New Poems by Our Contributors NATHANIEL PERRY and TYLER KLINE.
Table of Contents:
34 (Song, with Young Lions)
By Nathaniel Perry
All the young lions do lack
bones. They lie wasted on grass,
cashed out, exhausted and un-
delivered. A poor man cries
eventually. A troubled
friend cries eventually.
Curated by SAM SPRATFORD
This month, our online contributors CHRIS JOHN POOLE, JULES FITZ GERALD, and LAURA NAGLE recommend three inventive, deeply human books with stories that traverse two oceans—from Japan, to Mexico, to Norway.
Fernanda Melchor’s This Is Not Miami (trans. Sophie Hughes); recommended by TC Online Contributor Chris John Poole
In her author’s note to This Is Not Miami, Fernanda Melchor writes that “to live in a city is to live among stories.” The city in question is Veracruz, Melchor’s birthplace, a city of cartel violence and political corruption; ritual magic and cold, hard truth. Veracruz’s stories, meanwhile, are those which are gleaned from—and imposed onto—its grim realities.
The stories in This Is Not Miami are crónicas, a genre with no direct equivalent in the Anglophone canon. Crónicas mix reportage and fiction, in a manner akin to gonzo journalism. They favour subjective accounts and firsthand experience over hard data and rigid chronology. Melchor’s crónicas collate rumours, folk myths, and personal narratives, injecting reportage where necessary.
We are thrilled to announce the finalists chosen for this year’s Restless Books Prize for New Immigrant Writing in fiction. In this ninth year of the prize, it has never felt more important to highlight themes of migration, displacement, unrest, alienation, self-determination—of seeking home, and all the reasons one leaves home to find a better way.
As it has since the beginning in 2015, the prize seeks to support writers whose work examines, with fresh urgency, how immigration shapes our countries, our communities, and ourselves.The winner will receive $10,000 and publication by Restless Books.This year’s judges—authors Priyanka Champaneri, Rivka Galchen, and Ilan Stavans—have selected the following four finalists. Please join us in celebrating their work.
Excerpted from Every Other Universe, a finalist for the Restless Books Prize for New Immigrant Writing 2024.
This planet is mine and I belong to this planet. I know because when the dirt hits my tongue I feel almost joy. The earth here tastes like blood, which I haven’t tasted in many years, but I remember it, I remember being a child and cutting myself on an open can my mother had left in the kitchen, so long ago the memory comes to me as if from underwater. I slid my thumb against the silver crease, and my skin forked and made a dripping. It was my first encounter with sincere pain, but I didn’t mind. I still don’t. It feels like stray teeth in my stomach, a hard, misplaced bite.
The medical team here, of which I am a part, is overstaffed. If there’s a hurt on you, we’ll find it, we’ll lay you horizontal on a clean white sheet and watch the monitors spasm green and black, we’ll dizzy you with painkillers. There’s nothing else for us to do. Pain has become almost absent from our planet. I miss it. I miss stomachaches and headaches, the way my mind would curve toward the small agonies, how the basket of my body carried my hurt everywhere I went. Now, people are dying without any hurt at all, vanishing in clean rooms that smell like lemons.
Story selected from Lagos Will Be Hard for You, a finalist for the Restless Books Prize for New Immigrant Writing 2024.
There was a statue of the real Jack Daniels in the corner, or so the plaque read, but Jonathan swore that it looked more like one of the U.S. presidents: hat, beard, suit, presence, pose. It had a rainbow flag affixed to its shoulder, so Lotanna, or Lottie as she had come to be called in America, went with the Jack Daniels claim.
It was New Year’s Eve and they were on their third date. 10th Street Station was a basement bar and Lotanna decided she liked it as soon as she stepped in. The walls boasted of old autographed Hollywood posters and portraits, number plates proud of the Land of Potatoes, and when Lotanna found drawings on one of the high beams she thought it must have been by someone who cared a lot about this place but was shy of their talent. It was all mismatched in shape, color, and size. Nothing belonged. Like her. They ordered glasses of IPA and sat near the heater, and she kept glancing at her phone, waiting for the new year to ring so she could go home to her basement apartment.
