Ever idiosyncratic, Fence evades the tedium of the decade with this anthology, co-edited by eleven of Fence's editors past and present, including founding editor Rebecca Wolff ; fiction editors Jonathan Lethem, Ben Marcus, and Lynne Tillman; poetry editors Caroline Crumpacker, Katy Lederer, Matt hew Rohrer, Christopher Stackhouse, and Max Winter; and nonfiction editors Frances Richard and Jason Zuzga. In addition to presenting a stunningly eclectic compendium of poetry, short fiction, criticism, and creative nonfiction, much of it by younger writers who appeared in Fence at the beginning of careers that went on to be dazzling, this volume includes refl ective essays by editors on their experiences with selected texts, with authors, with the magazine as a collective, and with their own editorial identities, and serves as an indispensable record of the inception and continuation of one of the most infl uential literary journals of its time.
A masterful poetic exploration of the impact of Matthew Shepard’s murder on the world. On the night of October 6, 1998, a gay twenty-one-year-old college student named Matthew Shepard was kidnapped from a Wyoming bar by two young men, savagely beaten, tied to a remote fence, and left to die. Gay Awareness Week was beginning at the University of Wyoming, and the keynote speaker was Lesléa Newman, discussing her book Heather Has Two Mommies. Shaken, the author addressed the large audience that gathered, but she remained haunted by Matthew’s murder. October Mourning, a novel in verse, is her deeply felt response to the events of that tragic day. Using her poetic imagination, the author creates fictitious monologues from various points of view, including the fence Matthew was tied to, the stars that watched over him, the deer that kept him company, and Matthew himself. More than a decade later, this stunning cycle of sixty-eight poems serves as an illumination for readers too young to remember, and as a powerful, enduring tribute to Matthew Shepard’s life. Back matter includes an epilogue, an afterword, explanations of poetic forms, and resources.
"This is a living and essential book." --sam sax, author of Bury It and Madness A meditation on world invention and collapse, A Flag of No Nation traces the stories of Turkish Jews in the twentieth century, blind colonists in a white ocean, and performers enacting new rituals around a nationless flag. Through forms of storytelling that range from allegory to oral history, Tom Haviv investigates the history of Israel|Palestine and the mythologies of nationalism. A warning against imperfect dreams, and an invitation to imagine something new, A Flag of No Nation reminds us how the act of rememberance can help us re-envision the future.
From the author of Pulitzer-nominated The Devil’s Highway and national bestseller The Hummingbird’s Daughter comes an exquisitely composed collection of poetry on life at the border. Weaving English and Spanish languages as fluidly as he blends cultures of the southwest, Luis Urrea offers a tour of Tijuana, spanning from Skid Row, to the suburbs of East Los Angeles, to the stunning yet deadly Mojave Desert, to Mexico and the border fence itself. Mixing lyricism and colloquial voices, mysticism and the daily grind, Urrea explores duality and the concept of blurring borders in a melting pot society.
"In her first collection in five years, Anne Carson contemplates decreation an activity described by Simone Weil as undoing the creature in us an undoing of self. But how can we undo self without moving through self, to the very inside of its definition? Where else can we start? Anne Carson s Decreation starts with form the undoing of form. Form is various here- opera libretto, screenplay, poem, oratorio, essay, list, montage. The undoing is tender, but tenderness can change everything, or so the author appears to believe. By turns exhilarating and bewildering, lucid and hermetic, Anne Carson is a maverick with a thrilling range of skills. As Charles Simic says, Carson takes risks, subverts literary conventions, and plays havoc with our expectations. She is a wonder- an unconventional, often difficult poet who has a huge following among today s readers of poetry and whose work has been honoured with our most prestigious literary awards.
There are many ways to show our devotion to an author besides reading his or her works. Graves make for popular pilgrimage sites, but far more popular are writers' house museums. What is it we hope to accomplish by trekking to the home of a dead author? We may go in search of the point of inspiration, eager to stand on the very spot where our favorite literary characters first came to life—and find ourselves instead in the house where the author himself was conceived, or where she drew her last breath. Perhaps it is a place through which our writer passed only briefly, or maybe it really was a longtime home—now thoroughly remade as a decorator's show-house. In A Skeptic's Guide to Writers' Houses Anne Trubek takes a vexed, often funny, and always thoughtful tour of a goodly number of house museums across the nation. In Key West she visits the shamelessly ersatz shrine to a hard-living Ernest Hemingway, while meditating on his lost Cuban farm and the sterile Idaho house in which he committed suicide. In Hannibal, Missouri, she walks the fuzzy line between fact and fiction, as she visits the home of the young Samuel Clemens—and the purported haunts of Tom Sawyer, Becky Thatcher, and Injun' Joe. She hits literary pay-dirt in Concord, Massachusetts, the nineteenth-century mecca that gave home to Hawthorne, Emerson, and Thoreau—and yet could not accommodate a surprisingly complex Louisa May Alcott. She takes us along the trail of residences that Edgar Allan Poe left behind in the wake of his many failures and to the burned-out shell of a California house with which Jack London staked his claim on posterity. In Dayton, Ohio, a charismatic guide brings Paul Laurence Dunbar to compelling life for those few visitors willing to listen; in Cleveland, Trubek finds a moving remembrance of Charles Chesnutt in a house that no longer stands. Why is it that we visit writers' houses? Although admittedly skeptical about the stories these buildings tell us about their former inhabitants, Anne Trubek carries us along as she falls at least a little bit in love with each stop on her itinerary and finds in each some truth about literature, history, and contemporary America.
"Nicholas, the illegitimate son of a retired fencing champion, is a scrappy fencing wunderkind, and dreams of getting the chance and the training to actually compete. Through clashes, rivalries, and romance between teammates, Nicholas and the boys of Kings Row will discover there's much more to fencing than just foils and lunges"--Page [4] of cover.
A father revealed as a spy, a child unmoored from normalcy--in Safe Houses I Have Known, poems ripple with the secrets that we keep from ourselves and each other.
