Interview: Sarah Gerard, Author of Binary Star
Shelf Unbound: Your main character says, “A binary star is a system containing two stars that orbit their common center of mass.” In this case, the anorexic/bulimic unnamed main character and her alcoholic boyfriend are orbiting their addictions. You use the solar system as a metaphor throughout the novel—how did that idea come about? Sarah […]
Feature: The Instagram Book: Inside The Online Photography Revolution
Not since Edwin Land invented the Polaroid camera has photography become both redefined and reenergized all at the same moment. Instagram, the smart phone application, has taken today’s phenomenon of instant digital photography and social media to a new zenith, enabling amateurs and professionals alike to share their images with a global audience. From the […]
Feb/Mar 2015 Staff Picks
Backchannel Read carefully each word in Backchannel, for you are warned: “Every word in this poem is a dead body.” Doughnuts and young vegetables, couches and tables, heavy artillery, cobblestones, vibrators, swans, semiotics, cash registers, vegan vitamins, male desire, cosmic tulle. Read them, conscientious of their placement next to one another, noting nods of your […]
Review: Vs. Death Noises by Marcus Pactor
Vs. Death Noises by Marcus Pactor In the final story of Marcus Pactor’s Vs. Death Noises, a man discovers a single hair in his bathroom and obsesses over the shape it has taken. The problem, he realizes, is that geometry can’t solve his conundrum because geometric definitions are “concerned with perfect impossibilities” whereas the world […]
Excerpt: The Perfect Food by John Crawley
Ever since I got here, I have been on guard. What I eat, what I drink, what I breathe. It is scary as hell. Panic, I tell you. It was panic. You would have, too. You see you would have been awakened at night by that bump against the house. The dog barking at three […]
Interview: Earle Labor, Biographer of Jack London: An American Life
Shelf Unbound: How did you become interested in London’s works, and what about his writing most appeals to you? Earle Labor: I first became interested in London’s works when I was a grade-schooler in Tuskahoma, Oklahoma. Ours was a consolidated school for kids who lived on farms in the surrounding area along with the few […]
Excerpt: “The Red List: A Poem” by Stephen Cushman
Excerpt from “The Red List: A Poem” by Stephen Cushman Endangerment’s foreplay en route to extinction often but not always. Ask the bald eagle, ridiculous nickname for that elegant hood rhymed with its tail, a matched set distinctive against distant spruce, white as the transit of pre-dawn Jupiter’s super-heated drop soldering sky plates to cement […]
Poetry: Lisa Williams, Author of Gazelle in the House.
“Gazelle in the House” by Lisa Williams A gazelle in the house means tender, breaking silence. An approach calibrating hesitation. Something held out in the hand. Something bitter, exactly toward a gazelle. You will bring things forward that are not of your world. You will push things back that seemed massive, fundamental—packed away, out of the […]
Excerpt: The Alphabet of Birds by S.J. Naudé
Later on he will see it differently, but it starts out as a kind of war. Or, at least, a series of escalating skirmishes. He is caring for his mother. Cancer is growing in her intestines. She is going to die. The only unknowns are the moment and the precise route. The markers are set […]
Interview: Dave Housley, Author of If I Knew The Way, I Would Take You Home
shelf unbound What’s a typical starting point for you in writing a story, for example the guy who hooks up with a celebrity at a party and then finds out she later overdosed in “Pop Star Dead at 22”? davehousley For me, it’s usually a person in a situation. “Pop Star Dead at 22” is […]