You Think He's Going To Buy It?

We wish you nothing but the best. Success is good for you, us, the world. We also wish for the success of literary endeavors — most of the time. Maybe it’s just that our version of literary success and someone else’s version of literary success cross in the overlapping mutuality of the Venn diagram. Either way, books get published, writers get paid and readers get happy. Padgett Powell once said, “You don’t think anyone is actually going to buy it?” after reading from his work on a book tour. That sad prediction is forgotten as we join Padgett in his geographic comfort zone — rural Florida. But does a comfortable locale equal a comfortable state of mind? Read more in Deadspin. Normally we’ll drink to the success of any old reading endeavor, but the Kindle is destroying our parents’ libraries, the thought of which makes us sick. Speaking of sick, Terry Gross has an interview that explains how moonlighting as a professional dominatrix is a way to fund your path to greatness, Heidegger’s brilliance leads to Hitler, and Vollman’s Imperial County reminds us that everything ties together. Just like a group of literature professors bashing acclaimed novels for a quick payday. Hey, everyone has a different version of literary success, right?. — Andrew Geer

– At the north end of Plymouth, Fla., under trees on the corner of the U.S. 441 and Hermit Smith Road, Warren Sapp’s cousin Thomas McCrary sells barbecue from three handmade iron cookers. One of them he had made for $35; he supplied everything (tank, wheels, pipe) except the expanded metal for the grill. The other two larger ones cost just over $100. — Padgett Powell in Deadspin

– Downtown Tehran, winter: impossible traffic, the energy of 9 million Iranians making their way through congested streets, the white peaks of the Alborz Mountains disappearing shade by shade in the ever-increasing smog. The government’s declared another pollution emergency, and the center city is closed to license plates ending in odd numbers. The students at the university, where I am teaching a seminar on American Studies, are complaining openly about the failures of their elected officials. — Brian T. Edwards in The Believer

Not Your Mom's Kindle Library

– I enjoyed shooting the breeze with my friends’ moms (it was mostly moms who called) and I regretted that there was no longer much opportunity to do that once cellphones allowed our parents to call each of us directly. — Bookshelves in The Millions

– I became an ardent fan of William T. Vollmann’s work after reading Europe Central (2005). It is an extraordinary accomplishment, a remarkable feat of re-imagining one of the most complex, and harrowing, events of the 20th century, the conflict between Nazi Germany and Stalinist Russia. Vollmann tells his many stories with dark humor, intelligence, and a great, measured respect for suffering and courage. — William T. Vollmann in The Brooklyn Rail

– Heidegger is undoubtedly a genius. You can tell he’s a genius because his philosophy is so hard to understand. A word of background first, before we tackle Emmanuel Faye’s book.  Alasdair MacIntyre, the venerable 20th-century philosopher especially respected for his views on politics and morality, says of Heidegger’s key text, Being and Time, that “The great difficulty with Sein und Zeit (which is a far better book than those who have not read it generally allow) is that the perhaps warranted apprehension of traditional philosophical terminology is too often used to permit the invention of a new word”. — Heidegger and Nazism in Times Higher Education

– I’ve always wondered who responds to ads like this one, which was in the back of the Village Voice: Attractive, young woman wanted for nurse role-play and domination. No experience necessary, good money, no sex. — Whip Smart on NPR

– The American Book Review has taken stock of literature and come up with its Top 40 Bad Books. The list targets some big, popular favorites — F. Scott Fitzgerald’s classic “The Great Gatsby,” Richard Yates’ “Revolutionary Road,” the James Bond novel “Casino Royale” by Ian Fleming and Cormac McCarthy’s National Book Award-winning “All the Pretty Horses.” Really? If they’re the worst, what’s the best? — Bad Books in Jacket Copy

Video: A Very Bad Book

We Need Sleep

We’re in the middle of spring semester, and our procrastination is killing us. We’ve got piles of papers to grade, submissions to sort through, and some stories to edit and send away.

Our lives are the equivalent of Rip Van Winkle’s farm: weedy and barren. We want to carry our guns out into the Catskills. We want to sip gin from the Dutchman’s flagon and toss nine pens with the personages.

But, alas, there are things to do. 

Dam Van Winkle was a henpecker, and Rip Van Winkle was loved by all — not including the Dam. Rip was a silly, lazy lout who got to roam the town playing with children and tending to his dog, Wolf. He had things he was supposed to do, sure, but he put all that aside to hunt and hob-gobble.

We have tread his track. We’ve let our chores grow burgeoned by neglect. We are envious of Rip Van Winkle. We wish heartily for his easy outcome.

Rip squirreled off into the mountains, got drunk, watched some old-school bowling, and then fell asleep for twenty years. When he woke up his worries were forgotten. His wife had died, and his daughter had married-up a meal ticket. He spent the rest of his days frolicking. He’s a lucky son of a bitch.

So, we got to thinking. What would the world be like twenty years from today?

Luckily, our good friend Wikipedia had the answer for us.

Here are some  future highlights, as told by the collaborative encyclopedia:

The European Space Agency hopes to land humans on Mars between 2030 and 2035.

April 6, 2030: The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, which will have over 50 million members by then, will be celebrating its Bicentennial with dances and balls and other festivities.

The Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency will construct a manned lunar base.

All New Zealand cars will be hybrid, bio-fuel, or electric.

By 2030, “advanced countries will be competing for immigrants,” because of declining birthrates, according to George Friedman.

“More robots than people in developed countries” is also predicted for 2030.

The entire infrastructure of the California High-Speed Rail system will be completed.

I/We/All Robot

Sweet. Did you see it? By 2030 we’ll all have robots.

Robots for the yard work. Robots for the paper grading. Robots to wipe our crappers with. Robots for fighting the wars that we assume countries will wage over the possession of immigrants.

This war will be fought in New Zealand using hybrid tanks and planes. There will be high-speed rail in California, but only robots will ride it.

All the people? The people will be on Mars. They will have gone there to escape the fifty million members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, who will be choking the globe with their continuous anniversary worships.

That would be what we’d wake up to. And then we’d have to shoot ourselves. Thanks, Wikipedia, for the future of our dreams. — Brian Allen Carr

Video: We’re All On Mars

Every week during the month of March we’ll be featuring fiction and poetry Noir.

We asked writers to contribute their darkest and most sinister works.

The result is a batch of stories and poems that aren’t shy about harnessing vulgar language, violent imagery, and an unmistakably bleak societal prognosis.

