By SCOTT LAMBRIDIS
Review by BRITTA STROMEYER
“If you want the truth, you must ask someone else. Someone like me, who’s been here, on this island, all along,” writes author Scott Lambridis in his dizzying and darkly humorous debut novel, St. Ulphia’s Dead. Addictive and deceptive, the novel demands the reader’s full attention—as nothing is quite what it seems.
Galle Fort, Sri Lanka
Back home, the salt arrives before the sea. It rides on the evening wind, settles in your pores, and clings to the stone walls of the fort. On some evenings, when the waves are rough enough, the salt-bitter perfume of the sea accompanies a loud orchestra of sloshing and shushing, water lazily kicking the moist green moss on the bottom of the walls. Long before the sea comes into view, you taste it, saltier than the isso vade sold by the old man who pushes his cart through the fort everyday; you hear it, louder than the fretful tourists on the ramparts determined to take the perfect sunset photo for their Instagram; and you most definitely feel it, stickier than that melted Belgian chocolate ice cream from the nearby Gelato, dripping all over you.
By MARLEN HAUSHOFER
Review by BRIANNA BEEHLER
When I was a child, I was afraid to go upstairs by myself at my grandparents’ house. At the top of the stairs was a print of Pablo Picasso’s 1937 painting, Weeping Woman’s Head with Handkerchief III, and the sight of the woman’s tears found its way into my dreams at night. I didn’t know the painting’s context and the casual violence against civilians in Guernica that it referred to, but the image of the woman’s suffering would give me a sense of vertigo, and in the night I imagined climbing the stairs only to lose my balance on sight of the woman’s tight grip and upturned face.
By RODRIGO URQUIOLA FLORES
Translated by SHAINA BRASSARD
Story appears below in English and the original Spanish.
Translator’s Note
It is a pleasure to share my translation of this short story from contemporary Bolivian author Rodrigo Urquiola Flores. This semi-autobiographical work of fiction transports the reader to the windswept edges of the city of La Paz during the early and mid-1990s, when young children like the author and myself were cognizant of the mysterious and feared chupacabra as a topic of conversation and media coverage.
The story is part cataloging of the author’s first significant experiences and memories. Thrillingly, the narrator takes us on a journey from the neglect and loneliness of his spare, dusty home to the high drama of the soccer stadium. It is nothing short of a revelation. In this third space, he finds seemingly all the raw materials of life: effort, teamwork, luck, heartbreak, agony, triumph, relief.
Through the storytelling of his Aymara grandmother, Urquiola also takes us back in time to the Ocobaya hacienda, a site of subjugation and domination. I have resisted translating – and therefore decontextualizing – pongo, patrón, and amo, the unique terms of racialized power associated with this social and economic system. Curious readers are invited to learn more about haciendas, a significant feature of not-so-distant Latin American history with meaningful connections to the plantation system of the United States.
New poems from MARCUS WICKER and ELLEN HINSEY
Table of Contents:
What if an alien landed in Atlanta in January 2020 and tried to document everything it saw for two years? Not just the big stuff like the pandemic, the protests, the Capitol riot, but also the unfiltered everyday occurrences: binge-watching reality t.v. and some retail therapy, a young girl quieting her wailing sister in the middle of an airport Popeye’s with a kiss to her invisibly injured elbow. That’s the premise of Dear Mothership, the new poetry collection from Marcus Wicker (Ecco, September 8). Part Afrofuturist odyssey, part cultural chronicle, the collection weaves the ATLien emissary’s observations together as it examines what is alien in our world, alongside poems that chart upheavals both personal and political.
By LYS GRANIER
Photo courtesy of the author.
Montréal, Québec, Canada
Le petit bois a brûlé. Le petit bois a brûlé. Where I went to pick up asparagus in the spring. Where I saw a dead mole on the path and cried for hours. Where we had that secret patch of mushrooms. Des petits gris, my parents called them. Where the pines smelled of summer and safety. Where I went for my first walk in the snow. The only time I saw the woods in the snow. Where I threw a handful of road gravel in the tiny stream every time I crossed the bridge. The wood where I pictured my dad reincarnated as a fox. Where we had to wear red and be loud during hunting season. Where boars would dig up moss on the side of the path.
Kanchi Sharma (left) and Yu-Mei Balasingamchow (right)
KANCHI SHARMA and YU-MEI BALASINGAMCHOW first connected despite the limits of time zones – Kanchi in Mumbai, Yu-Mei in Boston. Years after seeing each other in pixels, they met in person at AWP. Bringing it full-circle, they met over Zoom to discuss Yu-Mei’s debut novel, Names Have Been Changed, its masterful portrayal of modern exiles, diaspora, concealment, and the quiet violences of bureaucracy and border.
In the middle of the Mediterranean, 50 miles from Sicily, 200 miles from Libya, floats a country whose general character has been defined by centuries of accretion and erasure.
This is the island that played host to this spring’s newest reality dating show, Love Overboard, in which sixteen sculpted young people battle for connection and status on a luxury yacht. The yacht, and the people, mostly float off the coast, though the golden sandstone of capital city Valletta looms behind them. The guiding myth of such shows is that a beautiful locale—sunny, cloistered, preferably bare of culture—is conducive to love.
The reality of Malta is that it’s the loneliest place I’ve been.
On this arid soil—not a river to be found on the entire island—forces as mythic as Ottomans and Knights Hospitaller met to make their case for dominion; Byzantines came, Arabs, the French. The resulting language, born of this crossroads aesthetic, seems to blend the insistence of Italian and the lilt of Arabic, though most islanders also speak English, which feels—like the red telephone boxes dotting the capital—vestigial.
By LIZ JOHNSTON and EOGHAN WALLS
Review by JULIA LICHTBLAU
It’s hard to fight for other organisms and remain on speaking terms with humanity. People don’t care about extinction. What’s one species, they say, compared to my precious convenience? Trees and birds do their bit for the ecosystem merely by existing. Humans are uniquely selfish and destructive. Come to think of it, maybe we’re the expendable species.
Two timely new novels, The Fall-Down Effect, Canadian writer and Brick magazine editor Liz Johnston’s debut, and Field Notes from an Extinction by Northern Irish poet and novelist Eoghan Walls, center on those who risk their lives—and other people’s—for nature. Both books ask what makes a person willing to go that far. Nature? Nurture? What’s the tipping point? Why now?
The protagonists in these books have suffered family traumas that harden them to distractions like love, and they share reclusive personalities, as well as a mix of megalomania and desperation. The Fall-Down Effect’s protagonist says: Enough thinking. Now. The main character of Field Notes says: A species is dying. The world needs to know.
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