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Closed for Good

July 18, 2015 Essays, In House

House

Lobster in the Rough is over. On a given summer day we can no longer pull off the highway on the Maine side of the border into the parking lot alongside dusty motorcycles, cars, and trucks, and take a seat at the bar or a table beside the bocce courts, inhale lobster rolls in the sun and have a drink among locals and interlopers. This was a place of tribute bands, ladies nights, and horseshoe pits. A place we visited any chance we had heading north or south, a place we returned to, the origin of memories and oft-repeated phrases overheard in the midst of one fantastic day or another. Its closing confirms or reaffirms that these sorts of things—the places we’ve come to depend on to be there as some small but increasingly significant facet of our lives—are going away.This link—to the past we have lived and a past that is hinted at by the place itself—is gone. It’s not a loss of food (certainly there are other shacks within a mile radius that could sufficiently do the job), but a loss of sustenance nonetheless—a shift in atmosphere. Sometime this past winter it transitioned from closed for the season to closed permanently. It’s for sale.

Friday Reads: July 2015

July 17, 2015 Reviews

By KURT CASWELL, SARAH WHELAN, SAHIBA GILL, PAOLA PERONI, OLIVIA WOLFGANG-SMITH

Are you up for a challenge? This month we’re reading books that test us as they enlighten us, seeking to explain the world on a grand scale—warts and all. We’re held rapt by catalogs of world travel, remembered across decades; the brutal pageantry of crisis erupting through daily rituals; the history of poverty and injustice; the intricacies of mental illness, personal and societal. Don’t turn to these titles for escape—we’re here to focus the lens of the human experience and find something as irascible as it is beautiful.

Review: The Fishermen

July 11, 2015 Reviews

Book by CHIGOZIE OBIOMA
Reviewed by ANGELA AJAYI

The Fishermen The year I left Nigeria, 1993, was a momentous one. For the first time in about a decade, there was a presidential election—a democratic process that had eluded Nigeria after at least two military leaders had ruled the country, seizing power through coups. I was 18, old enough to vote but not inclined to do so. My parents were not politically active, though my father loved to discuss current affairs with his friends at our house in northern Nigeria. That year, their discussions were filled with excitement about Nigeria’s future, about the presidential candidate, M.K.O. Abiola, whose beaming face was plastered on flimsy poster boards along busy roads. I, too, found myself swept along by the high hopes for the country despite the increasing power outages, corruption, fuel scarcity, and religious and ethnic tensions.

When the election finally occurred, on June 12, 1993, the charade that followed left us all jaded and crestfallen: the election, which Abiola won, was annulled due to unfounded accusations of rigging. An interim president was quickly instated, after which Sani Abacha took over the country and ran it with the iron hand of a despot.

Secret Finds

July 8, 2015 Dispatches

By NAILA MOREIRA

Today the corn is new, no higher than my knee, and at this height it has a special color: luminous green under the overcast sky. The clouds are thick and dark, like a stew. For some, this place might seem always the same: the corn growing, the looming mountain, the lone trees far off across the fields still and silent, punctuating the view. But for me there is always something to see.

Putting the War in Plain Sight: An Interview with Sara Nović

July 7, 2015 Interviews

S. TREMAINE NELSON interviews SARA NOVIĆ

Sara Nović’s first book, Girl at War, was published by Random House earlier this year and was immediately well received: described by critics as “outstanding,” “intimate and immense,” The New York Times concluded it is “a brutal novel, but a beautiful one.” American-Croatian Nović recently graduated from the MFA program at Columbia University, where she studied fiction and literary translation. She is the fiction editor at Blunderbuss Magazine and the founder of ReDeafined, as well as an advocate for the Deaf community. S. Tremaine Nelson spoke with Nović in June while she was on a book tour in London.

July 2015 Poetry Feature

July 2, 2015 Poetry, Translation

Please join us in welcoming Ukrainian poet SERHIY ZHADAN to our pages—and look for more of his work forthcoming in our print journal.

All poems translated by Ostap Kin. With an introduction by Polina Barskova.

Review: Reptile House

June 29, 2015 Reviews

Book by ROBIN MCLEAN
Reviewed by CHANTAL CORCORAN

Reptile House

Robin McLean’s story collection, Reptile House, opens at an end—when a freeze of apocalyptic proportions devastates the town of Easter, (“Cold Snap”)—and ends at a beginning—when an unhappy man’s wife gives birth to another baby (the title story). This sort of upset runs rampant throughout McLean’s debut work. McLean’s surreal tales about ordinary characters deliver emotional truth in poetic language. Concrete and surreal, they spill beyond the conventional short story forms.

A book for lovers of language, Reptile House won the 2015 BOA Short Story Fiction Prize, sponsored by BOA Editions, Ltd., a publishing house committed strictly to poetry, until 2007 when it launched its American Reader Series with the goal of publishing fiction “more concerned with artfulness of writing than the twists and turns of plot.” Indeed, the nine short stories that form Reptile House seem to spring from language in an intuitive way.

Ask a Local: Liam Callanan, Milwaukee, WI

June 25, 2015 Interviews

With LIAM CALLANAN

Your name: Liam Callanan

Current city or town: Milwaukee

How long have you lived here? 10 years

Polar Bear, Pass By

June 24, 2015 Dispatches

By KURT CASWELL

Polar Bear (Sow), Near Kaktovik, Barter Island, Alaska

North of the Long Range Mountains in spring time, where the road swings east off the long northerly climb up the west coast, and a little farther on, back to the north again to the land’s end on the Northern Peninsula of Newfoundland, a place where Norsemen and women came ashore 500 years before Columbus, and the great icebergs, calved off the great Greenland ice sheet, march along the eastern shore with the currents of the North Atlantic: here, in this place, a polar bear passed by.