Enjoy.

Outfits, by Caron Tate

– We was out riding one time. I was driving her car. She had a red Lexus IS 350 C convertible that her father got her special before they even came out. She actually talked about getting the interior done over in some wack-ass pattern (to match her favorite dress!) but the bitch wasn’t that crazy. I guess. I know she kept saying, “I’m going to pimp my ride. I think I’ll just pimp my ride,” over and over again in her chirpy voice. That was my fault. I never should have let her watch a show where they fix up cars. Too much like them stupid ass design shows. — Read the entire story here

Kitchen Knife, by Ed Higgins

– KITCHEN HEALTH & SAFETY; CUT WOUNDS; KNIFE WOUND SUTURE MATERIALS AND TECHNIQUES; METAPHORICAL CUTS; KNIFE SHARPENING TRICKS; HOW TO ARGUE WITH YOUR SPOUSE OR PARTNER CONSTRUCTIVELY; REMAINS OF “BOG MAN” FOUND WITH SHARPENING STONES WORN AS PENDANT — Read the entire story here

A Light In The Moon

Last week, a Large Hearted Boy got us thinking about all those sexy people we’re dying to date — writers who can sing, singers who can write. A few of these People Who Are Obnoxiously Talented At More Than One Thing include our imaginary boyfriend Ryan Adams. Adams has published a collection of poems entitled Hello Sunshine. (And while we’re talking about imaginary boyfriends, we can’t help but mention Blake Schwarzenbach, an English professor and singer who has a voice deeper than Crater Lake and poetic lyrics that will send the jets of your heart to Brazil.) Second up is David Berman of the Silver Jews. Berman put out a highly-acclaimed debut called Actual Air, which, we have to say, is really good poetry…

The Moon

by David Berman

A web of sewer, pipe, and wire connects each house to the others.

In 206 a dog sleeps by the stove where a small gas leak causes him
to have visions; visions that are rooted in nothing but gas.

Next door, a man who has decided to buy a car part by part
excitedly unpacks a wheel and an ashtray.

He arranges them every which way. It’s really beginning to take
shape.

Out the garage window he sees a group of ugly children
enter the forest. Their mouths look like coin slots.

A neighbor plays keyboards in a local cover band.
Preparing for an engagement at the high school prom,

they pack their equipment in silence.

Last night they played the Police Academy Ball and
all the officers slow-danced with target range silhouettes.

This year the theme for the prom is the Tetragrammaton.

A yellow Corsair sails through the disco parking lot
and swaying palms presage the lot of young libertines.

Inside the car a young lady wears a corsage of bullet-sized rodents.
Her date, the handsome cornerback, stretches his talons over the
molded steering wheel.

They park and walk into the lush starlit gardens behind the disco
just as the band is striking up.

Their keen eyes and ears twitch. The other couples
look beautiful tonight. They stroll around listening
to the brilliant conversation. The passionate speeches.

Clouds drift across the silverware. There is red larkspur,
blue gum, and ivy. A boy kneels before his date.

And the moon, I forgot to mention the moon.

Poems By Berman

However, when we read today’s poetry news, we started thinking about People Who Are Obnoxious and Not Talented At More Than One Thing, like Jewel. According to Jim Behrle, Jewel is one of the best-selling poets of the last twenty-five years. Her publicist even proposed an event where she would be interviewed by former poet laureate Robert Pinsky. We just hope Jewel isn’t crooning to American poetry when she sings “You Were Made for Me.”

On Sunday night, a chamber-work musical called “Songs of Wars I Have Known,” which is based on the writing of Gertrude Stein, swept through the city of Seattle. The performance was called “a rare and stunning performance of musical poetry.” Yes, right here in Seattle we have a prime example of poetry-meets-music and it’s the kind that makes us want to end with a sound-drenched poem about magnificent asparagus. –Lori Huskey

A Light In The Moon

by Gertrude Stein

A light in the moon the only light is on Sunday. What was the sensible decision. The sensible decision was that notwithstanding many declarations and more music, not even notwithstanding the choice and a torch and a collection, notwithstanding the celebrating hat and a vacation and even more noise than cutting, notwithstanding Europe and Asia and being overbearing, not even notwithstanding an elephant and a strict occasion, not even withstanding more cultivation and some seasoning, not even with drowning and with the ocean being encircling, not even with more likeness and any cloud, not even with terrific sacrifice of pedestrianism and a special resolution, not even more likely to be pleasing. The care with which the rain is wrong and the green is wrong and the white is wrong, the care with which there is a chair and plenty of breathing. The care with which there is incredible justice and likeness, all this makes a magnificent asparagus, and also a fountain.

Video: Footage of Gertrude Stein

by Ed Higgins

Kitchen Knife (n.)

1. A standard kitchen tool consisting of a sharp blade attached to a handle intended for cutting, peeling, chopping, slicing, and dicing.

2. Used primarily for food preparation (see also BUTCHERING; BACKSTABBING; JACK THE RIPPER; DEATH BY A THOUSAND CUTS).

3. Operated by hand, although some powered by electricity. Dangerous when employed inattentively.

4. May be lubricated by food juices, blood, or tears — as in onion preparation.

5. Should not be operated under the influence of alcohol, drugs, or while experiencing severe anger.

6. The most common weapon in domestic violence. A three-to-one ratio of kitchen knife murders over guns.

7. Slang: To betray or attempt to defeat by underhanded means. You backstabbed me again with a fucking butcher knife to my own mother,  for Christ’s sake!

8. The domestic utensil blamed in a fatal stabbing after a California couple’s New Year’s Eve party argument over tacos.

9. A good set of kitchen knives can make any food preparation job easier, but personal safety must always be a user’s main concern.

10. Keeping kitchen knives sharp is essential. If a knife is blunt you have to force it and there is a real danger of accidental cuts or severe injury.

Related articles: KITCHEN HEALTH & SAFETY; CUT WOUNDS; KNIFE WOUND SUTURE MATERIALS AND TECHNIQUES; METAPHORICAL CUTS; KNIFE SHARPENING TRICKS; HOW TO ARGUE WITH YOUR SPOUSE OR PARTNER CONSTRUCTIVELY; REMAINS OF “BOG MAN” FOUND WITH SHARPENING STONES WORN AS PENDANT.

