ZYZZYVA 93 / San Francisco, CA
New England Review 32.3 / Middlebury, VT
DIAGRAM 11.4 / Tucson, AZ
Camera Obscura 3 / Addison, TX
Fiddleblack 2 / Peninsula, OH
Barrelhouse 9 / Washington, DC
Antioch Review Fall 2011 / Yellow Springs, OH
Birkensnake 4 / Providence, RI
Gigantic Sequins 2.2 / Philadelphia, PA
Paris Review 199 / Manhattan, NY
Bateau 4.2 / Northhampton, MA
6x6 24 / Brooklyn, NY
Nick Ripatrazone's recent work has appeared or is forthcoming in Esquire, The Kenyon Review, Mississippi Review, and the Beloit Fiction Journal. He is in the MFA program at Rutgers-Newark. His Luna Park articles on William H. Gass and Blake Butler and on LBJ: Avian Arts are available on the site.
Monkeybicycle’s editors—Steven Seighman and Shya Scanlon—talked with Luna Park’s Nick Ripatrazone about Monkeybicycle 8 through e-mail. The interview was a follow-up to Ripatrazone’s recent review of the issue. Nick Ripatrazone: Monkeybicycle 8 works so well as a cohesive issue. Could you discuss how this particular edition went from individual submissions to a collective, a completed
At 192 pages, Monkeybicycle 8 is a healthy selection of prose and poetry of impressive range. Rarely am I introduced to a print publication through its online version, but my previous reading experiences with Monkeybicycle have been focused on their more truncated works, including the archived flash fiction and the addicting One Sentence Story feature.
draft: the journal of process—first introduced to me by Luna Park’s editor, Travis Kurowski—is a dream discovery for teachers of creative writing at the secondary, undergraduate, and graduate levels. Although the process of revision is referenced, and sometimes dramatized, through the workshopping process, the work of revision as re-thinking is often a purely personal activity.
I teach a year-long Advanced Fiction course at my high school. Enrollment is roughly 20 students, most 17 and 18 years old, and they enter the course with a desire to publish. Former students have been included in the recent Hint Fiction anthology, won The Florida Review fiction contest and the Davidson Scholarship, and have
What is the best single issue of any literary magazine? We could spend paragraphs defining best: Is the word synonymous with favorite? (“Entropy” by Thomas Pynchon, one of my favorite short stories, appears in the Spring 1960 issue of The Kenyon Review, but is that enough to make the issue a classic?) Should we treat
Nearly a year has passed since I implored secondary school teachers to use literary magazines in the classroom. Thanks to CLMP’s Lit Mag Adoption program and other initiatives, undergraduate and graduate classrooms engage contemporary literary magazines at a regular rate, yet the logistics of such programs (which require students, rather than the institution, to handle
Sports or sport? The terms often have widely different connotations in regards to literature. “Sports” intimates hokey, “we won the big game” barbeque-reminisces of glory days, weekend warriors, and empty idolizations of professional athletics. “Sport” connotes more measured reflections and considerations: think Don DeLillo’s End Zone, August Wilson’s Fences, and the fiction of Jenifer Levin.
Standing rabbits grace the wraparound cover of The Tusculum Review volume 6, their recent poetry prize issue. Ralph Slatton’s pen-and-ink drawing on the front and back of the issue is complimented by a five print set inside the magazine, enigmatic representations of creatures encapsulated by thick branches and ropes. Slatton’s work is a preface for
Teachers: Use Literary Magazines Literary magazine subscriptions at the classroom level are an educational luxury, not a need. But that’s not a sufficient excuse. Can secondary school teachers save literary magazines? Save might not the best choice: the word presupposes both power in the savior and tremendous need in the recipient. Perhaps help would work
Poets & Prose: Gerard Manley Hopkins and Fiction Theory Robert Olen Butler’s 459 word “A Short Short Theory,” from the Spring 2009 issue of Narrative, reads like half a conversation. Butler does not present the responses, the doubts, the nods. He initiates critical inquiry into flash fiction by displacing that very title and replacing it
