Reviews of the Ephemeral

Posts Tagged ‘non-fiction’

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A Fiction Round-Up 2012

In End of year round-up on December 23, 2012 at 5:35 pm

-Decided by Richard T. Watson-

‘Tis the season to be making lists and round-ups of the previous year, so it’s just the right time for a look back over the year for Sabotage Reviews and our fiction coverage. Arguably, we could do this at any time of year, but it seems more fashionable in December.

Our Poetry Editor, (now Dr) Claire Trévien, has already given her best bits and highlights from Sabotage’s poetry coverage, which you can read here. Now it’s my turn.

Following last year’s pattern of giving a ‘Top Ten’ [or Three] of most-viewed reviews, I’ve prepared a list of the most successful fiction reviews of Sabotage’s 2012. The publications might be considered as Christmas presents for that special reader in your life…? Just a thought.

#1 I Wrote This For You
A printed selection of posts from Jon Ellis’ and Ian Thomas’s blog I Wrote This For You, which the two men have composed through a process of intercontinental collaboration. There’s a narrative and a theme, but much of it is left up to the reader – Ian Thomas claiming that ”There’s no story I can tell you that is as powerful as the story you can tell yourself”. Our reviewer, Ian Chung, praised the way that ”Thomas and Ellis seem to have distilled something of what it means to remain profoundly human in a digital society”.

#2 Acquired for Development By…
A hyper-local collection of poetry, fiction and non-fiction based around and inspired by the London Borough of Hackney, and published by Influx Press. Our reviewer, John McGhee said: ”The collection neatly pinpoints some of the most critical tensions in modern urban life – tradition versus innovation, the real versus the perceived, the modern versus the post-modern – and sees how these play out in a borough perceived as both lawless and cool.”

#3 Armchair/Shotgun #3
Following the success of Armchair/Shotgun #2 in this year’s Saboteur Awards, their third instalment has also been popular. Our reviewer, Rory O’Sullivan, had this to say of the New York-based collection of poetry, pictures and short stories: ”The magazine manages to embrace so many art forms and yet remain a predominantly literary offering; storytelling is at the heart of literature, and indeed central to this publication’s mission statement”.

On a more subjective and personal note (as if the previous paragraphs have been really objective), I was pleased that the winner of this year’s Saboteur Awards in May was the second issue of Armchair/Shotgun, a review from Sabotage’s Fiction stable, and that their third issue also got a very positive review. We also got a rather lovely mention over on the Guardian website, thanks to Dan Holloway.

If you’re looking for more round-ups of Sabotage activity this year, why not have a look at the results of this year’s Saboteur Awards?

This is also a good time to thank all of our reviewer team for their hard work in the past twelve months, and to thank you all for supporting the independent and often low-budget publishing we cover on Sabotage. So thank you all. Well done you.

Oh, and have a happy Christmas.

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‘Acquired for Development by…’ A Hackney Anthology

In anthology on May 30, 2012 at 10:39 am

- Reviewed by John McGhee-

“In recent years Hackney has become synonymous with London Cool,” says Invest in Hackney. “Hackney – a crime infested craphole,” counters Your City’s Worst District. Until the new Overground line connected east London to south, my own preconceptions about Hackney lay somewhere between these two extremes.

Acquired for Development by... A Hackney Anthology cover

Clapton. Hoxton. Dalston. Homerton. Haggerston. Shoreditch. Hackney Wick. Hackney Marshes. Stoke Newington. The polarities and paradoxes of Hackney’s districts are surveyed in Acquired for Development By…, an anthology of contemporary fiction, non-fiction and poetry from Influx Press. The stories in Acquired for… are inspired by and set in Hackney and their writers are Hackney citizens by birth or residence. Taken together, these pieces reveal an original cultural history and a leftfield psychogeography of the borough – and an unsettling blueprint for its future. The collection is structured by locality and there are strong indications it would be best read with a copy of the London A-Z at hand.