__________________________________

Ed Higgins teaches creative writing and literature at George Fox University, south of Portland, OR. He lives on a small farm with an assorted menagerie of animals including a Manx barn cat named Velcro. His poems and short fiction have appeared in Monkeybicycle, Pindeldyboz, and Twisted Tongue, as well as such online journals as CrossConnect, Word Riot, The Centrifugal Eye, Mannequin Envy, and JMWW, among others.

by William Doreski

The rain today looks more naked
than usual. It bastes the treetops
with id. I dreamt I walked a horse

beside the railroad. The creature shrank
with every step until I stuffed it
into my largest coat pocket.

At home I caught you dissecting
an ordinary garter snake.
Split lengthwise, it resembled

a stretch of the Dead Sea scrolls.
Out of my pocket, the horse
expanded to its natural size

and with its famous Scottish accent
thanked me for the ride. The morning
negates that drama, though.

You hustle the cats to breakfast
and rattle dishes in the sink
to alert me that a new world

has risen from the Atlantic
to replace the dream-world I lived
with ample faith. How can I solve

the simple needs of a landscape
I inhabit barely long enough
to learn how to read its idioms?

The rain kneads the sky till it’s soft
and fluffy. The treetops weep with joy.
You order me to eat breakfast

as soon as the cats have finished,
but I want to run out naked
in the rain, naked as the rain,

and although we have no neighbors
to see, my ripening expression
would surely explain everything.

__________________________________

William Doreski teaches at Keene State College in New Hampshire. His most recent collection of poetry is Waiting for the Angel (2009). He has published three critical studies, including Robert Lowell’s Shifting Colors.  His essays, poetry, fiction, and reviews have appeared in many journals, including Massachusetts Review, Notre Dame Review, The Alembic, New England Quarterly, Harvard Review, Modern Philology, Antioch Review, Natural Bridge.

Sun In The Morn, Writers Be Warned

Sunrise gets more praise than it should. If we’re awake for a sunrise it means one of several things has happened: we’ve had a brush with alcohol poisoning, insomnia, or have just an ungodly reason for waking up earlier than normal. No, instead of filling us with warmth and optimism, sunrise reminds us of a short story we penned way back in the oft-referred to “College Days.” The story involved a female protagonist who struggled with sleeplessness — a remarkable conceit, we know. But we were 19 and battling insomnia ourselves, if that’s any excuse. Anyway, two years later a young woman we were dating found the story (the unconscionable invasion of privacy into one’s scribble pad does not even warrant discussion here). Somehow this young woman, two years after the story had been written, found reason to believe it was about her. To this day, we have no idea why. She certainly didn’t subscribe to the “author is dead” school of criticism, follow? No? Well, Heteroglossia, Bahktin, what is there to do? Visit the Guardian, of course, which is listing fiction writing’s fundamental laws. From there we head to an autopsy on the death of film criticism, and then on to the death of The Exile. But life springs eternal, right? At least it evolves, as long as culture fosters it forward. The Jewish Review of Books is searching for a Hebrew Narnia, and Sam Lipsyte does interviews via IM. It’s a new morning, insomniacs. — Andrew Geer

– Get an accountant, abstain from sex and similes, cut, rewrite, then cut and rewrite again – if all else fails, pray. Inspired by Elmore Leonard’s 10 Rules of Writing, we asked authors for their personal dos and don’ts. — Rules of Writing in  The Guardian Part I Part II

– ”It sucks,” decrees an Internet movie critic, sharing the most common aesthetic reaction in contemporary film criticism. In the viral salon of bloggers and chat-roomers, the finely tuned turns of phrase crafted by an earlier generation of sharp-eyed cinema scribes have been winnowed to a curt kiss-off. In cyberspace everyone can hear you scream. Just log on, vent, and hit send. — Film Criticism in The Chronicle of Higher Education

– The demise of The Exile began, as so many demises have in Russia, with an official letter. Faxed to the offices of the newspaper late on a Friday afternoon the spring before last from somewhere within the bowels of Rossvyazokhrankultura, the Russian Federal Service for Mass Media, Telecommunications, and Cultural Heritage Protection, it announced the imminent “conducting of an unscheduled action to check the observance of the legislation of the Russian Federation on mass media.” — The Exile in Vanity Fire

Exiled!

– As with any other species, human populations are shaped by the usual forces of natural selection, like famine, disease or climate. A new force is now coming into focus. It is one with a surprising implication — that for the last 20,000 years or so, people have inadvertently been shaping their own evolution. — Culture’s Role in Evolution in The New York Times

– Although it might seem unlikely that anyone would wonder whether the author of The Lord of the Rings was Jewish, the Nazis took no chances. When the publishing firm of Ruetten & Loening was negotiating with J. R. R. Tolkien over a German translation of The Hobbit in 1938, they demanded that Tolkien provide written assurance that he was an Aryan. Tolkien chastised the publishers for “impertinent and irrelevant inquiries,” and—ever the professor of philology— lectured them on the proper meaning of the term: “As far as I am aware none of my ancestors spoke Hindustani, Persian, Gypsy, or any related dialects.” As to being Jewish, Tolkien regretted that “I appear to have no ancestors of that gifted people.” — The Magicians in The Jewish Review of Books

– Milo Burke, the self-loathing failed painter who narrates Sam Lipsyte’s “The Ask,” fits squarely into this economic model. As the story begins, he is tenuously employed as a development officer for the arts program of a third-tier New York City university. A good decade removed from his salad days at a cozy liberal-arts college, Milo now works to perpetuate the system that creates the losers who naively assume they “could become the icons wearing sunglasses in the dorm hall posters of the future, pioneers of jackass phenomena, ancestor gods of cool.” — Sam Lipsyte in the LA Times

Video: Sam Lipsyte Reading

The Late-Great Hannah

Barry Hannah passed earlier this week. The literary world is aching. Hannah was a badass. We think that’s the best way to describe him. A motorcycle-riding, knife-wielding giant of American letters.

Two weeks ago we lamented the lack of regional distinction in recent literature. Hannah was the king of the Post-Modern South.

Here we are running an excerpt from an essay by novelist and critic Eric Miles Williamson as tribute to the late-great Hannah. — Brian Allen Carr

from Barry Hannah and the Postmodern South

III

Before becoming a scholar, a Professor of “Postmodern and Contemporary Literature”, I wanted to be a writer when I grew up. I earned graduate degrees in Creative Writing at two different universities, the University of Colorado and the University of Houston, and I published a few things here and there. But becoming a writer proved to be way too difficult, and so I chose the easy way out, the route any schmuck can take, and I re-branded myself a “scholar.” Don’t kid yourself: it’s a lot easier to get a job as a “critic” than as a writer. If you’re a writer, you need a book or even several books to even apply for a job.

