literature

The 1980s were a contentious time in Korea. Following the 1979 assassination of dictator, Park Chung-hee, protests began springing up all over the country after one of his generals seized…

Written Lives by Javier Marías Translated by Margaret Jull Costa Penguin Modern Classics, 2016 (First published in English by New Directions in 2006) 208 pages – Penguin /Amazon   The great figures in…

Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five: Bookmarked by Curtis Smith Ig Publishing, 2016 184 pages – Ig / Amazon   How does a “classic” book continue to ripple through our culture? This is…

Transitory Poetics  is a monthly review series by Toby Altman focused solely on current and upcoming chapbooks. You can read the introduction here.   Let me begin with an understatement: contemporary poetry has a complicated relationship…

“In literature, the most essential thing is freedom.” d          –Enrique Vila-Matas. Spanish writer Enrique Vila-Matas (born in Barcelona, 1948) seems his own creation—someone carefree but self-absorbed…

A list of Literary Bears Compiled by the Entropy Community The Bear from In the House Upon the Dirt Between the Lake and the Woods by Matt Bell  Where would…

Sand Opera by Philip Metres Alice James Books, 2015 100 pages – Alice James / Amazon   “When we speak we are afraid our words will not be heard or welcomed.…

I will say that the beauty of a small press is that you can take small risks, and ideally use any limitations as assets. One of the things that I love about the stories of Black Mountain College is that they had little in terms of resources but nevertheless had a tremendous cultural impact. Of course it’s easier to think like that now that we have a degree of stability, but especially in the beginning we had little to no overhead. Which is a good thing, because it took about four years before the first two books we’d published paid for themselves. Since then the press mostly maintains itself, but definitely I would say it’s a lucky thing to break even on a project and any earned income goes into future publishing projects.

The Weight of Things by Marianne Fritz Translated by Adrian Nathan West Dorothy, 2015 144 pages – Dorothy / Amazon   When reading The Weight of Things by Marianne Fritz, I…

The Correspondence Artist by Barbara Browning Two Dollar Radio, 2011 192 pages – TDR / Amazon I’m Trying to Reach You by Barbara Browning Two Dollar Radio, 2012 224 pages – TDR…

The man on his knees in the small dead-grass yard leaning over the slat of fence he was repairing looked like he was praying. That’s what the woman who was…

Image Credit: Innosanto Nagara Historically, I was convinced that I’d have Rosemary’s Baby, so I’d never considered motherhood as part of my trajectory. However, a few shots of tequila and…

We were convinced that some of the best writing from writers we knew happened outside of their normal writing forms and practices, e.g., in conversation, in emails, in rants while driving, etc. We then began commissioning these works as they occurred or as we encountered them, and we published them as our Tract Series of pamphlets.

It’s no secret that an appropriative style—where objects identifiable as belonging to past eras are sewn together—is in. Atop—or perhaps below—this larger swell there also happens to be a contingent…