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Why We’re Excited to Publish…“Magellan” by Bradley Bazzle

Bryan Castille

For a new series of posts, we’re asking our editors to choose a recent story, essay, or poem they’d selected for publication and tell us how it won them over. Here, our 2010-2011 fiction editor, Bryan Castille, recalls his discovery of Bradley Bazzle’s “Magellan,” which appears in the Winter 2011 issue.

It was the end of a very long day of reading fiction manuscripts. The sun had long set, and my head ached from hours of straining my eyes. My contact lenses had fused themselves to my corneas. I was about to log out of my computer when I saw another unopened envelope. (Envelopes tended to inexplicably repopulate my desk when I was ready to go home.) Rather than toss it back into the slush pile for another day, I opened it, thinking, “I’ll just read the first page. If it’s good, I’ll take it home. If it’s not so good, I’ll leave it for tomorrow.”

Mark Leidner's BEAUTY WAS THE CASE THAT THEY GAVE ME

Chris Martin

You may come to this book looking for a stance on Beauty. You may come to it looking for more Snoop Dogg references. You may come looking for a catalog of Mark Leidner’s Twitter feed. In each of these cases you will arrive misguided, but by the time you realize it you will be halfway through this immanently readable book and a couple of express stops past your intended subway exit. In adopting the serial aphorism for his debut collection of poetry, Beauty Was the Case that They Gave Me (Factory Hollow 2011), Leidner doesn’t so much aim for Nietzsche as shoot for perpetual brain spasm, a sort of intellectual pleasure buzz built on the evolution of a comic theme over lines.

Our 2012 Pushcart Nominations

Jenna Hammerich

Choosing only six pieces to nominate for the Pushcart Prize is never an easy task. We could have nominated any of the 123 pieces we published this year for the 2012 anthology, but (after much list-making and hand-wringing) decided on these:

Dark Translation: Tim Parks on Pesky Poet-Translators

Russell Scott Valentino

Tim Parks, one of TIR’s contributors to its Forum on Literature and Translation, just published this piece at the NYR Blog, http://www.nybooks.com/blogs/nyrblog/2011/nov/30/translating-dark/, which from the very start stacks the deck against poor poet-translators by suggesting that they rarely know their source material well enough to really free themselves from it. The point might seem paradoxical at first, and he appears to be aware of this, when he notes

Sarah Goldstein's FABLES

Nick Ripatrazone

In 1902, W.B. Yeats—according to his unused preface for Ideas of Good and Evil—told James Joyce that he had based his recent plays “on emotions or stories that I had got out of folklore.”[i] Yeats also imbued the folk tradition in his Red Hanrahan stories in The Secret Rose, and collected Sligo County oral tales in Celtic Twilight. Joyce called Yeats’s practice “deteriorating” but borrowed and revised Irish myth himself, first in a short story, “Clay,” and most notably in Finnegans Wake.

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