Print Issue:

Volume 20 Number 2

Raymond Strom
The Tattooed Arms

In The Print Issue:

Lara Vapnyar
"L and D"

Amy Reed
Under the Wall

Isaac Babel
Forword
From: The Unpublished Letters of Isaac Babel

Raymond Strom
The Tattooed Arms

John Sullivan
Love, Vaguely

Jon Udelson
Eva

Joyce Carol Oates
The Blind Man's Sighted Daughters

Gila tal
Brass Knuckles

Jason Trask
From: Putting Out the Sun

Kim Chinquee
Doll

Mark Jay Mirsky
Lake

Luis Amate Perez
Florencia

Steve Stern
From: The Frozen Rabbi

Nurit Zarchi
Sailor

Georgi Gospodinov
A Living Soul

Zack Bean
Lucky Dog

Stephen Marche
For the Other Eugene Schiefflin

William Powers
November Shoot, Rain

Daniel Grandbois
The Wife

Editor's Reading List

Babel, Isaac - Collected Short Stories

Bachman, Ingeborg - The Thirtieth Year

Baldwin, James - Go Tell It On the Mountain

Barth, John - End of the Road

Barth, John- Lost in the Funhouse

Barth, John - The Book of Ten Nights and a Night

Barthelme, Donald - Come Back, Dr. Caligari

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From: Autonauts of the Cosmoway

by Julio Cortazar

Note: This piece appears in Fiction Volume 20 Number 1)

(Pages 33-37)
The plan becomes concrete

In the autumn of 1978, the basic idea of the expedition had been established, with the following rules of the game:

1. Complete the journey from Paris to Marseilles without once leaving the autoroute.

2. Explore each one of the rest areas, at the rate of two per day, spending the night in the second one without exception.

3. Carry out scientific topographical studies of each rest area, taking note of all pertinent observations.

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Editor's Reading List

The first 15 titles from Editor Mark Jay Mirsky's Reading List:

Aciman, Andre - Out of Egypt (Riverhead Books)

Astrov, Margot - The Winged Serpent (American. Indian Prose and Poetry)

Achebe, Chinua - No Longer at Ease

Achebe, Chinua - Things Fall Apart

Aeschylus - The Oresteia Lattimore trans. (Note: Link is to Johnston translation.)

Agnon, S.Y. - Twenty-one Stories/Selected Stories

Aleichem, Sholom - Collected Stories/Selected Stories

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MAX FRISCH Lecture at City College, November 1981

by Max Frisch

This will be tiring for you, I know, and sometimes perhaps a little funny, because of my English pronunciation. So we can recuperate now and then, I will use quite a lot of quotes and the quotes you will hear in perfect English.

Let me say it at once: I have no theory. We have a choice of fascinating aesthetic theories from Aristotle to Roland Barthes, not excluding the Marxist thinkers, Walter Benjamin, Lukacs, Adorno, etc. That a theory does or doesn't help us in our work isn't what decides its value. I know that. It wasn't Aristotle who taught Aeschylus and Sophocles how to write tragedies. But don't misunderstand me. I have nothing against theory. It's just that I myself don't have one.

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On Handke's A Sorrow Beyond Dreams

by Mark Mirsky

In a complex (though damning) review of Peter Handke's "Crossing the Sierra Los Gredos," in the August 19, 2007 issue of the NewYorkTimes Sunday Book Review, one line caught my eye, and raised a vigorous "No, unfair!"

The reviewer had begun with praise for Handke's early work, but then slowly demolished the writer's career, beginning with Slow Homecoming, (1979).

I published excerpts of Handke in Fiction, and at the Frankfurt Book Fair in 1976, had a brief but bizarre encounter. Handke was teasing my friend, Marianne Frisch, our European Editor, cruelly from what I could read on her flushed, exasperated face. When she introduced me, I thought I heard him say, reacting no doubt to my bushy head of chaotic curls, that I looked like a taxi driver. It took several moments of explanation for me to understand that I looked like the actor in the movie, Taxi Driver. Handke had a bottle of wine in his hand and he poured us both drinks, sipped a bit, remarked in English, "It tastes awful," and then tipped the bottle back into my glass with a mischievous, "Have some more." I left more amused than irritated.

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