Enter your email Address

ENTROPY
  • About
    • About
    • Masthead
    • Advertising
    • Submission Guidelines
    • Info on Book Reviews
  • Essays
    • All Introspection
      Creative Nonfiction / Essay

      Tales From the End of the Bus Line: Aging Ungraciously

      January 18, 2021

      Creative Nonfiction / Essay

      Salt and Sleep

      January 15, 2021

      Creative Nonfiction / Essay

      Revolution for Covid

      January 14, 2021

      Creative Nonfiction / Essay

      WOVEN: My Precious: On Leaving My Abusive Ex-Husband and Being Left with the Ring

      January 13, 2021

      Introspection

      The Birds: A Special Providence in the Fall of a Sparrow

      January 2, 2020

      Introspection

      Returning Home with Ross McElwee

      December 13, 2019

      Introspection

      The Birds: In Our Piety

      November 14, 2019

      Introspection

      Variations: Landslide

      June 12, 2019

  • Fiction
    • Fiction

      The Birds: Little Birds

      December 11, 2020

      Fiction

      The Birds: Perdix and a Pear Tree

      December 9, 2020

      Fiction

      The Birds: A Glimmer of Blue

      November 23, 2020

      Fiction

      The Birds: Circling for Home

      November 13, 2020

      Fiction

      The Birds: The Guest

      November 9, 2020

  • Reviews
    • All Collaborative Review Video Review
      Review

      Review: Shrapnel Maps by Philip Metres

      January 18, 2021

      Review

      Perceived Realities: A Review of M-Theory by Tiffany Cates

      January 14, 2021

      Review

      Review: Danger Days by Catherine Pierce

      January 11, 2021

      Review

      Review – : once teeth bones coral : by Kimberly Alidio

      January 7, 2021

      Collaborative Review

      Attention to the Real: A Conversation

      September 3, 2020

      Collaborative Review

      A Street Car Named Whatever

      February 22, 2016

      Collaborative Review

      Black Gum: A Conversational Review

      August 7, 2015

      Collaborative Review

      Lords of Waterdeep in Conversation

      February 25, 2015

      Video Review

      Entropy’s Super Mario Level

      September 15, 2015

      Video Review

      Flash Portraits of Link: Part 7 – In Weakness, Find Strength

      January 2, 2015

      Video Review

      Basal Ganglia by Matthew Revert

      March 31, 2014

      Video Review

      The Desert Places by Amber Sparks and Robert Kloss, Illustrated by Matt Kish

      March 21, 2014

  • Small Press
    • Small Press

      Gordon Hill Press

      December 8, 2020

      Small Press

      Evidence House

      November 24, 2020

      Small Press

      death of workers whilst building skyscrapers

      November 10, 2020

      Small Press

      Slate Roof Press

      September 15, 2020

      Small Press

      Ellipsis Press

      September 1, 2020

  • Where to Submit
  • More
    • Poetry
    • Interviews
    • Games
      • All Board Games Video Games
        Creative Nonfiction / Essay

        How Zelda Saved Me: The Inspiration, Feminism, and Empowerment of Hyrule

        November 2, 2020

        Board Games

        Session Report: Victoriana and Optimism

        December 14, 2019

        Games

        Best of 2019: Video Games

        December 13, 2019

        Games

        Hunt A Killer, Earthbreak, and Empty Faces: Escapism for the Post-Truth Era

        September 21, 2019

        Board Games

        Session Report: Victoriana and Optimism

        December 14, 2019

        Board Games

        Ludic Writing: Lady of the West

        July 27, 2019

        Board Games

        Session Report: Paperback and Anomia

        July 27, 2019

        Board Games

        Ludic Writing: The Real Leeds Part 12 (Once in a Lifetime)

