thirty years,” he says. “Each editor has contributed to Amoskeag‘s growth and expansion. This year we have had two of our authors, Ainey Greaney and John Debon, selected as Notables in The Best American Essays of 2013. It’s stuff like that that makes me as an editor hopeful in each submission that arrives at my desk.” Benjamin Nugent will be taking over with issue 32.

The press release states that “With the change of editor, the magazine will continue to produce noteworthy and thought-provoking poetry, fiction, nonfiction, photography, etc., but will also take new steps towards better serving the future creative writing majors of the SNHU community. The literary magazine greatly focuses on showcasing their work as well as the work of other aspiring and established regional, national and International writers.”

In World Literature Today‘s March 2014 issue, Myrsini Gana contributes an excellent article on the idea of translating humor, through her experience with translating David Sedaris’s work. “Humor is a big deal,” she writes. “It’s not a question of knowing the words; there’s a whole world behind it. Every country’s—and in consequence every language’s—take on humor reveals its deeper character, is idiosyncratic, and operates well within a “closed circle.” Seen like this, a whole country can be like a group of friends—they have their own codes, their own jokes—and outsiders are just that: they don’t get it.”

“I could fill pages with examples explaining in detail how every instance calls for a different line of thought and a different solution. I wish I could say that every solution I have chosen is the optimal one, but there is no universal rule to dictate a translator’s decisions. That’s why no two translators will ever come up with the exact same translation.”

Also included in this section is a brief interview with David Sedaris: “It’s one thing to translate a joke, and another to translate timing, which is hwere a lot of my laughs come from. It’s especially difficult when the sentence structure is so very different in German, for instance, when the verb comes at the end of the sentence. In my last collection, one of the laughs was based on the way people in Toronto say “about.” The joke didn’t make sense in German, so the translator focused on another word in the sentence—”kiosk”—and moved my Canadian to French-speaking Quebec. It was a brilliant save, but nothing could salvage the ending of another essay. The laugh is based on the phrases ‘your trash’ and ‘you’re trash,’ and I don’t imagine it will work in anything but English.”

Connu is the newest app to start reading short stories from great new writers. The app publishes these stories recommended by well-known authors including Lydia Davis, David Sedaris, Ron Carlson, and Joyce Carol Oates. It is also available online. All of it is free. Read the week’s selections, listen to their words, select your favorites, or pick something to read based on how much time you have at the moment.

To view the website, click here. Or if you’d like to download the app, click here.

Lumina Journal has put forth a special multimedia publication titled Lux. When you receive a copy, you’ll need to download the free app (or any other QR code reading app) to your phone or other mobile device. Then, each page of the book features writing with a QR code; scan it to discover videos, recordings, photographs, and interactive material. Artwork can also be scanned.

“We’re especially excited that we’ll be sharing a radio piece by Rick Moody—and giving you its fantastic prose in print, too, and poetry from Bianca Stone and Ken Cormier that live in the realm of YouTube as much as on the realm of the page.” – Carolyn Silveira, Multimedia Editor

Read more about it and watch a video here.

With the publication of issue 14, Memoir has decided to say goodbye to its years of readers and writers. “Despite the fact that Memoir has continued to grow, that we gain more readers each month and attract scintillating submissions from well known writers as well as new and emerging writers, we will be turning out the lights and locking the office door,” writes Editor Claudia Sternbach . “Our primary source of funding has ended. But we are forever indebted to them for their generosity over these past few years. Not only were we able to publish 14 issues of Memoir, but we were able to offer workshops and publication through our (In)Visible Memoir project. And who knows, miracles do happen. Sometime in the future a Phoenix may rise from these ashes.”

From what I can see, issues are not archived online, and you cannot purchase the issues. However, there is an email address for business inquiries on their new site.

Stephen Donadio, editor of New England Review, says in the editor’s note that this special 2014 double issue will be his last as editor. Beginning with the next issue, the editor will be Carolyn Kuebler. Donadio says that some may wonder how his last issue came to be a double issue with a special section titled “The Russian Presence.” The section, “centered on recurring themes and patterns in Russian history and culture, contains an exceptionally wide range of writings, many of which appear here in English for the first time. . . Representing the work of more than twenty different authors, the selections gathered here span nearly two hundred years, from poetry by Alexander Puskin (1799-1837) to an excerpt from a contemporary novel by journalist and fiction writer Oleg Kashin (born in 1980). . .”

In celebration of the Lego Movie, Lego has taken to recreating famous scenes from literature in (of course) Legos! They are also having a competition and accepting entries from Lego fans. You can see some of their fan “favorites” so far here. [Pictured: The Red Wedding, from A Storm of Swords (A Song of Ice and Fire book 3) by George R.R. Martin]

Creative Nonfiction has now been publishing “true stories, well told” for twenty years, marking their 50th issue with a very special edition. Here’s the press release:

Twenty years ago, it was a joke, an apparent oxymoron, an idea roasted in Vanity Fair and savaged in Harper’s. It was lambasted by journalists and critics and vehemently rejected by academics. Only outcasts and self-indulgent writers supported it at the outset. Today everybody’s doing it—whether you call it narrative nonfiction, longform, or simply creative nonfiction.

The dramatic, unlikely, surprising—and sometimes amusing—story of the battle that led to the acceptance of the creative nonfiction genre and the establishment of the literary magazine of the same name is told for the first time in the landmark 50th issue of Creative Nonfiction.

In “The Fine Art of Literary Fist-Fighting,” a 12,000-word excerpt of a new memoir-in-progress, founder and editor Lee Gutkind reflects on the unlikely path, starting in the late 1960s, that led him to start Creative Nonfiction, which is published quarterly and has an international circulation of 6,000.

Gutkind recalls his roots in the working-class Greenfield neighborhood of Pittsburgh and the professor at the University of Pittsburgh who, after reading Gutkind’s stories of working at a beer distributor, suggested the unconventional college student might become a writer. Gutkind went on to teach at Pitt; in his memoir, he recalls the battles that took place in the English Department there before the establishment of a Master’s program in creative nonfiction writing.

By the early 1990s, Gutkind had begun to explore the possibility of starting a nonfiction-only literary journal. Denied support by the University of Pittsburgh, he set up shop on his dining room table, where he hand-addressed and stamped copies of the first issue for 176 customers.

Every month Beloit Poetry Journal posts a reflection by a poet on a poem of hers or his from the current issue and invites readers into a conversation with other readers and the poet. BPJ hopes the ensuing discussion enriches readers’ appreciation of the poem and of poetry. For the month of February, Michael Bazzett offers commentary on “The Field Beyond the Wall” and “The Differences.” He comments, “I write because of weird symmetries [ . . . ] Odd little moments that flicker like sparrows through the undergrowth.” Check out his poems available online and join in the conversation.