Detective novels are meant to grab you, kick you in the gut, hoist you up by your cheap lapels, and carry you along riveted as you stagger through the L.A. streets. On your journey you’ll drink from flasks, resist femmes fatales (or not), and compromise your principles.
Jana Prikryl’s The After Party is one of those rare debut volumes, like Stevens’s Harmonium, in which we meet an already fully-inhabited voice. In some such cases, much unforeseeable development may be in store, as with Graham’s Hybrids of Plants and Ghosts; sometimes, as with Delmore Schwartz’s In Dreams Begin Responsibilities, the debut may be almost the whole story. Predictions are futile. A reader does feel, though, that a new town has appeared on the map.
The waning months of President Obama’s presidency coupled with the populist ascendancy of Donald Trump has seemingly expedited feelings of fear, loathing, and endless uncertainty among many. To some, Obama’s ascendancy was supposed to usher in a post-racial democracy that would rescue, resuscitate, and render the American dream (or pieces of it, at least) reachable to the average American citizen. Unfortunately, Trump’s nativist rhetoric and crypto-fascism synched with the durability of racism, generational poverty, and American empire-building has imposed newer and more serious life-challenges into the lives of Black Americans and poor and working class people from all walks of life.
In recent weeks, my colleagues working as advocates and public interest lawyers inside the #BlackLivesMatter movement have called upon white people to join their efforts. Voicing support from the sidelines is no longer enough. And so they’ve been sharing lists on their social media platforms: what actions can white people take to help facilitate change?
Those in the business of National Security classify diarrhea as a clear and present danger. It’s particularly hazardous for members of the U.S. Special forces, because diarrhea is an enemy from within that can attack without warning. I know this because I’ve read Mary Roach’s GRUNT: THE CURIOUS SCIENCE OF HUMANS AT WAR, specifically, chapter eight (“Leaky SEALs”).
While publishing online can mean that a text is more easily widely circulated, the dedication that goes into presenting a chapbook online often goes unsung. For July, I read three e-chapbooks, and each of them had stunningly beautiful covers and design that enhanced the reading experience.
In the collaborative poetry collection Ghost/Landscape (Blazevox, 2016) by Kristina Marie Darling and John Gallaher there is no beginning or end. The first poem is “Chapter Two.” So begins traversing a time loop of poems where the reader can really “begin” anywhere. What is a beginning and what is an ending? Is moving forward and looking behind you the same thing? A circle never ends. “Chapter Two,” begins like a bed time story:
“We must have known there was no going back…that morning, before our windows had been broken, you asked about the lock on the door. I realized it was only a matter of time before the alarm sounded, which always seemed out of place in the dead of winter.”
Everybody from P.D. James to your best friend’s sister seems to be writing Jane Austen fan fiction but the only fanfic I’m really excited about right now is Whit Stillman’s reimagining of Lady Susan, an early epistolary novella.
Like many Gen-Xers, I don’t know as much as I should about the Vietnam War. Sure I’ve heard stories—from an uncle who cleared land mines, from a middle school teacher ravaged by Agent Orange.
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