The non-fiction works particularly well, especially Tim Burrows’ ‘Dalston Kittiwakes’, a sprawling exploration of random connections between places and events centred on the Four Aces reggae club, demolished five years ago to make way for a multi-million pound regeneration of Dalston Square. Burrows avoids making his subject matter feel too insular and inward-looking, and instead chooses to meander through Scotland and Northumbria, wandering as far as Egypt, Jamaica and America’s west coast: a gloriously circuitous narrative. Nell Frizzell’s profile of the River Lea’s canal boat dwellers, ‘Rivers of Change’, is a charming, succinct documentary of a small-scale battle between boaters and the bureaucrats of British Waterways, of lives soundtracked by early morning ‘jaggering coots’. Natalie Hardwick does her best Louis Theroux impersonation for ‘Alevism and Hackney’, an enquiring, sincere portrait of Dalston’s Turkish community.

Slam and performance poets are well represented. Sam Berkson’s ‘Hackney Numbers’ mixes the urban genial with the urban ominous to great effect: kids, neighbours, booze, house parties and violence. There is a chance to revisit Molly Naylor’s sparky monologue Whenever I Blow Up I Think Of You, with two pertinent extracts reprinted here. In Siddhartha Bose’s ‘Wicklove’, memories of the ‘performed bohemia’ of a summer festival sizzle and tumble and Bose’s lines dazzle:

Chicken-shopped, corner-kebabed, glimmer dereliction, Hackney
Wick – chromatic – fizzes, bobs, pops in soap bubbles, like tube-
travellers on a plunkt escalator.

There is a haiku sequence, urgent like graffiti; perceptive flâneurs reconnoitring ‘Dalston Lane’ and ‘Dark Island: Wallis Road 09.03.11′; and a warm-hearted memoir of growing up between Vicky Park and the Murder Mile. There is much wit, darkness and variety in this poetic selection.

Within the constraints of their Hackney setting, the short stories and flash fictions manage to be wonderfully eclectic. At the heart of the anthology is ‘Tautologies’ by Gary Budden, a detouring commentary on identity, the passing of time and the self-contradictions intrinsic to living an art life in Hackney:

I took a certain uncomfortable pleasure in the knowledge that my lifestyle, or at least
part of it, would be considered by some as worthless and pathetic. Derided as left-wing
posturing, or the sad trappings of an adolescence that really should have been let go of.

The impact of passing time on pleasure-seeking lifestyles is also considered in Gareth Rees’ funny and sinister ‘A Dream Life of Hackney Marshes’. This story transcends its high concept – a man falls in love with an electricity pylon – to be a memorable take on the destabilising effect of ‘the pram in the hall’. In a similarly darkly comic style, David Dawkins’ ‘A Hackney Triptych’ comprises three twisty anecdotes that only pretend to be unconnected. Other pieces stray further from the everyday into the absurd. Andrea Watts’ ‘All Gone’ is a modern parable pivoting on a bizarre metamorphosis. Amongst the flash fiction, I most enjoyed Kieran Duddy’s ‘Demolition: Clapton Park Estate 1993′, a snapshot of a life-changing double towerblock blowdown.

Perhaps most ambitious are the three dystopias: ‘The Battle of Kingsland Road’ by Paul Case, ‘The Finest Store’ by Kit Caless and ’2061′ by Ashlee Christoffersen. All three are entertaining, if somewhat broad, hyperbolic extrapolations. ‘The Battle of Kingsland Road’ documents a future clash between rival Stoke Newington and Hoxton militias through manifestos, memos and transcripts – more parody than serious post-riot commentary. I am a huge fan of the original The Twilight Zone and felt the class-and-consumerism satire ‘The Finest Store’ could have sat perfectly next to the likes of classic TZs like The After-Hours and The Fever. ’2061′ cleverly plays off different interpretations of the word ‘estate’ (a tract of Council housing, or a slave plantation). Whilst its economic analysis is debateable, ’2061′ commits fully to its sinister hypotheses, its chilling vision.