So I wrote a few lame articles with the word “Postmodern” in the title, learned how to use the MLA Handbook for Writers of Research Papers, cut my hair, and stopped cursing so much. I switched from beer and Scotch to wine, and I pretended to care when someone started jabbering about the injustices of the patriarchal oppression of the white male canon. “I hate those white males, too! Henry James has had his run — it’s Kate Chopin’s turn!”

But in the days when I wanted to be a fiction writer, those foolish and naive 27 or so years, instead of reading the important stuff, the criticism, the theory, the articles by respected professors and by young and brilliant future theoretical superstars, I wasted my time reading through what Harold Bloom would call The Western Canon. That’s what the other silly, misguided, idiot-savant wanna-be writers were doing, after all. I was just an impressionable youth, eager to be like the writers, dolts who couldn’t tell bricolage from fromage, who wouldn’t recognize a [[(de)([cent]er(ed))]] signifier if it slapped them in the face and swiped their lunch money.

The canon of dead writers was easy to get right: it’d been the same gang for thousands of years, and even the list of great Modernist writers was already established by the time I was in graduate school. The tough decisions came when I had to decide what contemporary authors I was going to read. The literature professors were of little use recommending books—they were still reading the books their professors had told them to read, stuck on the Modernists, wasting their time on hacks like F. Scott Fitzgerald, the most recent copyright date on their bookshelves about 1969. The writing professors weren’t much use, either: they tended to recommend their friends’ books. At Colorado they recommended Fiction Collective authors and the Beats and Black Mountain Poets, and at Houston they recommended New Yorker and Paris Review authors.

Where we grad student wannabe writers discovered authors was from each other. Back then, in the 1980s, what the students were reading was Gravity’s Rainbow, JR, Raymond Carver, Cormac McCarthy, John Hawkes, Robert Coover, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Donald Barthelme, Peter Handke, Milan Kundera, Carlos Fuentes, Jorge Luis Borges, Nabokov, and Barry Hannah. We might have read all these authors, but it wasn’t the so-called “Postmodernists” — Coover and Pynchon and Barth and Barthelme and Gaddis—who influenced us. We saw them as clever fellows, to be sure, but moreso we understood them to be generators of onanistic spew, of masturbatory game-playing silliness. These are the authors, of course, who the critics latch onto (draw your own conclusions here, amigo). Instead of the institutionalized Postmodernists, the authors who most influenced us, who we imitated, who we wanted to be like, were Cormac McCarthy (Suttree and Blood Meridian), and Barry Hannah (Ray and Airships).

To say that Barry Hannah’s work is Postmodern would be redundant: born in 1942, Hannah was three years old when the nuclear weapons incinerated Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and is therefore clearly of the Postmodern generation. What makes Hannah interesting as a Postmodernist, however, is not just that he is the right age (otherwise, every other writer out there of a certain age would be equally interesting, and clearly they are not), but how Postmodern dread, angst, nausea (in Sartre’s sense) manifests itself in his fiction, and how Hannah’s work is clearly a Postmodernist updating up the Modernism of his fellow Oxford, Mississippian, William Faulkner, under whose shadow Hannah has written for decades.

The Modernism of Faulkner, dread-filled as it is, always concludes with hope. In Faulkner’s Nobel Prize Address, he writes,

I decline to accept the end of man. It is easy enough to say that man is immortal simply because he will endure: that when the last ding-dong of doom has clanged and faded from the last worthless rock hanging tideless in the last read and dying evening, that even then there will still be one more sound: that of his puny inexhaustible voice, still talking. I refuse to accept this. I believe that man will not merely endure: he will prevail.

Likewise, the last line of The Sound and the Fury, his great novel of the disintegration of the Compson family, is Dilsey’s statement, “They endured.” In A Fable Faulkner rips-off his Nobel Prize Address in a passage in which an old general describes his vision of Armageddon to a corporal:

It will not be someone firing bullets at him who for the moment doesn’t like him. It will be his own Frankenstein which roasts him alive with heat, asphyxiates him with speed, wrenches loose his still-living entrails in the ferocity of its prey-seeking stoop. So he will not be able to go along with it at all, though for a little while longer it will permit him the harmless delusion that he controls it from the ground with buttons. Then that will be gone too: years, decades then centuries will have elapsed since it last answered his voice: he will have even forgotten the very location of its breeding-grounds and his last contact with it will be a day when he will crawl shivering out of his cooling burrow to crouch among the delicate stalks of his dead antennae like a fairy geometry, beneath a clangorous rain of dials and meters and switches and bloodless fragments of metal epidermis, to watch the final two of them engaged in the last gigantic wrestling against the final and dying sky robbed even of darkness and filled with the inflectionless uproar of the two mechanical voices bellowing at each other polysyllabic and verbless patriotic nonsense. Oh yes, he will survive it because he has that in him which will endure even beyond the ultimate worthless tideless rock freezing slowly in the last red and heatless sunset, because already the next star in the blue immensity of space will already clamorous with the uproar of his debarkation, his puny and inexhaustible voice still talking, still planning; and there too after the last ding dong of doom had rung and died there will still be one sound more: his voice, planning still to build something higher and faster and louder’ more efficient and louder and faster than ever before, yet it too inherent with the same old primordial fault since it too in the end will fail to eradicate him from the earth. I don’t fear man. I do better: I respect and admire him. And pride: I am ten times prouder of that immortality which he does possess than ever he of that heavenly one of his delusion. But man and his folly—”

“Will endure,” the corporal said.

“They will do more,” the old general said proudly. “They will prevail.”

In Faulkner’s Modernist vision of the world, the Compsons, through broken, endure, Sutpen’s Hundred might be a shambles but Jim Bond, half-breed idiot, survives, and after Armageddon, mankind crawls out from the rubble and prevails.

This isn’t the case with Barry Hannah’s Postmodern South. Hannah’s South is not populated with people who remember the dignity of man, the hope of a future bleak as it might be. Barry Hannah’s South is populated with the destitute, the aimless, the horribles of an impoverished, all-too-romanticized (Faulkner’s partly to blame, Margaret Mitchell complicit as well), ignored and ridiculed hoard of wandering rednecks, liars inventing the world as they go, bigots, murderers, perverts, psychos, and each and all of these folks freighted with incurable existential emptiness and loneliness. Of course it’s incurable: they know not only will they not prevail, they won’t even endure. They, like us, are doomed, cursed to only live in the rubble of the ugly and irredeemable present. They, like us, are screwed.