        November 10, 2018

        Video Games

        How Zelda Saved Me: The Inspiration, Feminism, and Empowerment of Hyrule

        November 2, 2020

        Video Games

        Best of 2019: Video Games

        December 13, 2019

        Video Games

        Super Smash Bros. Ultimate is the Spirit of Generosity

        December 31, 2018

        Video Games

        Best of 2018: Video Games

        December 17, 2018

    • Food
    • Small Press Releases
    • Film
    • Music
    • Paranormal
    • Travel
    • Art
    • Graphic Novels
    • Comics
    • Current Events
    • Astrology
    • Random
  • RESOURCES
  • The Accomplices
    • THE ACCOMPLICES
    • Enclave
    • Trumpwatch

ENTROPY

  • About
    • About
    • Masthead
    • Advertising
    • Submission Guidelines
    • Info on Book Reviews
  • Essays
    • All Introspection
      Creative Nonfiction / Essay

      Tales From the End of the Bus Line: Aging Ungraciously

      January 18, 2021

      Creative Nonfiction / Essay

      Salt and Sleep

      January 15, 2021

      Creative Nonfiction / Essay

      Revolution for Covid

      January 14, 2021

      Creative Nonfiction / Essay

      WOVEN: My Precious: On Leaving My Abusive Ex-Husband and Being Left with the Ring

      January 13, 2021

      Introspection

      The Birds: A Special Providence in the Fall of a Sparrow

      January 2, 2020

      Introspection

      Returning Home with Ross McElwee

      December 13, 2019

      Introspection

      The Birds: In Our Piety

      November 14, 2019

      Introspection

      Variations: Landslide

      June 12, 2019

  • Fiction
    • Fiction

      The Birds: Little Birds

      December 11, 2020

      Fiction

      The Birds: Perdix and a Pear Tree

      December 9, 2020

      Fiction

      The Birds: A Glimmer of Blue

      November 23, 2020

      Fiction

      The Birds: Circling for Home

      November 13, 2020

      Fiction

      The Birds: The Guest

      November 9, 2020

  • Reviews
    • All Collaborative Review Video Review
      Review

      Review: Shrapnel Maps by Philip Metres

      January 18, 2021

      Review

      Perceived Realities: A Review of M-Theory by Tiffany Cates

      January 14, 2021

      Review

      Review: Danger Days by Catherine Pierce

      January 11, 2021

      Review

      Review – : once teeth bones coral : by Kimberly Alidio

      January 7, 2021

      Collaborative Review

      Attention to the Real: A Conversation

      September 3, 2020

      Collaborative Review

      A Street Car Named Whatever

      February 22, 2016

      Collaborative Review

      Black Gum: A Conversational Review

      August 7, 2015

      Collaborative Review

      Lords of Waterdeep in Conversation

      February 25, 2015

      Video Review

      Entropy’s Super Mario Level

      September 15, 2015

      Video Review

      Flash Portraits of Link: Part 7 – In Weakness, Find Strength

      January 2, 2015

      Video Review

      Basal Ganglia by Matthew Revert

      March 31, 2014

      Video Review

      The Desert Places by Amber Sparks and Robert Kloss, Illustrated by Matt Kish

      March 21, 2014

  • Small Press
    • Small Press

      Gordon Hill Press

      December 8, 2020

      Small Press

      Evidence House

      November 24, 2020

      Small Press

      death of workers whilst building skyscrapers

      November 10, 2020

      Small Press

      Slate Roof Press

      September 15, 2020

      Small Press

      Ellipsis Press

      September 1, 2020

  • Where to Submit
  • More
    • Poetry
    • Interviews
    • Games
      • All Board Games Video Games
        Creative Nonfiction / Essay

        How Zelda Saved Me: The Inspiration, Feminism, and Empowerment of Hyrule

        November 2, 2020

        Board Games

        Session Report: Victoriana and Optimism

        December 14, 2019

        Games

        Best of 2019: Video Games

        December 13, 2019

        Games

        Hunt A Killer, Earthbreak, and Empty Faces: Escapism for the Post-Truth Era

        September 21, 2019

        Board Games

        Session Report: Victoriana and Optimism

        December 14, 2019

        Board Games

        Ludic Writing: Lady of the West

        July 27, 2019

        Board Games

        Session Report: Paperback and Anomia

        July 27, 2019

        Board Games

        Ludic Writing: The Real Leeds Part 12 (Once in a Lifetime)