Acquired for… is a chorus of rich and diverse east London voices. The collection neatly pinpoints some of the most critical tensions in modern urban life – tradition versus innovation, the real versus the perceived, the modern versus the post-modern – and sees how these play out in a borough perceived as both lawless and cool.

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Curbside Quotidian #3

In Magazine, online magazine on August 17, 2011 at 6:48 pm

-Reviewed by Ian Chung-

There is a range of strong and enjoyable work to be found in Issue 3 of Curbside Quotidian, although the featured artwork in particular is quite diverse, and not all of it may appeal. Personally, I found the two strongest to be Inge Hoonte’s Simulated Travel and Eleanor Bennett’s Sleep Anywhere. The former is a very simple black surface, over which text marches from left to right and five dotted arrows run through the text from top to bottom. The visual impact verges on being clinically sparse, yet pay closer attention and details like how the dotted arrows cut through ‘i’s in the text will emerge, evoking the deeper organising principles underpinning the artwork. The crux of the piece then seems to be the last line of text, ‘get immobility bonus for not flying anywhere’, as Hoonte is interested in ‘how notions of privacy, identity, and behavioral routines shape the tension between reaching out and keeping one’s distance in interpersonal communication and physicality’.

Visually speaking, Bennett’s Sleep Anywhere is the complete opposite of Hoonte’s piece. The colours here are lush and vibrant, but what is most striking is that brilliant blue iris staring out of the top-right quadrant of the artwork. The other eye is not exactly obscured by leaf litter, but because it is still cast in shadow, what is a beautiful image is given a subtly disquieting feel, intentionally or otherwise, as if there were something off-kilter about it that yet cannot be pinned down with any certainty. This juxtaposition of moods finds an echo in one of the poems, Daniel Fitzsimmons’s ‘Underfoot’, which opens with the violently visceral (but sonically pitch-perfect in its alliteration) ‘A dead cardinal is crushed crimson’, yet closes with a measure of wistfulness:

‘and the swift-footed commuters

slowed for a moment to wonder

if the photos hanging on the walls

upstairs were black and white.’

The editors of Curbside Quotidian must also be commended for their lively sense of humour, which surely played a part in their choosing to publish a poem like Kevin Heaton’s ‘Castaway’. Poems concerning literary rejection may run the risk of sounding bitter, but Heaton’s poem deftly avoids this by approaching rejection from a subtly different perspective. Rather than writing a poem about rejection from the poet’s point of view, he goes a step further and imagines a poet rejecting a literary magazine’s request that he take out a subscription. Substitute a few nouns here and there, and the poem would read like any polite form rejection from an editor, which detractors might say is too gimmicky, but as a one-off, I find it quite ingenious. The shape of the poem on the screen also plays on this familiarity with rejection by editors, with indents drawing attention to phrases like ‘thoroughly / reviewed the work’ and ‘lacking / in laudable characteristics’.

It is in the fiction offerings though, that Issue 3 of Curbside Quotidian really shines. The element of humour is again displayed in a story like Yaki Margulies’s ‘Failed Expectations’, which imagines what would happen if God actually came back to Earth and started living a celebrity lifestyle, only to become fed up with humanity all over again. Zealots will probably take offense, but more level-headed believers should be able to appreciate the satire, especially given the rise of megachurches and their celebrity pastors. Also carrying on the religious theme is Christine Utz’s ‘Ingénue: A Girl in Three Parts’. The three-part structure of the story may be a nod to the concept of the divine Trinity, but its subject matter is strictly mortal. The love stories that unfold grow progressively weirder, and by the third section ‘3. The Herpetologist’, the narrator is in a relationship with what is clearly stated to be a lizard. Even leaving aside the metaphorical implications of shedding one’s skin (‘To ask him to claw me so my new skin could emerge, too.’), this narrative hangs together precisely because it is never self-conscious about its oddity, allowing the story to coast smoothly to its end.