Hannah’s short story, “Coming Close to Donna,” from his first collection, Airships (1978), illustrates this in spades. The narrator, Vince, and a girl named Donna are at a graveyard watching a fight between two boys, Hank and Ken. While Hank and Ken fight, Donna begins taking off her clothes. The two boys are Donna’s options for a future boyfriend. Once she’s naked, she tells Vince, “Warm me up, Vince. Do me. Or are you really a fag like they say?” She continues, “Come in me, you fag. . . . Don’t hurt my feelings. I want a fag to come in me.” Vince can’t bring himself to do it. Meanwhile, Hank and Ken keep fighting. Donna wants to screw, splays herself out on the ground. The boys hit to kill, and they do. They kill each other. Then Donna “goes to the two bodies and is absorbed in a tender unnatural act over the blue jeans of Hank and Ken.” When she finds the boys, dead, unresponsive, she says, “I can’t make anybody come! I’m no good!.” When Vince tries to coax her to leave the graveyard and the dead boys, she says, “Do me right now, Vince! It’s the only thing that makes sense.”

Six months later, Vince encounters Donna again. Now she’s a wasteoid on heroin, and she wants to go to the cemetery again. She says, “Climb me, mount me, fight for me, fuck me,” but instead of doing any of the above,

Vince picked up a neighboring tombstone with a great effort. It was an old thing, perhaps going back to the nineteenth century. I crushed her head with it. Then I fled right out of there.

Some of us are made to live for a long time. Others for a short time. Donna wanted what she wanted.

I gave it to her.

In a Postmodern world, death, like its ugly and preposterous cause, life, is meaningless: it’s just a given, and since there’s no afterlife, no God, no future, all that exists is the present. Donna: she sees her boyfriends killing each other, her sources of pleasure becoming extinguished, and so she seeks her pleasure from whatever’s near, in this case, a suspected homosexual. Her life is nothing, and so she becomes a heroin addict. She tries to recoup some semblance of a misguidedly better past, but it’s nothing, and so the narrator, in mercy, kills her. And not only does he put her out of her misery (which is incurable — it’s a Postmodern misery), but he confesses it to all of us. He’s going to be executed for killing Donna — but he doesn’t care. Why should he? His life, after all, is no better than Donna’s. Like all of us, he’s doomed. And he’s unhappy in the now, so why should he think it will be any better tomorrow? Better to check out, end the misery, than to go on even another day in the face of unutterable meaninglessness.

Postmodernism is not a style of writing. It’s an ontological and metaphysical mode, and we’re in it, and Barry Hannah is one of its primary spokesmen.

In another favorite of my graduate days, “Constant Pain in Tuscaloosa,” Hannah takes on the great levelers of race, class, and God, demonstrating how the lower classes and the South experience Postmodernism. In this story, the narrator, a nasty redneck bigot, harasses a black man for eating bananas, and the black man invites himself and his sister over to the redneck’s house for a meal. The redneck won’t admit it, but he’s delighted that they’re coming over — he is desperate for human contact of any kind, even if it’s with blacks, who he supposedly despises. The narrator accosts a preacher in the story, and says,

“Say, Doctor Campbell, I’m surrendering my heart to Jesus.”

He laid scrutiny on me. The few hairs he had left were oily and carefully set in a dramatic way.

“Tell you what, my son.” He laid hand on my shoulder. He whispered. “I’m not the person to talk to. I hate your guts, after what you did to that poor disk jockey.”

“He was a queer and it was an even fight,” I said. “He had a baseball bat and I had a TV antenna. On the roof there wasn’t anything else.”

“He’s still lying out in Druid Hospital.”

“I know where he is. I take beer to him under my coat. What about Jesus? I was surrendering my heart.”

“I’ve got to this position, Ellsworth. I don’t think Jesus wants you. He’s too dead to want. He was a hell of a sweet genius guy, but he’s dead. The only thing left is humanism. Are you humanistic?”

“Right on.”

“Precious are the hours we touch one another,” the son of a bitch said.

The Bible-beating South? Forget about it: the preacher hates your guts. And to him, Jesus is dead. There’s only humanism. We’re all we’ve got, and we’re about to be extinguished. At the story’s end, after the narrator has the hell whooped out of him by the black man with a banana and after the characters have had a few beers and some steaks, the narrator is going to sleep with the black man’s sister — with the black man’s reluctant approval. Because what is there in this miserable meaningless world of ours but temporary and vacuous pleasure? The best we can do in this Postmodern world is eat a steak, have a beer, and get an orgasm.

Why do we want instant gratification? Because if we don’t get it now, it might not be possible for us to get it in an hour. The world might not exist in an hour.

Hannah’s still got it going. His novel, Yonder Stands Your Orphan (2001), is a vicious and nihilistic as McCarthy’s Blood Meridian.

Yonder Stands Your Orphan is the story of a community of country folks being terrorized by Man Mortimer, an SUV driving, knife wielding, used-car selling pimp, murderer, and loan shark. Young, he looked like Fabian. Older, like Conway Twitty. He’s everything that’s wrong with America rolled into one despicable exaggeration of the bourgeois middle-class, a single-minded clot of torpor bent on accumulating money, real estate, SUV’s, sex, and the illusion of power that comes with the goodies. Nearly all the folks in the book owe him something, and he randomly and sporadically exacts payment with knives, guns, clubs, and anything else he can use to maim and kill. The body count in the novel is high, and the wounded appear with shocking regularity — a old man is beheaded, a woman kills her child (Mortimer’s) and then herself, youngsters are abused and oldsters maimed.

It’s a small community with a new sheriff, and everyone in town knows what’s going on except him, since nearly everyone has been victim to Mortimer. The sheriff, a man named Facetto, despises the place. Hannah writes, “He felt he reigned in a county which everyone of worth should have left decades ago, all breeds. He dealt with refuse, squatters, the ones gathered around their own nastiness, their own echoes, like night dogs.” A dignified old black veteran-turned-fisherman named Roman is equally disgusted: he says, “I used to be a man. People did what I said. I advanced under fire. I had dignity. I walked toward crowds with my head up. Now I hold hands with nonsense. Gnats of spite around my head. I do not know where the fight is or where to give up.”