        November 10, 2018

        Video Games

        How Zelda Saved Me: The Inspiration, Feminism, and Empowerment of Hyrule

        November 2, 2020

        Video Games

        Best of 2019: Video Games

        December 13, 2019

        Video Games

        Super Smash Bros. Ultimate is the Spirit of Generosity

        December 31, 2018

        Video Games

        Best of 2018: Video Games

        December 17, 2018

    • Food
    • Small Press Releases
    • Film
    • Music
    • Paranormal
    • Travel
    • Art
    • Graphic Novels
    • Comics
    • Current Events
    • Astrology
    • Random
  • RESOURCES
  • The Accomplices
    • THE ACCOMPLICES
    • Enclave
    • Trumpwatch
ExcerptSmall Press Releases

Small Press Release: My Red Heaven (an excerpt)

written by Jacob Singer January 17, 2020

My Red Heaven by Lance Olsen (images by Michael Kroetch & Andi Olsen)
200 pages – Dzanc Books/ Amazon 


Hannah Arendt and Martin Heidegger step arm-in-arm through the main doors of the Arnhold Villa on the shore of Lake Wannsee into the salon’s fuss, where they catch a glimpse, above the heads of the other guests, of the scarlet traces threading the sky over Lake Wannsee through the large windows on the far end of the room. Hannah instinctively presses Martin’s arm tighter.

 

 

 

Down the block a train bedlams through the Wannsee Station on its way into the city. Johann Pfeiffer, en route to enroll at the university, shuts Passionate Journey, Frans Masereel’s wordless novel in woodcuts, and looks out the window the very instant Berlin’s trashed backsides start rushing past.

 

 

 

Across from him sits the no-longer-thin, no-longer-hirsute Walter Gropius, making notes for the party he will throw upon his return to Weimar next week. Whenever the regularly smoldering tensions among his Bauhaus faculty spark into conflagration, Walter always throws a party. In his leather-bound journal, he writes: 2 naked women / 1 naked man = painted silver to slither. Eerie music / flashing lights. Silver paper to cover walls + large chute from ground floor to basement to end in — rubber mats? pillow mountain? Many white pellets to be thrown.

 

 

 

Walter doesn’t notice out the window a young woman, Anna Handke, gently lay her infant down in the middle of the street and depart. Anna will refuse to pick it up again, telling the two policemen who materialize she can no longer figure out how to feed it.

 

 

 

 

[[ a radiant system ]]

 

 

Max Liebermann, the eighty-year-old Impressionist painter, scrooches down in the back row of the packed Marmorhaus theater, glaring at the newsreels before the feature begins, sorely aware this is what the last pterodactyl must have felt like — forlorn, hopelessly out of step with its time, dead in some absolute sense years before the reaper actually visits. I think I’ve heard of Max Liebermann — I wonder who he was, people in fifty years, Max knows, won’t ever say.

 

 

 

 

[[ bounding for birds ]]

 

 

 