“Hey. You okay?” Jonathan asked, nudging her lightly.
By SOFI STAMBO
Excerpted from A Bunch of Savages, a finalist for the Restless Books Prize for New Immigrant Writing 2024.
Baba Borka
I absolutely have to go to Coney Island every weekend. People think that’s strange. Luckily, lately I don’t care if people love me, like I did before. I used to suffer and blush and stay home and cry. Not anymore—I grew up and out of this. One day I woke up and realized that it doesn’t matter if I am well-liked or not. What matters is to get up at six, go to work, calculate for fifty hours, get yelled at, watch people get bullied, stay calm, and not kill anyone.
I can definitely do this, but with huge quantities of Coney Island.
I need to step into this postcard image of sea, sand, salt, and seagulls. This is my comfort zone. I don’t need anything else. Unless we are going for perfect, then maybe a peeled peach, and my grandmother to peel it.
Summer always starts with her glittering, gold-toothed smile. In the morning, the night train from the capital arrives at the old station in Varna. My small grandmother and huge grandfather are running toward us, they always ran, with bouquets for my mother, my sister, and me. These dahlias have been planted, watered, and weeded months ago for us. They’d been cut an hour before. The seagulls scream, it smells like sea, the station shines wet from the fog and bright from the sun and the smiles of my people.
By HAITAO XU
Excerpted from Cattail, a finalist for the Restless Books Prize for New Immigrant Writing 2024.
1.
Kargh, pzzzs, kargh. Good morning, Revolutionary comrades! The sun is rising;
Kargh, pzzsz . . . the war drum is beating!
Again, the formidable metal rooster atop the office building of Sunrise People’s Commune Brigade Three shattered the quiet early morning with its violent static coughs and squawks.
Hearing it, Cattail, a tall and thin girl in a faded purple winter coat, kicked the dirt floor of the kitchen, a lean-to attached to their main dwelling, which consisted of a hut with two bedrooms and a common area.
She should have the breakfast ready. But their meal, sweet potato soup, the same food they have twice a day in winter, was not boiling yet. The sweet potatoes were like stones. She knew the loudspeaker would soon summon every commune member, all the adult residents of Brigade Three, to report to work.
Kevin Dean speaks to managing editor Emily Everett about his story “Patron Saints,” which appears in The Common’s most recent issue. Kevin talks about the process of writing and revising this story, which follows a young American trying to find his place in Cairo, while the city roils with political uncertainty after the Arab Spring uprising. Kevin also discusses how it feels to write from memory, what he tries to capture when writing about place, and what projects he’s working on now.
New Poems by Our Contributors MORRI CREECH, ELISA GABBERT, ANNA GIRGENTI, and GRANT KITTRELL.
Table of Contents:
The Others
By Morri Creech
The children that I have never had follow me, late, through the vacant corridors.
They whisper there is still time, time for the quarter moon to nock its black arrow
Curated by SAM SPRATFORD
To kick off the autumn column, our contributors bring you three novels that invite unexpected encounters with time. A recommendation from former TC submissions reader SAMUEL JENSEN trains our sights on the future of the American dream; with LILY LUCAS HODGES, we unearth an artifact of historical erasure; and with HILDEGARD HANSEN, we finally transcend history through prose that gropes at the primordial core of life.
Alexander Sammartino’s Last Acts; recommended by Reader-Emeritus Samuel Jensen.
I picked up Alexander Sammartino’s debut novel, Last Acts, because of the cover. Seeing it at the book store, it was as if someone had walked up the road from my childhood home, aimed their camera across the arroyo, and snapped a picture. I’m from El Paso, Texas and Sammartino’s novel is set in Phoenix, Arizona—two very different places—but still: a sunbleached strip mall with a gun shop in it, burning under a merciless blue sky? It was like running into someone you’re not sure you wanted to see again.
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Celebrating 15 Years