Of course he doesn’t know that the fight is: he’s Postmodern. There is no fight. There is no dignity. There is no defeat. There is no victory. There is only the inevitable end.

Sidney Farté, an old coot who is gleeful when his father is killed by Man Mortimer because now Sidney will be sole proprietor of the bait and tackle shack, hates the land, too: “He had been in a position to improve himself and leave these counties for happier parts, but he had turned down each chance out of spite.” And a Cuban woman named Mimi who sings in a band on a riverboat casino, has resigned herself: “She had become the smells out here. It was no longer only decay but richer life, she understood. Soldiers, slaves, Indians, lost women, all under her in the earth. Same as Cuba, with a crown of living creatures and fat vegetation on it.”

The orphans of the novel’s title are taken in by a sado-masochistic couple and reared on a peninsula across the lake around which most of the action of the novel takes place. With best intentions, the couple try to bring the kids up right, feeding and clothing them, sheltering them from the nastiness of the world. The home for orphans becomes a Waco-like compound, the children armed with grenades, guns, and dynamite. And the children use it all. Postmodern Apocalyptic warriors. What do they have to lose?

As much as these characters dislike the land and each other, just as much they brim with love and compassion, though that love and compassion, ultimately, is of no existential worth beyond the absolutely now, as is the Postmodern condition. Couples find solace in each other, and children of neglectful parents find solace in each other and in the people who take them in. The swamp is as beautiful as it is menacing, and Hannah finds dignity, albeit meaningless dignity (or perhaps the only meaning dignity can now possibly have) amid the squalor that is, ultimately, life. He writes,

“Nobody had the right to touch the stories, the pictures, the silence. That was your due. Nobody could enter. No government was here. No phone calls, no mail, no knocks on the door. You saw old men on benches and you pitied them for all bereft, but you were wrong. They had the time of their life. The deaf ones even more so. Inside and away. They were inside a pure dream.”

The beauty found in loneliness is the best people can do. And the best beauty, the beauty most sublime, is the beauty of someone deaf, someone who’s physically checked out, who can’t hear. You want the perfect Postmodern life? Escape into “pure dream.”

Barry Hannah’s Postmodern South is not the Modernist South of William Faulkner. At the end of his “The Agony of T. Bandini” (which I published in Gulf Coast some 20 years ago) a Vietnam vet at the end of the story says,

I could sleep and make myself little but I always woke up the second anything anybody in range. I could smell them, my nose wake me up. I was on that tree crotch and had me a good limb with my honey and I start fucking her. They come over a hill five black pajamas in a row across like they was hunting rabbits. I blow all they heads off. Then I let myself down and each and every one I stomp they balls. But one of them a teenage girl just the top of her head blown back. I commence giving it to her mouth when I hold her up by the shoulders. That was the best I ever had.

This is not a good world. This is not the dignified though messy and ugly world of William Faulkner. This is a world of human degradation and shame and vileness more horrible than anything in human history. This is our Postmodern world, a world in which copulating with pulsing and bleeding skulls gives pleasure, relief, consolation in light of the ubiquitous alternative—our sure and impending obliteration.

Barry Hannah’s South is a metaphor for the United States, as was Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha County for the Modernist USA of a generation ago. But Hannah’s Postmodern South is not Faulkner’s Modernist South. For some reason we’ve looked to the South in America for our grand metaphor, whether it be Richard Wright or Flannery O’Connor or Cormac McCarthy or Bobbie Ann Mason or Faulkner or Barry Hannah. The Southern writers, we’ve taken them as our spokespersons. But our world has changed for the ugly, and there’s no going back, and it’s no longer regional—it’s global. The entire planet is doomed, and we all know it, and Barry Hannah, in delineating his “little postage stamp of earth,” expresses the Postmodern mindset as well, perhaps better, than any writer of this our Postmodern age.

You want Postmodernism? Don’t read Pynchon — he’s just jacking off in despair. Don’t spend your time reading the criticism, as erudite and witty as it is, of William H. Gass. John Barth? Can anyone say they actually enjoy reading that garbage? And what is the new Fiction Collective other than a bunch of coffee house professorial poseurs? What happened to New Directions, to Grove? Where’s our Beckett?

Read real despair. Read Barry Hannah. Read the rest of the contemporaries who still write mimetic fiction. You’ll find their despair to be much more real than one of Coover’s characters going up and down in an elevator, one of Barthelme’s characters scaling a glass mountain. The Postmodernism that’s out there, the Postmodernism of Chris Offutt, of Paul Ruffin, of Larry Fondation, of Charlie Smith, of Marilynne Robinson, that’s the stuff of dread.

Barry Hannah’s our Postmodern writer of the South, and by extension, our Postmodern American writer. He’s the stuff of our fiction.

_________________________________________

Eric Miles Williamson

Eric Miles Williamson is an American novelist and literary critic, member of the Board of Directors of the National Book Critics Circle, editor of American Book Review, Boulevard, and Texas Review. He is currently a professor of English at the University of Texas-Pan American. He can be found online at Eric Miles Williamson. “Barry Hannah and the Postmodern South” originally ran in The Arkansas Review and will be included in the collection Say it Hot, forthcoming from Texas Review Press.

Olde New England Towne

We know what it’s like to feel a seismic shift when reading groundbreakingly good poetry. And with all the talk of earthquakes lately, we thought now would be an opportune moment to consider some tremors of the literary variety. Before we get started, lets take stock and appreciate the movement of the earth and the geologic construction of words. Or as Edward Hitchhock says, “Shall not geology, which is the first science in affording scope for the imagination, be brought into favor with the Muses, and afford themes for the Poet?” Yes, Sir Ed, let’s be taken away with metaphors and metamorphic rock talk. Sifting the interwebs, we dug up this poem written about the 1653 New England earthquake…

Poem on the 1653 New England Earthquake

by Reverend Peter Bulkeley

The solid earth, before an angry God,
Shakes at the terrors of His awful nod.
The balance of the mighty world is lost—
Its vast foundations, in confusion toss’d,
Through all the hollows of its deepest caves
Rock like a vessel foundering in the waves.
Volumes of sulphurous air, with booming sound,
Burst through the gorges of the parted ground.