On the other hand, Danny Lalonde’s ‘\A Simple Function\’ deliberately fractures language, repeatedly defining (or appearing to define) specific words at scattered intervals. There is something almost schizophrenic in the way these definitions are mixed together with the parsing of grammatical functions, snatches of Robert Frost’s ‘The Road Not Taken’, and the refrain ‘a space and then a line’. This effect is heightened by the story’s being narrated in the second person, a relatively uncommon choice, but which impels the reader to inhabit the story as it is being read. Finally, it is also worth pointing out that Nick Kowalczyk has an excellent non-fiction piece in Issue 3. ‘Dispatches From Home’ details through a mixture of anecdote and reportage Kowalczyk’s relationship to his hometown of Lorain, Ohio, and is an excerpt from a longer work that I would very much like to see in its completion.

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The Write Place at the Write Time

In online magazine on July 31, 2010 at 10:04 am

- Reviewed by Liam Jones -

The Write Place at the Write Time is a quarterly online literature zine, edited by Nicole M. Bouchard. It hopes to immerse the reader in thought-provoking writing from previously unpublished writers to more established writers.

At first glance this online zine seems so simple: the layout of the website is not too flashy. However, it is multi-faceted, easy on the eye and it is easy to navigate through its sections of commentary, interviews, fiction and poetry. The simplicity suggests humility and you can only wonder what it has in store for you.

The message on the home page grabs you and lulls you into comfort:

‘Imagine that you are seated comfortably in a chic café with the décor of your choice. In the time it takes you to consume the generous warm mug of coffee or tea cradled between your hands, you can step into another world, abandon your senses and delve into another space and time.’

Each page has its own featured artwork that adds to this atmosphere and compliments the work on show. From abstract painting such as Jim Fuess’ Wave and Sand to oil paintings of landscapes such as The Farm by Hermes Hernandez.

The poetry presented is extremely poignant and aims to grab the reader’s heart strings and pull them. Denise Bouchard’s In the Land of Dementia gives an account of a daughter whose mother has Dementia. It is an emotional portrait of the problems that face not only the person with Dementia but also their family:

‘As I leave, the critical judgments rain down on me from
The new guard
Untruths only they could conceive

I’d rescue every single one of the inhabitants if I could,
But the scary thing is once you are assigned to Dementia,
You can never leave’

The fiction section features more than a fair few of great stories, all meaningful, accessible and lacking pretention. The work ranges from Jeff Tompkins’ roadtrip in ‘Chutes and Ladders’ to the sharp ‘Killing the Writer’s Block’ by Mayra Calvani.

Other than the fiction and poetry sections, the website offers other sections such as ‘Our Stories’: non-fiction, accounts of serendipitous happenings, or just musings on every-day life. For instance, there is SuzAnne C. Cole’s description of her writing life as an addiction she can’t help:

‘So here goes:  I have a tendency to use people; I’m friendly and a good listener until I’ve soaked up all their quirks and motivations and heard their stories, and then, I discard them like used tissues.’

The website has a section called the Writers’ Craft Box where it helps with resources and inspiration. It gives recommended reading lists for things such as ‘On Description’ and ‘On Beginnings’, all hoping to help writers in their practice and guide them down new avenues.

They also offer a contest that gives you a choice of three options and you must write to a certain word limit about this. For example:

Contest 1-  There are three objects a century old in a drawer of the antique writing desk you purchased:  a key, a broken locket, and rusty-edged letter opener.  In 500 words or less, create a scene that played out in the room which first held the desk a century ago and explain the items’ relationship to one another.

This online zine is a little gem. It has everything that a zine should offer from great poetry and fiction to help and advice for writers either struggling with writers block or just looking for new research tools and methods.

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‘Markets like Wide Open Mouths’ by Tori Truslow

In Pamphlets on July 14, 2010 at 10:50 pm

Tori Truslow’s ‘Markets like Wide Open Mouths’ is not yet an anthology of writing and photography from Bangkok that you can purchase or procure (unless you ask her very nicely). I say ‘yet’ because I don’t doubt that it will get snapped up in the near future by a discerning publisher. In the meantime it is a thirty page photocopied and stapled black and white booklet with a scrap book aesthetic.

