#Bellevue Literary Press

[expendablemudge]

SEASONS OF PURGATORY, English-language debut story collection from exiled Iranian author

Winding down #NationalTranslationMonth with a 4* story collection translated from Farsi, set in the war-torn Iran of the recent past: SEASONS OF PURGATORY by award-winner SHAHRIYAR MANDANIPOUR via @bellevuepress.

My #BookRecommendation is here:

#book blog #book review #book tumblr #national translation month #bellevue literary press #farsi translation #short story collection

[virtualmemoriespodcast]

Episode 551 - Jerome Charyn

"The word is far more real than the world": Jerome Charyn rejoins the show to celebrate his new novel, RAVAGE & SON (Bellevue Literary Press), a fantastic noir about the Lower East Side in 1913. We talk about his love for the LES and the Bintel Briefs in The Forward, why he wanted to write a Jewish Jekyll & Hyde story, and how adopting a cat changed the course of this amazing novel. We also get into life on the page, the music of the sentence, and the self-revelation of writing, why so many of his characters attend Harvard, the holiness of books and why he reads so little of others' books nowadays, treating writing as an apprenticeship rather than a career, and how he got overwhelmed for a year after writing in Abe Lincoln's voice. Plus we discuss his reverence of Joyce Carol Oates and Cormac McCarthy (and ambivalence toward Henry James, who makes an appearance in Ravage & Son), the reason so many of his characters attend Harvard, the sense of being transported by the ballet performances of Allegra Kent, how it felt to write a character who's in love with destruction, why gender fluidity is essential to human nature, and the one advantage to living long enough: understanding that nothing remains and everything disappears. Follow Jerome on Twitter, and listen to our 2019, 2021, and 2022 conversations • More info at our site • Support The Virtual Memories Show via Patreon or Paypal and via our Substack

Check out the new episode of The Virtual Memories Show

#podcast #books

[finishinglinepress]

NEW FROM FINISHING LINE PRESS: Motion Photos by Nina Bannett

On SALE now! Pre-order Price Guarantee: https://www.finishinglinepress.com/product/motion-photos-by-nina-bannett/

Motion Photos offers a sparse and haunting examination of physical deterioration and emotional loss. Using the language of trains, #poems explore a father’s psychological landscape in the face of neurological illness and a daughter’s grappling with the inevitable. Economical in scope, poems explore the themes of mobility and stasis in the face of crisis.

Nina Bannett is the author of These Acts of Water (2015) and a chapbook, Lithium Witness (2011). Her poetry has been featured in numerous journals including North American Review, Valley Voices, Bellevue Literary Review and WomenArts Quarterly. She is Professor of English at New York City College of Technology, City University of New York. www.ninabannett.com

PRAISE FOR Motion Photos by Nina Bannett

Nina Bannett’s Motion Photos tracks the journey’s end of a life fascinated by motion and derailed by terminal illness. The spare and angular early poem, “Adaptation,” sets this collection going as if laying down rails for a perpetual “grief train.” In exquisitely crafted, economical poems, a daughter travels with her dying father, recording his “scant options in mean country,” discovering the enduring stasis of love. Like her father’s model trains, Bannett’s poems are “N scale but full size.”

–Kate Falvey, author of The Language of Little Girls; Associate Editor for the Bellevue Literary Review

Each of Nina Bannett‘s poems, so economical, reverberates with grief. Here we find Freud’s traveler sitting in the train, describing the changing views through a window. But in Motion Photos, the train isn’t always running. It stops. It breaks down. What is revealed in that stillness, in the tension before movement, is delicate longing, remembrance and profound loss.

–Rob Ostrom

Please share/repost #flpauthor #preorder #AwesomeCoverArt #read #poems #literature #poetry #terminal #illness #grief

#poetry #flp authors #preorder #flp #poets on tumblr #american poets #chapbook #chapbooks #finishing line press #small press

[bookcoversonly]

Title: The Bear | Author: Andrew Krivak | Publisher: Bellevue Literary Press (2020)

#books #The Bear #Andrew Krivak

[nurtureliterary]

Would You Rather

Susan Ito

We start asking this question early.   Toddlers: blue cup or yellow?  

Children ask each other:           Would you rather be sucked into quicksand           or eaten by a crocodile?  

Would you rather die by fire or water? Mayo or mustard on your sandwich? Every day is a storm of choices.

Paper or plastic, elevator or stairs. Pay the rent or the pharmacy. One child’s performance or the other child’s tournament?