In town from Paris to visit Hannah Höch’s new exhibition and catch up with old friends, Otto Freundlich steps off the U-Bahn into the ruckus of the Kurfürstenstraße platform. The idea for his next painting gyres in. Its title, he comprehends without warning, will be My Red Heaven, and it will consist of an abstract flurry of quadrilateral shapes forging three color-strata down a large canvas: reds at the top; grays, greens, whites, and blues in the middle; blacks at the bottom. Otto doesn’t know it will take another half decade before he can plunge in. Other ambitions will broil into his life first, including the vision for what he believes (although this isn’t the case) to be his masterwork: a highway lined with non-figurative sculptures stretching from Paris to Moscow that shows what peace and brotherhood could look like. A decade, and another work of his will be featured on the cover of the catalogue for The Degenerate Art Exhibition staged in Munich. A sculpture called The New Man, it will stand nearly one and a half meters tall and resemble a modernist rendition of one of those stone heads on Easter Island. Four years later it will disappear, as will most of Otto’s art, as will Otto himself. First, though, he will go into hiding in the Pyrenees, be denounced and arrested in Saint Martin de Fenouillet, a tiny mountain village about two hundred kilometers southeast of Montpellier, having with a misconstrued sense of faith in reason written a personal letter of protest to the highest local authorities when told he must register as a Jew under the Vichy regulations. On 9 March, 1943, sixty-four, with achy feet and bum knee, Otto will hoist himself up into train No. 907, which will babel him to the Lublin-Majdanek extermination camp in southeastern Poland, the first to be discovered by the Soviet troops eighteen months later. The last thing Otto will see before the cattle-car door slams shut and bolts is a little buttery-blond boy with slingshot launching a frail white paper glider into the bluewhite dawn. Exhaustion, not Zyklon B, will claim Otto before the sun sets on his first day at his new home, yet now, walking up the stairs from the U-Bahn onto the nattering street, nothing exists in his head except one question: Did I just take the wrong exit again?

 

 

 

 

[[ skin waving goodbye ]]

 

 

 

Standing at her kitchen table, aproned Adina Kleid takes in her husband, Chaim, and two boys, Amir and Alim, with affectionate pride tinctured with churning resentment as she leans forward to light the candles and welcome Shabbat into their home. Baruch atah, Adonai, Eloheinu, she commences, deciding this might be a good night to trim her toenails.

 

 

 

In the flat across the hall from Adina Kleid’s, Stanisław and Halina Banaszynski sit stiffly at the foot of Krystyna’s — their fifteen-year-old daughter’s — bed, looking on while the doctor searches the girl’s wrist for a pulse, but less and less, Krystyna’s shiny eyes slitted open, the muscles in her face relaxed beyond life, her mouth wide and startled by what has pounced her fewer than five days after that sickly man in the U-Bahn sneezed, sharing with Krystyna influenza’s coughs, sweats, shaking chills, and dry heaves, how if she had stepped into a different car, or into the same car through the other door, or decided to walk rather than train home from school, or stayed behind with friends that afternoon to struggle through a few more lines of Latin in a nearby café, or been born on a Thursday rather than a Monday, or turned her head away from that man a second earlier, or believed more firmly in God, or less firmly in the devil, or planned to be a nurse rather than a teacher, a teacher rather than a baker’s assistant, something else might have come to pass, who could say what, a nice handsome soldier in a crisp uniform walking into her hopefulness, a simple happy marriage, a complicated unhappy one, an uneventful union where she never quite followed through with the plans she made, although she was always making them, one after another after another, yet it didn’t matter because Krystyna came to believe everything occurred for a reason — except this storm that tore through her flat adolescence.

 

 

 

 

[[ twenty-seven seconds ago ]]

 

 

 

Robert Musil strolls cheerfully down a gravel path in the Tiergarten, light ashing everywhere, past a man in threadbare blazer sans tie propelling himself quickly in the opposite direction (a journalist? a young professor?), past a meadow circulating with baby prams, chuffing dogs, cuddling couples, and a late game of football. Robert was in town just a few months ago for Rilke’s memorial service. Now he is here from Vienna six days to continue research on his novel-in-progress, tentatively titled The Man Without Qualities, which he has been buffeting against for six years, and whose end — a point of light no bigger than a match specking the midnight horizon — he has seriously started worrying may never draw nearer. The more he pens, the more characters and ideas surge up around him and it all gets unconscionably out of control, like the simple act of beheading a chicken sometimes can. Robert has never made a steady income, has thrown his family into financial crisis more than once … yet right now he believes more than anything (taking a deep breath of candied night air flowing into the city from the west) it isn’t we who do the thinking. It is life that does the thinking all around us. Let life think. Let morality be a profusion of life’s possibilities.