Sprinkled with photography (this aspect suffers the most from the photocopying sadly) Truslow’s offering concentrates on six locations or aspects of Bangkok: the Old City moat, Charoen Krung, The Temple Fair, Lumphini Park, The Museum and Songatews. In these explorations, Truslow is understandably fascinated by the layers of mythology, history and contemporary life that make-up a place:

‘The canal’s a groove in the century’s surface at my feet, and I fancy that if I started from there and peel away this veneer, this today, the memories of the place as it was would spring up in its place, that it’s all still here under the concrete’

This relationship between the present and the (sometimes legendary) past in Bangkok is, I feel, the core of the anthology and one which Truslow strives to present to the reader in all its complexity. At times though, she is in danger of leaving the reader at shore so familiar is she with her material. This is a problem that could be easily resolved by a few more introductory sentences to tame the pile-up of unfamiliar descriptions.

Mixed in with these set pieces, Truslow also includes day/night fragments, impressions of the city as the sun rises or sets. These are my favourite sections for letting me ‘live’ the city. Truslow has a magic turn of phrase, she writes in Morning #1 for instance: ‘yesterday’s overheated engines are cold, sleeping or just warmed up’. She acts as a people magpie picking out the idiosyncrasies of individuals to capture a place: ‘Thai men drinking icy water, one flipping through a magazine of muscle-rippling guys in tight underpants’.

Truslow’s Bangkok comes across in this work as a culturally rich, touristy, buzzing, cosmopolitan, ghost-infested and endlessly fascinating city. In her hands, even a bus journey becomes extraordinary. It is difficult to review a work that is still rather exclusive, but if the above words attract you in any way let me point you to the next best thing: Truslow’s flâneur blog of Bangkok from which much of the writing in the booklet comes from.

Tori Truslow also blogs and writes about fiction here

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The Battered Suitcase – Spring 2010

In online magazine on May 30, 2010 at 10:21 pm

I should first make clear that this is a biased review. My short story ‘The Chameleon’ was published in The Battered Suitcase in December 2008. The Press behind The Battered Suitcase, Vagabondage Press is also responsible for nurturing the Little Episodes Arts Community, a project I have been following with interest. It aims to bring together artists, writers, and performers who have suffered or are suffering from mental illness and produce kick-ass art. Thirdly, I love the word ‘Vagabondage’ and think that ‘Battered Suitcase’ is a wonderful title. I’m jealous they nabbed them first.

The Battered Suitcase is an online ‘zine, and you have to admire its sheer bravado in producing a 167-page monster. After all, aren’t we internauts supposed to have the attention span of a goldfish? Much like a suitcase, you don’t have to unload its contents unto the floor in one go – you can pick out the Short Shorts firsts, and from there progress to the Short Stories, Non-Fiction, the Novellas, Poetry, and Art. I can’t pretend I’ll give each work the attention it deserves, it would take up too much time. Instead I’ll offer some quick arbitrary reviews of a few categories that will hopefully leave you wanting some more and send you flying to the Battered Suitcase – Spring 2010.

Short Shorts

In the Short Shorts Category two tales caught my eye. First, I’ve picked ‘The Greedy Dress’ by Melinda Giordono for its cruel sensuality. Only three paragraphs long, Giordono’s story manages to make the wearing of a dress deliciously macabre. I am not surprised to read in the biography that Giordono has been published in Danse Macabre. This piece of flash fiction fits in well with their aesthetic:

‘The unyielding prison of fabric pressed and bruised her skin like selfish fingers.’

The dress and its wearer are caught in an abusive relationship: ‘But it must love her, she reasoned, because it made her beautiful’. It’s a well-worn path that Giordono is treading on, but she fortunately handles The Morality subtly enough that it doesn’t overcome the tale.

In contrast, in the same category, there is ‘Balloon’ by Lydia Ship. ‘Balloon’ is a  cautionary tale of a man whose head ‘grew slightly puffy, as if retaining water’ the more books he read. The inflation is so extreme that the man has trouble keeping his feet on the ground. The narrative is funny, fast-paced, and related in a stream of consciousness style by the other half of Balloon-man.

