Cover of Versal 7

Sam Ruddick has a riveting new article up at Luna Park on the new (or fairly new) issue of Versal, an English-language lit mag from Amsterdam. More than simply writing a magazine review, Ruddick uses pieces from the issue to explore how words function in literature and what it is that draws us to melancholy narratives:

Nonetheless, it seems clear that these pieces share an interest in identity and loss. They paint a grim picture of the world. Think of it: if the common experience, the one shared across cultural and geographical borders, is loss, if the “insight… that can be applied everywhere” is only that the one certain and immovable fact of life is loss, it’s a sad, sad world. I would almost call it hopeless. But for some reason I still keep coming back to an image in the closing paragraph of “Suit.” Our narrator tells us that the dealership is having some kind of promotion on Saturday, and imagines herself standing next to a machine that makes bubbles and blows them into the air. They “float out…carried by the currents of passing cars.” Most of them will burst, she says, if not against the silly sign she holds, then against the silly suit she has to wear. But, she says, “some will make it across the street.”

And to those, we attach our hope.

Remember ‘zines? (Okay, so maybe you never forgot, but I’ve been losing touch ever since I moved away from Portland and Powell’s Books.) Michael Berger writes on The Rumpus about a ZineWiki he stumbled upon—and, from it, how he came back around to one of my own favorite magazines from the past: Hermenaut.

More on Fictionaut.