The high stone wall guarding Gabriel García Márquez’s vacation house in the hills of Cuernavaca, Mexico was a foot thick and topped with broken glass. Bougainvillea spilled over the top and formed a magenta canopy over the wall’s wooden door.
Book by KAREN RUSSELL
Reviewed by
Karen Russell’s novel Swamplandia! (based on one of the stories in her collection St. Lucy’s Home for Girls Raised by Wolves) is the mystical coming of age story of Ava Bigtree, a skilled alligator-wrestler at her family’s failing theme park in the Everglades. Setting plays an important role in this book, and made me notice the settings within a setting. Swamplands, swamp flies, buzzards, and a feverish humid mud mash surround the narrative. Since Swamplandia!, the Bigtree’s theme park, is also a family history museum (Ava’s mother’s wedding dress is on display among other exhibits), family is a setting. The conflation of family and place familiarizes the wildlife around the reader (Ava calls all their alligators “Seths”), while also revealing the darkness and wilderness of a family.
Join us at our table at Newtonville Books‘ Small Presses and Literary Magazines Fair, and enjoy a short reading of our recent poetry.
Come celebrate the release of Issue 03! Join us at Amherst College’s Alumni House on April 27 for drinks and music. Featuring readers Susan Stinson and Brad Leithauser. The event, which is free and open to the public, starts at 7:00 p.m. Click here for a map of the Amherst College campus.
Once again, The Common will keep a table at this year’s Juniper festival. Enjoy the journal and press fair, and a keynote reading by James Tate.
Visit the Kelly Writers House at UPenn for a rousing discussion on writing about place. The conversation will be streamed live here.
On Sunday, on the side of a rural ridge path that cut through fields of maize and newly planted papaya trees, I watched a man kill a venomous adder. He threw large rocks to stun the snake, and then used his heel to crush its head. Even after he stopped, the snake’s body kept moving, dragging its destroyed head behind it.
Book by JIM SHEPARD
Reviewed by
Sometimes, after finishing a particularly impactful book, I experience a partial paralysis. It’s a sort of ecstatic exhaustion, I think; I’ve felt similarly after long, intense runs. If there is a window nearby, I’ll stare out it without really noticing anything in particular. If my chair is capable of rocking, I’ll do so steadily and rhythmically to the point where people sitting nearby will clear their throats in my general direction. I will occasionally mutter an expletive over and over under my breath. I don’t deny that all this is sort of dramatic. In my own defense, it doesn’t happen that often, and it requires a fairly momentous reading experience. Again, this happens usually after finishing a book. It seems significant, then, that I felt emotionally KO-ed after nearly every story in Jim Shepard’s new collection of short fiction, You Think That’s Bad. The equivalent would perhaps be getting picked up by the same girl eleven times in a row despite having your heart broken every single time. And being ready to be picked up again, if she ever comes back.
The National Guard is on patrol
in combat boots and GI Joe camouflage,
M16’s slung down to their hips,
young as boys on Halloween,
ready for anything, and I want
to hand every one of them a bag of candy.
My parents used to have a grey miniature schnauzer named Jacques. While his brother Pablo was big and black and thick, Jacques was wiry and small. Over the years, his runtiness and Pablo’s brotherly abuse (stealing food, mounting his haunches) made him kind of squirrely. If he had been a human he would have been diagnosed and put on medication, but Jacques was only a dog, and so he was allowed to lead his neurotic, pampered life.
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