Ship writes playfully with an attention to sound:

‘The mummified packages began arriving weekly, old books printed in the seventies, new books with a gluey smell, Foucault, Diderot, Hugo, Bellow, C.P. Snow, John Doe…’

‘Balloon’ will frustrate anyone trying to find a logic in the works digested by its hero, but it is perhaps beside the point. This short short is meant as a bitter sweet fairytale:

‘any of us, for that matter, floating among the trees, tinctures of the clouds, heavy heads, airborne hearts’.

Non-Fiction

I read Nancy Williams’ ‘Expiration Date’ a few weeks ago and it stuck in my brain so it feels appropriate to point it out. It relates Williams’ first job after grad school working as a hospice social worker. Williams’ account doesn’t try to glorify her position as selfless or brave, she is in fact quite entertainingly critical of her failings:

‘I also worried that, after my constant exposure to book and movie deaths, a real one wouldn’t live up to my expectations. What if I found it a bore? If I knew myself at all — and I feared that I did — I’d probably end up critiquing the scene, or jazzing it up in my mind to increase its entertainment value.’

The job gradually takes over Williams’ life, she gives directions based on which funeral parlour is nearest and goes straight to the chrysanthemums in a flower shop. I was led along, as equally surprised as her to realize that death doesn’t make appointments.

Poetry

I’m worried about being over-positive about this review, ‘Surely’ you might say, ‘Surely there are some duds?’ Since I’m not pretending to be objective in this review, I will confess that yes, some works appealed to me more than others. For instance, I’m not mad about Bob Brill’s ‘Florida Suite’ – an impressionist poem made up of three line stanzas such as :

‘in the room next door
a couple dressing for dinner
argue about money’

Each stanza highlights a different room, or setting of this hotel – the imagery sticks to well-worn stereotypes: the lonely woman drinking at a bar, the band leader forcing a smile, women sharing photos of their grandchildren. These stanzas are set into two columns which redeem the poem somewhat by offering an alternative way of reading it. This interesting quirk might be accidental – a way of keeping the poem unto the same page. This isn’t made clear, especially as the poem lacks punctuation.

In fact the two column style of three line stanzas seems to be a theme of this issue, Madeline Caritas Logman provides another one with ‘The River’, but this time it is definitely a case of fitting the poem unto the same page.  ‘The River’ is a time-capsule poem, an attempt to bottle the emotions and tastes associated with being seventeen. It captures well the intensity of being seventeen, the extremes of passion, the energy but also the monotony of the week-days:

‘the toxins that built up
deep inside us, the lethargy

of sleepwalking through a
routine day after day and then
staring sleeplessly at ceilings’.

This is Longman’s first publication and it is a promising one. Freshly out of school, her poem harnesses impressively teenage angst  and knows how to deliver a killer blow.

Art

The Battered Suitcase doesn’t just use art as a filler or an illustration for the writing. Each artist is given his own separate section – a personal showcase as it were. Talonabraxas’ work caught my eye, his work has a steampunk, noir, surrealist quality that I find appealing.

"Heart Girt with a Serpent" by Talonabraxas for Battered Suitcase - Spring 2010

‘Heart Girt with a Serpent’ reminds me of Futurist Umberto Boccioni’s Unique Forms of Continuity in Space (1913) in the best possible way. The way Talonabraxas renders the human body alien is a theme in this mini-collection. I just wish The Battered Suitcase would subtitle these works with the medium of creation, particularly as this is an artist who likes to dabble in various techniques.

Overall

I have barely brushed the surface of course, but I hope that these tasters encourage you to plunge into the innovative, surprising and ambitious online magazine that is The Battered Suitcase. It is available in different versions: online where you can click on every author individually; as a pdf; for kindle, sony or stanza readers. One of these is bound to suit you. So go ahead, start unpacking (sorry).

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