Now: Adopted person, would you rather have been aborted?

If that is what my mother had wanted and yes, it is what she wanted but couldn’t have.           Then yes.            I would rather she’d have had the choice.

She tried in her own ways. She tried, by not eating. She gained not a pound   during her pregnancy. She did not resort to sharp objects or poison but tried to wish me away.

She told no one. It was years before Roe.  

I burst from her months early, then she vanished.   A kindly couple raised me           But the question of her           filled me forever.

If she had aborted me, her life would have been free           of the hard pit inside her           the secret of me.

And I would have been free to become a flower, a lizard, a redwood tree  

But what about your children? If you hadn’t existed, then           neither would they           and you love them so much,           don’t you?

We would have been a yardful of flowers nodding at each other in the wind.

Susan Ito is the author of The Mouse Room. She co-edited the literary anthology A Ghost At Heart’s Edge: Stories & Poems of Adoption. Her work has appeared in Growing Up Asian American, Choice, Hyphen, Hip Mama, Catapult, The Bellevue Literary Review, and elsewhere.  She has performed her solo show, The Ice Cream Gene, around the US. She teaches at the Writers Grotto, Mills College and Bay Path University. Her theatrical adaption of Untold, stories of reproductive stigma, was produced at Brava Theater. Her memoir in essays is forthcoming from the Ohio State University Press.

#poetry

[thebookcoverollector]

Moss by Klaus Modick ISBN: 978-1942658726 Publisher: Bellevue Literary Press (August 25, 2020) Design: Alban Fischer

#moss #klaus modick #bellevue literary press #alban fischer #book #books #book cover #book cover design #amazon books #Amazon #the book cover collector #cover design #art cover #read #read a book #bookstagram #fiction books #fictionbooks #fiction book cover

[jewishbookworld]

In the Shadow of King Saul: Essays on Silence and Song by Jerome Charyn

In the Shadow of King Saul: Essays on Silence and Song by Jerome Charyn

In the New York Review of Books, Joyce Carol Oates expressed her admiration for an equally prolific contemporary: “Among Charyn’s writerly gifts is a dazzling energy. . . . [He is] an exuberant chronicler of the mythos of American life”; the Los Angeles Times described him as “absolutely unique among American writers.” In these ten essays, Charyn shares personal stories about places steeped in…

View On WordPress

#Bellevue Literary Press #Essays on Silence and Song #In the Shadow of King Saul #Jerome Charyn

[whatsheread]

A gentle post-apocalyptic read According to the blurb, The Bear by Andrew Krivak is a fable. I have no idea whether this is correct.

#Andrew Krivak #Bellevue Literary Press #Fable #February 2020 Releases #Literary Fiction #NetGalley

[dk-thrive]

The open strings set your entire violin trembling, so that you can feel the wood itself ringing against your neck and shoulder as you bow.

The section is one long crescendo toward ecstasy, full of open strings, where you don’t put any fingers down and just bow, letting the strings ring out in their full and elemental clarity. Violinistically, it’s a delight to play: The open strings set your entire violin trembling, so that you can feel the wood itself ringing against your neck and shoulder as you bow. When I was learning the Chaconne at Meadowmount, this was the one part that didn’t seem so hard, that made sense, that felt free. I can feel it now, remembering—that quickening overtakes you: You and your violin are one, intensely and ecstatically present. Bach adds another iterated element, a trinity of repeated notes—either A or D—that sound like the striking of a bell. They create a kind of ellipse between the end of each phrase and the beginning of the next, linking and extending them into one continuous moment; they are alpha and omega, beginning and end, and their persistent chiming announces, over and over again, the present moment. To play them you have to traverse the open strings of the violin, from high to low, sounding the depths of the instrument and the moment. The repeated notes begin small and sweet and then increase in their resonance and warmth, until the notes are ringing out with a joy that defies all containment, a bright effusion, a shout from the mountaintops. You can’t help but feel some sacred presence, there, in the midst of grief; the music continues building and rising until it can no longer contain itself, and you feel the light that is spilling forth, the joy of being delivered from yourself. With each iteration the feeling grows stronger, the conviction deeper, the present moment freer of the past.