 

 

 

[[ a chair is a very difficult object ]]

 

 

[[ the heat of our thoughts ]]

 

 

 

On his balcony with a hand-sized view of the Tiergarten’s treetops, a tram driver leans back in his wooden chair, feet propped on the banister, arranging comfort and a cigarette, illumination pervading him: One regret I am determined not to have on my deathbed, Silvia, is that I didn’t kiss you enough.

 

 

 

Adolf Hitler pops another chocolate-covered marzipan square onto his tongue as his plane taxis toward the runway. He is busy behind his forehead reliving this morning’s event with his supporters and the press, savoring how easily he handled those pain-in-the-ass journalists with a combination of force, obfuscation, and strategic deception. Engines revving, Adolf senses his eyes beginning to close, his consciousness beginning to unbuckle. A few seconds later, he is reliving nothing at all.

 

 

 

 

[[ a hundred different movies ]]

 

 

 

 

[[ the noise knowledge makes ]]

 

 

 

 

[[ mother eating her own uterus ]]

 

 

 

 

[[ we have come loose from ourselves ]]


Amazon and Bookshop are affiliated links and qualifying sales help to sustain Entropy. I can be reached at jacob@entropymag.org.

Small Press Release: My Red Heaven (an excerpt) was last modified: October 5th, 2020 by Jacob Singer
dzanc booksLance OlsenMy Red Heaven
0 comment
0
Facebook Twitter Google + Pinterest
Avatar
Jacob Singer

Jacob Singer’s work can be found at Orbit, American Book Review, Rain Taxi, and Quarterly Conversation. He can be found on Twitter @jacobcsinger

previous post
The Waters: Point of Origin
next post
Tower Crane Towers – ep.

You may also like

April in Books: Small Press New Releases

April 30, 2016

February and March in Books: Small Press Releases

March 1, 2018

February and March: Small Press Releases

February 1, 2020

April in Books: Small Press New Releases

April 30, 2015
Facebook Twitter Instagram

Recent Comments

  • Lei Yu wow so beautifully written!

    Review – : once teeth bones coral : by Kimberly Alidio ·  January 18, 2021

  • Lisa S Thank you so much for your kind words and your feedback. I can only hope my story is able to help someone who needs it.

    WOVEN: This isn’t love ·  January 8, 2021

  • Ann Guy Thank you, Josh. And glad you didn’t get tetanus at band camp on that misguided day.

    A Way Back Home ·  December 24, 2020

Featured Columns & Series

  • The Birds
  • Dinnerview
  • WOVEN
  • Variations on a Theme
  • BLACKCACKLE
  • Literacy Narrative
  • COVID-19
  • Mini-Syllabus
  • Their Days Are Numbered
  • On Weather
  • Disarticulations
  • The Waters
  • Session Report series
  • Birdwolf
  • Comics I've Been Geeking Out On
  • Small Press Releases
  • Books I Hate (and Also Some I Like)
  • The Poetics of Spaces
  • Fog or a Cloud
  • Tales From the End of the Bus Line
  • 30 Years of Ghibli
  • Cooking Origin Stories
  • YOU MAKE ME FEEL
  • Ludic Writing
  • Best of 2019
  • The Talking Cure
  • Stars to Stories
  • DRAGONS ARE REAL OR THEY ARE DEAD
  • Foster Care
  • Food and Covid-19
  • LEAKY CULTURE
  • Jem and the Holographic Feminisms
  • D&D with Entropy

Find Us On Facebook

Entropy
  • Facebook
  • Twitter
  • Instagram

©2014-2020 The Accomplices LLC. All Rights Reserved.

Read our updated Privacy Policy.


Back To Top