The earth doth heave, with groanings of distress,
Beneath the weight of human sinfulness.
Shall not our eyes drop penitential rain,
When all creation travaileth in pain?
Great God! who shall not fear Thee in the hour
When heaven and earth are trembling at Thy power!
Father, to nature’s tumult whisper peace,
And bid the wickedness of man to cease!

Did that get your bones rattling? Are you ready for something with even more voltage? Check out this snippet from John Ashberry’s poem called …by an earthquake

Running up to the girl, Alvin stumbles and loses his coins.
In a nearby dell, two murderers are plotting to execute a third.
Beatrice loves Alvin before he married.
B, second wife of A, discovers that B-3, A’s first wife, was
unfaithful.

Known For His Aftershocks

It’s likely this poem has nothing at all to do with earthquakes, which makes us like it even more. It’s sooo Ashberry.

Elsewhere, a tectonic plate bridging poetry and earthquakes exists over in the UK. A line-up of poets were caught raising foreign currency for Haiti last night (are prose writers raising coin for Chile?). But what’s most impressive about this fundraiser is how poetry “changes nothing” and yet is able to produce an earthquake-inspired event with a spectacular gathering of poetic minds.

All of this reminds us that life is fragile and in the end what really matters is an individual’s commitment to his or her art. For poets, when the ground splits and buildings tumble, a sharp memory can come in handy (and, let’s face it, there’s nothing like a smarty-pants scholar who can rattle off a poem when the occasion calls for it.). Milton’s Paradise Lost was passed down through oral tradition and any great poet worth her salt will have an impressive hard drive of memorized poems — after all, what are you going to rely on when an earthquake shatters your Kindle? — Lori Huskey

Video: Ivory Madison Rreads at Litquake

by Stephanie Dickinson

“And the thug takes the girl over to New Jersey in the cab and kills her and rapes her and does all these terrible things to her in front of his prostitute girlfriend. The thug is so stupid, he uses her cell phone, and the cops trace it back to him.” — Bill O’Reilly

#1

Even walking two steps behind you there is still so much sidewalk and many eyes. Blue peacocks. “Don’t look at the stores,” you say. “They have cameras.” The video can capture what I see–the murdered girl riding between your shoulder blades, your thumbprints in her neck. Her white skirt and silver belt. Her red tears. Cold. That’s why you’re wearing sweatpants in ninety degrees. You’re ice. Because she is. You keep cracking your knuckles, the fig cookies smack, your tongue paddle mashing seeds and saliva. Since we left New Jersey you can’t seem to stop eating. Fruits, nuts, slugs. A dim sky hangs starless between buildings. Ticker tape Times Square. BODY OF MISSING NEW JERSEY GIRL FOUND IN DUMPSTER. News chases the lit up letters into the blank. Legs fishnetted, see-through girls walk by in bursts of perfume. Lilac. Rose. Diamond nose studs in the gray face of the night. You stink like homicide.

#2

“Wait!” I call out. “I need to go in here.” Before you can stop me I dart into Designer Perfumes. Rustling manes of fragrances rush at me. The stronger ones, the weaker. Others wait for me to go toward them. I smell like grilling sweat, like soy sauce and Clorox. Like a bird at the base of its quills. I smell like a dead girl. Not blood. There wasn’t any just those two red tears trickling from her eyes. I think I started my period. I crossed a line.

#3

Samba Heat. Jasmine. Peony. I spray it on my wrist skin. My underarms. I want to crawl into the bottle. Live inside pink glass. Water lily. Black Currant.

I can always visit the long ago. I spray on avatar roses, see the white throated woman back in my past. Her name was Cyndi. She let my father’s friends kiss her. “All of them are peacocks,” she said, “resting it on the ground.” Please stay, I thought, don’t go away. She leaned against the dresser. The perfume decanter was the prettiest thing in the room. She fingered the cloudy glass of the stopper ball where the scent left was tawny and dried. She touched it behind my ears. “You’re a sweet thing.” Then she hugged me. “I wish your da would let me take you home.” Cyndi’s long brown hair felt like feathers, soft and warm. I wanted the stopper ball. Perfume like crushed leaves held a precious sweetness of the tree. More Samba. Perfume makes me invisible. Lilies and mint. Nutmeg and musk. This one is cedar and gardenia. I spray all of them on. I make a mortuary.

#4

“You have to pay for that bottle,” the clerk says, stepping out from behind the elevated check-out. He pushes aside the perfume fog. He’s tall and Indian, handsome with black hair that looks too silky to be real. People are smaller when the cash register isn’t between you and them. But he holds himself like he’s the owner. “You pay, then get out.” He passes a hand over his rich black hair. Like black ice cream. What flavor would that be? I tell him I don’t have money. “You take your dirt. Go.” I see my eyes floating in the round mirror above the counter but where is my face?

#5

There I am on TV. Shoplifting Network. They’re all from Bangladesh in the delis, working twelve hour shifts, and young dark-eyed guys who I smile at and who always smile (shyly) back. No matter if Indians or Koreans own the store, they get Bangladeshis. They work, they keep on working. Fourteen, sixteen hours. Whatever it is that lies behind them, they keep saying “next,” their fingers quick on the register. Starving owls bring fish and frogs into the nest. Now you enter the store, stand out in your red sweats, red hoodie, sneakers brand new from Payless Shoes. You strut like a peacock in full array. Each eye, gold, green, purple. “How about a hand job from this girl for two six-packs of Heineken and a box of fig cookies? How about it, brother?” Now you badger him, wanting a sandwich too. Ham and cheese with oil and onions and a pickle on the side. Will you bind a wild bull fast with its ropes in the furrows? The counter boy freezes, the smile still on his lips. I smooth my blond hair. Now a couple sidles in, tall and dreadlocked. In uptown leather pants and claret-colored velvet vests. Ethiopian gazelles. I clutch fig cookies, counting out dimes. The nice-faced boy shakes his head. “No charge.” Then he says, “next,” and the gazelles step to the counter. Meals in the Ethiopia of long ago–the tongues of flamingos and the brains of peacocks. Outside on the street the heat presses down, breathes what it wants of us, and blows stale half air at our backs.

#6

“Pick up the pace,” you say. “Two more avenues to Port Authority. We’re going to find a hotel in East Harlem. Get our faces off the street. You’re just as guilty as me. Remember that. What are you gawking at?” You stroke your goatee so pointed and black it could be made out of coal. “They find me they find you. Understand?” The heat wants to peel the faces from the canyon of glass, the billboards with the beautiful huge people peering down. “I gotta make a call.” You lean against the building, talk on the girl’s cell phone.