— Natalie Hodges, Uncommon Measure. A Journey Through Music, Performance, and the Science of Time (Bellevue Literary Press, March 22, 2022) 

#Natalie Hodges #violin #violinist #music #sacred

[jllongwrites]

Poet Kyle Potvin presents LOOSEN Tickets, Wed, Jan 13, 2021 at 7:00 PM | Eventbrite

Poet Kyle Potvin returns to Gibson's Bookstore, virtually, to read from her new volume of verse, Loosen, from the Hobblebush Granite State Poetry Series. She will be joined by fellow poet Maudelle Driskell (Executive Director of The Frost Place) to discuss the themes of the poems.

About the poet: Kyle Potvin's chapbook, Sound Travels on Water (Finishing Line Press), won the Jean Pedrick Chapbook Award. She is a two-time finalist for the Howard Nemerov Sonnet Award and received a commendation in the 2019 International Hippocrates Open Prize for Poetry in Medicine. Her poems have appeared in Bellevue Literary Review, Crab Creek Review, Tar River Poetry, The New York Times, JAMA, and others. Her work has also appeared in various anthologies. Kyle is cofounder with Tammi Truax of the Prickly Pear Poetry Project: Processing the Cancer Experience Through Poetry, a workshop for survivors and caregivers. A member of the Powow River Poets and Frost Farm’s Hyla Brook Poets, she is an advisor to Frost Farm Poetry in Derry, New Hampshire, and served as assistant director of the New Hampshire Poetry Festival for five years. Kyle runs a public relations firm and lives with her husband and two sons in southern New Hampshire.

#kyle potvin #loosen #live reading #poety #poems #new hampshire

[laledavidson]

Those darned submission guidelines

Those darned submission guidelines

Most literary magazines submission guidelines tell you to read their magazine to see what kind of work they publish.

This can be daunting when you are struggling to find enough time to write, let alone publish.

Furthermore, when you follow their directions and do the reading, it’s hard to decide which magazines to read (there are so many!), and it’s hard to extract their aesthetic. Finally,…

View On WordPress

#Bellevue Literary Press #Black Warrior Review #book review #Booth #Independent Presses #Jabberwock Review #NEA #NEH #Pangyrus #Paul Harding #Pembroke Magazine #Ploughshares #Poets and Writers #Potomac Review #submission guidelines #The Missouri Review #Tinkers

[pgcbooks]

“Jerzy is a novel with a light touch that’s still capable of lifting heavy subjects. Charyn knows what he wants to do and knows how to do it. His prose has some of the rapid-fire but carefully controlled energy of Thomas Pynchon’s early novella “The Crying of Lot 49.” Part of Charyn’s point is to make the real and the imagined sound equally implausible. You find yourself looking up some of the characters, some of the episodes, online: Can this be true? It isn’t always easy to tell.”

Benjamin Markovits reviews Jerome Charyn’s enigmatic new novel Jerzy for the New York Times.

#books #jerome charyn #jerzy kosinski #new books #new york times #literary fiction #reading #fiction #Bellevue Literary Press #indie fiction #indie publishing

[finishinglinepress]

FLP CHAPBOOK OF THE DAY: All The Beauty, Poems by Jay Kidd

ADVANCE ORDER: https://www.finishinglinepress.com/product/all-the-beauty-poems-by-jay-kidd/

All The Beauty could almost be subtitled A Memoir in Verse for it explores, shares, and illuminates the life of the poet, a poet who is writing in midlife, reflecting on how he has lived and what he has lived through. Jay Kidd’s poems portray the emotional impact of an unsettled childhood, a young adulthood overtaken by an epidemic and the impact of having survived it, the satisfaction of work, and most importantly the solace of love. Through it all, these poems hold on to the possibility of hope in their compelling quest for beauty, the beauty borne of emotional honesty and the beauty that can be found in the world around us.

Jay Kidd’s poetry has appeared in many publications including, Bellevue Literary Review, Ruminate Magazine, The Florida Review, Atlanta Review, Crosswinds Poetry Journal, and others. He is a past winner of Ruminate Magazine’s Janet B. McCabe Prize for Poetry and Atlanta Review’sInternational Poetry Competition. Jay lives in New York City and East Hampton, New York.

ADVANCE PRAISE FOR All The Beauty, Poems by Jay Kidd

“Jay Kidd’s chapbook pays delicate attention to life’s joys and griefs. After reading All The Beauty, I need to sit quietly to allow these poems a little time settle within. The space between love and sadness is where they reside. Kidd writes in The Dusk Effect that “sorrow emerges from the gloaming like a violet/for me to touch, hold close and tend to.” I am grateful for the ‘tending’ and ultimately, the joy these poems provide.”

