Patricio Pron Seeks His True Country through Writing

by David Saccone-Braslow

Patricio Pron was born in Rosario, Argentina in 1975. His father was a political journalist and his mother worked as an archivist. As a child he spent summers with his paternal grandparents who immigrated to Argentina from Turin, Italy. His maternal family was originally from Bern, Switzerland. By seventeen, Pron was writing for La Capital, Argentina’s oldest Spanish-Language newspaper.

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Exploring Sara Ludy’s Virtual and Metaphysical Worlds through Her Art

by Leah Kogen-Elimeliah

For Sara Ludy, an American artist from Bluemont, a town in rural Virginia near the Appalachian Trail, the unknown, the unseen, and the ghostlike is what drives her creativity to those shadowy and unfamiliar territories. This is where questions and what she refers to as paranormal experiences, help gauge her sense of belonging while getting inside the virtual and the metaphysical worlds, touching on what Sara regards as “energy” that produces and shapes her works of art.

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Marc Palmieri’s Struggle to Keep His Daughter Alive and Pursue His Art

by Sonja Killebrew and Afsana Ahmed

Marc Palmieri is a professor, a writer, an actor, and even a baseball coach having once played for the Toronto Blue Jays. His plays, such as Waiting for the Host, Poor Fellas, and NY Times’ “Critic’s Pick” Levittown have been performed not only in New York City but around the country. His script for Telling You was produced by Miramax and stars Jennifer Love Hewitt.

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Salar Abdoh on Writing in and Outside of War Zones

by David Saccone-Braslow

Salar Abdoh is a novelist, essayist, and translator born in Tehran, Iran. He attended a boarding school in England before relocating to Los Angeles when his father left Iran for the United States following the 1979 Iranian Revolution. Abdoh received his undergraduate degree from U.C. Berkeley and his Master's from the City College of New York, where now teaches creative writing.

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Kafka’s Passover, From the Desert to Canaan

by Mark Jay Mirsky

The Diaries of Franz Kafka is a new translation of Franz Kafka’s Journals by Ross Benjamin and his extensive notes open up a new chapter for readers in English who want to understand the inner life of Franz Kafka, a writer whose work has influenced many of the major writers of 20th and 21st century fiction as well as serious thinkers in fields as diverse as philosophy, history, and sociology.

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Louise Brooks: Silent Muse

by Thomas Gladysz

The fictional character at the heart of Jerome Charyn’s “Lulu in Love,” an excerpt from a forthcoming novel, was inspired by a real person, Louise Brooks. Today, this 1920s film star is best known for two things. The first is her iconic look. What defined her image was her sleek bobbed hair—a “black helmet” as critic Kenneth Tynan once put it. Brooks’ legend also rests on her role as Lulu in G.W. Pabst’s 1929 film, Pandora’s Box. Like her oft-copied haircut, Brooks’ memorable portrayal of Lulu has inspired more than fashion, including a handful of other films and film characters.

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To Sneer At Robert Musil

by Mark Jay Mirsky

As a novelist, I read one way, and as I suspect as a teacher, I read another. There is a third way I occasionally read—as an editor. (I once was privileged to read as a critic, but since a change of editors at The Washington Post’s Book World and the extinction of Partisan Review, and various other publications whose editors knew me, I have lost a ready access to a soapbox.) Every now and then, however, some stunning stupidity, in The New York Times, The New York Review of Books, or The New Yorker takes my breath away.

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On Gila Green's "Passport Control"

Gila Green [Tal] was a student of mine some years ago in the graduate creative writing program at Bar Ilan University. Since then I have followed her fiction with pleasure and printed it in Fiction, [See—Gila Tal, Brass Knuckles, Fiction Magazine, Volume 20, #2]. Some years ago she left her home in Canada to eventually settle in Beit Shemesh and her work often echoes of the disparate worlds of those who come to live in Israel from other places.

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Puddingstone by Mark Jay Mirsky

Reviews & Testimonials

by Joseph McElroy

Mirsky of Boston has an ear for longing, anger, contradiction, family, a smelting pot of confounded and ironic heritage; an eye for wild progress, flood, violence, the hands-on politics of Irish police force and Black power, and here, so convincing and droll and painful, the fugitive, all but isolated will of outlying Native America. 

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