Notes on Witness Vol. XXII One of the many risks of Witness, “the magazine of the Black Mountain Institute,” presenting an issue dedicated to the theme of Dismissing Africa is that the very notion of dismissing “Africa” already dismisses the individuals who live in Africa. I don’t deny that this volume sometimes succumbs to the

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  West Branch63, the Fall/Winter 2008 issue of Bucknell’s semiannual, contains a rather conservative swath of poems, at least in the realm of structure and form. John Estes’s “Year: Two” is the lone exception, a four-page poem laddered in phrase and image. It is both welcoming and surprising, then, to see that James Harms’s essay

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One of the few of its kind on the web, Born Magazine describes itself as “an experimental venue marrying literary arts and interactive media” where writers and media artists collaborate on projects. Setting aside, for now, its ideological nomenclature, its appeal lies in the interpretative dynamic between text and image. The first project, “Inferno (Minor),”

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Literary Bohemian’s current issue is BYOB, a literary party where “RSVP[s] will be analyzed for errata.” I imagine party-goers huddled around a fire pit as they share stories about stalking a would-be lover in Laurie Byro’s “Tetraimeros“, about following the circus in “Learning to Travel” by Julene Tripp Weaver, and about the intimacy of shorn

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Contemporary flash fiction has been slugged, whipped, and slapped: dragged through the literary mud, pegged as incidental. While some appreciate the concision of the form, others hate the practice, positing that flash fiction has excised indelible elements of fiction, including pacing, profluence, and emotional resonance. Many of these criticisms are warranted. Often works of flash

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First, Narrative presents Thriller Fiction, 5 Must Read Classics, 4 Great Tales of Africa, plus Kate Atkinson, Jayne Anne Phillips, T. Coraghessan Boyle, Anne Beattie, and N3OB Winners, Kara Levy, Alita Putnam, and Alison Yin and more. BREVITY 29 offers a Warm Winter Stew with work by Lance Larsen, David Bradley, Tim Elhajj, John Bresland,

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Anderbo, one of Esquire blog’s five best literary magazine websites, has published its first novella, “We Were There and Now We’re Here” by Kayla Soyer-Stein. It begins with an epigraph from Gunter Kunert’s postmodern “Sleeping Beauty.” In Grimm’s classic tale, the whole castle falls asleep along with the princess after she pricks her finger on

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Months ago, a copy of Jesse Ball’s Parables & Lies—the inagural issue of The Cupboard, a new “quarterly pamphlet of literary prose” out of Lincoln, Nebraska—arrived at Luna Park. The Cupboard has already moved on to their next issue, Louis Streitmatter’s A New Map of America, but the first issue still deserves a mention. Parables

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William Gass—fiction writer and philosopher—has always focused on the accumulation of acerbic, image-driven language. Gass’s preface to his 1968 collection, In the Heart of the Heart of the Country, includes his impetus for writing “The Pedersen Kid,” his breakneck novella: “And I began by telling a story to entertain a toothache. To entertain a toothache

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The announcement of a new literary magazine is often met with a terse response: Why? Detractors posit that market saturation has resulted in publication of nominal, superficial works, with provincial audiences at best. The LBJ: Avian Life Literary Arts, a new publication from the University of Nevada, Reno, has sufficient answers within an inaugural, Fall

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