–Kim Farrar, author of The Familiar and The Brief Clear (Finishing Line Press 2011and 2015)

“Jay Kidd’s poems, steeped in the quotidian, are witty and knowing and laced with a guarded humor. There is sorrow in these intelligent lines as well, grief and testimony, but the city and the country, where past is always present, slyly ambush both poet and reader with unexpected joy.”

–Lesley Dormen, author of The Best Place to Be: A novel in stories.

“Migraines, parental abandonment, the terror and isolation of AIDS, the sweet intricacies of modern marriage, there’s a good deal of human pain in these poems, which is perhaps why its title, All The Beauty, is so richly earned and perfectly right. The beauty found here is that of compassion and wisdom and, yes, that special music made only in the heart. This first book feels ancient in its scale and appeal, in its honesty and candor. We are eavesdropping on a conversation the poet is having with himself, a conversation as intimate as it is universal. Beauty, indeed.”

–Philip Schultz

Please share/please repost [PROMO] #flpauthor #preorder #AwesomeCoverArt #poetry #chapbook #read #poems

#poetry #preorder #flp authors #flp #poets on tumblr #american poets #chapbook #chapbooks #finishing line press #small press #book cover #books #publishers #poets #poem #smallpress #poems

[torontocomics]

DEBUTING AT TCAF 2019: ALPHA: ABIDJAN TO PARIS, BY BESSORA AND BARROUX

Published by Bellevue Literary Press. 128 Pages, B&W, US $24.99Doctors Without Borders Prize PEN Promotes Award GLLI (Global Literature in Libraries Initiative) Translated YA Book Prize Shortlist CILIP Kate Greenaway Medal Longlist Library Journal “Best Book of the Year” selection School Library Journal “Best Adult Book 4 Teens” selection Comics Journal “Best Comic of the Year” selection“

Barroux’s raw illustrations and Bessora’s matter-of-fact text express the inhumanity at the heart of the refugee crisis.” 

―School Library Journal “Best Adult Book 4 Teens” citation

Alpha’s wife and son left Côte d’Ivoire months ago to join his sister-in-law in Paris, but Alpha has heard nothing from them since. With a visa, Alpha’s journey to reunite with his family would take a matter of hours. Without one, he is adrift for over a year, encountering human traffickers in the desert, refugee camps in northern Africa, overcrowded boats carrying migrants between the Canary Islands and Europe’s southern coast, and an unforgettable cast of fellow travelers lost and found along the way. Throughout, Alpha stays the course, carrying his loved ones’ photograph close to his heart as he makes his perilous trek across continents.

Featuring emotive, full-color artwork created in felt-tip pen and wash, Alpha is an international award–winning graphic novel supported by Amnesty International that received the PEN Promotes Award and Doctors Without Borders Prize, and was longlisted for the CILIP Kate Greenaway Medal. 

The U.S. edition is sponsored by Le Korsa, a nonprofit organization devoted to improving human lives in Senegal.

====================

Bessora is an award-winning author of Swiss, German, French, Polish, and Gabonese heritage, whose work has been anthologized in Best European Fiction and has received the Fénéon Prize and Grand Prix Littéraire d’Afrique Noire. Raised in Europe, America, and Africa, she has traveled extensively, and her fiction is underpinned by extensive research and her training as an anthropologist. Alpha is her first graphic novel. She lives in Paris.

Bessora attends TCAF in support of her recently released graphic novel ALPHA: Abidjan to Paris, created with illustrator Barroux. Her trip is supported by The French Embassy to Canada.

http://bessora.fr

#tcaf #tcaf 2019 #Toronto Comic Arts Festival #bessora #barroux #ALPHA: ABIDJAN TO PARIS #comic #comics #graphic novel

[hrexach]

I felt haunted by a monumental sense of failure, of aborted struggle and lost time.

I felt haunted by a monumental sense of failure, of aborted struggle and lost time.

Music – the soul’s balm!! … “Natalie Hodges, from Prelude in “Uncommon Measure. A Journey Through Music, Performance, and the Science of Time” (Bellevue Literary Press, March 22, 2022).”

View On WordPress

[bloghrexach]

I felt haunted by a monumental sense of failure, of aborted struggle and lost time.

I felt haunted by a monumental sense of failure, of aborted struggle and lost time.

Music – the soul’s balm!! … “Natalie Hodges, from Prelude in “Uncommon Measure. A Journey Through Music, Performance, and the Science of Time” (Bellevue Literary Press, March 22, 2022).”

View On WordPress