#7

Port Authority depot swarms. The pretzel sellers are burning dough on the corner, twisting it. You want two with mustard on it. First we have to make money. Through the electronic doors and down the escalator to the bus gates. You walk behind me. There at gate 73 the door from the loading zone opens and a stream of weary people straggle in. In baggy jeans and purple muumuus, in bedroom slippers. The overweight driver, a white-haired guy with a cigarette in his mouth, climbs down from the bus. You approach him. “Want a date?” The driver glances over at me, takes a puff of his cigarette. Nods. He throws down his smoke, re-boards and I follow him. He doesn’t sit in the driver’s seat, but closes the door and leads me a few seats back. “Sweetheart, make it quick. They’re going to be cleaning in here.” I take down his zip and reach in and bring him out. I lick my lips because men like that. Like I’m hungry for it. I can inhale the three hundred mile long drive. I think of my favorite red knit sweater dress with a V cut away back. I’m kneeling between an empty can of Vienna sausages and a Burger King Santa Fe Salad. I’m tasting him. It’s a smallish thing. He’s breathing normally, and then he’s panting. Afterward, he touches my hair. “You look like a nice girl,” he says, raising his zip. He has beautiful blue eyes in a flat tire of a face. “Here’s an extra twenty. Get away from that thug.”

#8

You’re on the girl’s cell again. You beckon me, a finger wag. You take the money, peel off a five dollar bill. “Go get me two pretzels. Hurry.”

#9

The pretzel man. His eyes like burnt dough look out of a long thin face. “Two with mustard,” I say. He slips the crinkly paper under each, lifts the mustard bottle and a ribbon of yellow wiggles from its nostril. The brown man fingers the smoke, the miniature world where his hands live. I don’t think I’ll fetch two pretzels for you. I tuck the paper sack under my arm, pull dough apart and scatter the pieces. Pigeons scuttle around my feet. Pigeons are my favorites. Traipsing this way and that on their red legs. Their feathers muted orange blue gray radiance, the most beautiful things on this earth. “That one,” the pretzel man laughs, pointing at the dark grey pigeon with rainbow neck. “He comes everyday. Fat as a cat.” The pit of my stomach is caught in gnarl and gristle. I look down the street. I take a bite, lick mustard and watch the big one eat.

#10

I never knew my mother. My father laughed and told me I was hatched. For she leaves her eggs to the earth itself. And in the dust she keeps them warm.

#11

When I was three and four my room held one window. The building’s air shaft looked in, although sun never did. When cold hunched its shoulder against the glass, pigeons huddled on the ledge. In bitter snow they flew to warm themselves, I watched them fall into the air and then fly up. Others fell, their wings frozen, didn’t open. I couldn’t see to the bottom of the shaft where pigeons died. I carried my blanket to the window to warm them. I tried to push the glass up but it was nailed shut. Sometimes Cyndi brought me pretzels. In a little box the pretzels rested side by side, not twisted but straight as sticks. We counted them together. “Twenty five,” she’d say and her voice sounded like a purr. She would get down on her knees, push aside all her smoky brown hair and bite and tease me. Her lips outlined in dark roses and bruises from all the men kisses. Once she brought a rubber ball and six-tipped metal things. I put one in my mouth and tried to chew it. Cyndi laughed. “For fucks sake, you’re more like a little animal, aren’t you?” She took the jack from me. “I’m going to teach you.” We sat on the green rug with the rose in the center and bounced the ball. Onesies. Twosies. “Poor little animal you don’t even talk.” She let me climb into her lap to snuggle there and wrap the warm brown hair through my fingers. “Your da was a Shakespearean actor before he became a pimp and he can’t put words in his own child’s mouth.” After she left I stood at the window. White pigeons roosted on the ledge. I kissed them through the glass. Coo roo. I talked back in their language. Coo roo. Coo roo. The white pigeon with blue rainbow iridescence at his neck told me I was their friend.

#12

I give the pretzel man a dollar tip and just then police cars pull up alongside 42nd Street. An NYPD van stops at the curb and policemen jump out. I search for mustard in the corner of my mouth. Brawny men in blue uniforms rush into the Port Authority. Hands at their belts, guns. Another car squeals up. More blue men. I walk away. You are a peacock roasted and served its own plumage.

#13

I keep walking. Blue Ruin, the leather bar with go-go dancers in mesh thongs, flat beer in a chlorine-scented dark. In the window of a bookstore Barrack and Michelle Obama paper dolls and cut outs for sale. Smith’s Bar & Grill. If I had money I would go inside. I keep walking toward the light, stop, take another bite. The pretzel is good, but the mustard is better. I tear off more bread. A checkered brown pigeon hurries toward the crumbs. Do you know why a pigeon will eat almost anything? It has only 37 taste buds. A person has 9,000. Cyndi told me that long ago.

#14

I keep on moving toward Broadway, past the theaters with their smoky exteriors. Phantom of the Opera and Monty Python’s Spamalot. Frankie and Johnny’s Steakhouse. Two Guardian Angels patrol a corner of the sidewalk and when I pass by one of them winks. A police car careens down Eighth Avenue. I feel the red breath of its siren. It passes through me like a red knife. Terrible is the taste of the forbidden. The girl whose whole body hundreds of flamingo tongues covered.

#15

The dead girl was a bakery tier of cupcakes in fortresses of frosting. Marzipan peaches and strawberries. I’m an order of coffee. Chicory here, that harsh bitter brew made from bark. I’ll keep walking. I’ll never stop. I picture my history teacher. I think of the tank girls who volunteered for the Battle of Stalingrad, the partisan girls, Zoya and Masha, one hanged by a thin noose and left to slowly strangle, another high from an ash tree, her feet floating out of her shoes. Girls who went to their deaths without batting an eyelash. I think of the girl in the dumpster. Why hadn’t I run screaming from the room?

________________________________________

Stephanie Dickinson has lived in Iowa, Texas, Louisiana and now in New York. Her work appears in Dirty Goat, Oranges and Sardines, Hotel Amerika, Gargoyle, Fourteen Hills, among others. Her novel Half Girl, winner of the Hackney Award (Birmingham-Southern) is published by Spuyten Duyvil. Her stories have been reprinted in New Stories from the South, The Year’s Best, 2008 and 2009 www.stephaniedickinson.net