Sunday Edition: Travel farther, check out a novel for Spring Break
Whether you are traveling by train, car, plane or just hunkering down here for the week, Spring Break is a great time to read. Let a novel take you to new places, introduce you to unique people, pull you through puzzling encounters, challenge your emotions, enlighten your day, and/or make you laugh. Following are just a few of the newly arrived novels that can do this and more. Check one out and enjoy your break.
The wolf at number 4 : a novel / Ayo Tamakloe-Garr
Desire Mensah, a disgraced schoolteacher in her thirties, sees moving to sleepy little Cape Coast, Ghana, as her chance to get away from a shameful secret not buried deeply enough. And maybe, just maybe, she will find the love she craves and the husband her mother craves for her. (Keywords: Student-teacher relationships, Cape Coast, Ghana)
In our mad and furious city / Guy Gunaratne
Inspired by the real-life murder of a British army soldier by religious fanatics, Guy Gunaratne's In Our Mad and Furious City is a snapshot of the diverse, frenzied edges of modern-day London. While Selvon, Ardan, and Yusuf organize their lives around soccer, girls, and grime, Caroline and Nelson struggle to overcome pasts that haunt them. (Keywords: Muslims, London psychological)
Welcome to Lagos / Chibundu Onuzo
When the army officer Chike Ameobi is ordered to kill innocent civilians, he knows it is time to desert his post. As he travels toward Lagos with Yemi, his junior officer, and into the heart of a political scandal involving Nigeria's education minister, Chike becomes the leader of a new platoon, a band of runaways who share his desire for a different kind of life. (Keywords: armed forces, desertion, Lagos, psychological)
Something like forever / by Jay Bell
Love, like everything in the universe, cannot be destroyed. But over time it can change.
The hot Texas nights were lonely for Ben before he met Tim Wyman, the man he would one day mary. Now, twenty years later, everything is perfect. Isn’t it? (Keywords: gay men, romance)
Speak no evil : a novel / Uzodinma Iweala
On the surface, Niru leads a charmed life. Raised by two attentive parents in Washington, D.C., he's a top student and a track star at his prestigious private high school. Bound for Harvard in the fall, his prospects are bright. (Keywords: sexual orientation, Nigerian Americans, gay teenagers)
Destroy all monsters : the last rock novel / Jeff Jackson
An epidemic of violence is sweeping the country: musicians are being murdered onstage in the middle of their sets by members of their audience. Are these random copycat killings, or is something more sinister at work? Has music itself become corrupted in a culture where everything is available, everybody is an artist, and attention spans have dwindled to nothing? (Keywords: murder, musicians, rock concerts)
Reservoir 13 / Jon McGregor
A teenage girl has gone missing and everyone is called upon to join the search. The villagers fan out across the English moors as the police set up roadblocks and news reporters descend. (Keywords: missing children, country life, England)
The removes / Tatjana Soli
Traces the intertwining stories of Civil War hero George Armstrong Custer, his frontierswoman wife Libbie, and fifteen-year-old Anne Cummins, a captive of the Cheyenne after surviving a homestead attack. (Keywords: Indian captives, women West (U.S.), pioneer life)
Eternal life : a novel / Dara Horn
Ever since she made a deal to save her son's life in Roman-occupied Jerusalem, Rachel has been doomed to live eternally, but as her descendants develop new technologies for immortality, she realizes that, for them to live fully, she must die
"What would it really mean to live forever? Rachel is a woman with a problem: she caǹt die. (Keywords: immortality, idea)
Mother India : a novel / Tova Reich
Literary, lyrical, and cuttingly satiric, Mother India is a brilliantly original novel about Jews who go to India to find transformation and eternal release from the sufferings of life. Narrated in luminous prose by Meena, a Jewish American lesbian who has claimed India as her home, the novel is vividly populated by the darkly comic universe of three generations of women along with other family members, as well as by the Indians whose world they seek to penetrate. (Keywords: divorced people, Jewish, India, parent and child)
It’s spring break at LSU! In celebration, we’ve decided to shed some light on the behind-the-scenes action at NDR. After the jump, find out more about the people who handle our beloved submissions, by reading this special interview with the current EIC and getting a special glimpse at our staff’s spring break reading lists.
The following questions come from Kimberly Southwick, who’s been researching University journals for a project on Real Pants. Thanks, Kimberly!
1) What is your name and your position on the literary journal? What is your affiliation with the university?
Laura Theobald, Editor In-Chief
MFA student in poetry
2) How long have you held this position? How long do you plan to hold it?
The position of Editor In-Chief rotates on a year-to-year basis. It's always run by a second- or third-year MFA student in either poetry or fiction. I graduate in May, at which point the newly elected EIC will take over (likely someone from our current staff).
3) Anything else about you that you want me to know?
I was NDR's Art Director before I became the EIC; I've also been working in the publishing industry for about 7 years.
4) How and why was this journal started? How many issues has it put out? What is the most important recent change to the journal (if any) & why was it important?
I don't know too much about how and why it was started. The journal with its current name (New Delta Review) began in 1985 (31 years!) and has published twice yearly since then. 2010 marks our last print issue—from then on we've published our issues online, which also come out biannually. We began publishing chapbooks (in print) in 2012.
We recently revamped our website (take a look)! We gave it an entirely new look and feel with a ton of help from our Faculty Advisor, Jason Buch. We've also modified our Mission Statement to reflect our commitment to publishing underrepresented voices.
5) What kind of journal is produced? (online? print? both? quarterly? once a year? etc.) And what do you publish? (everything? only poetry? only poetry gifs? etc.)
We publish online twice a year (in December and May). Fiction, nonfiction, poetry, hybrid forms, art, reviews, interviews, gifs, videos, (yes)—we love it all and encourage the most experimental work!
6) What is the breakdown of your staff? What kind of work/commitment is expected of the different levels of staff? What sort of breakdown of benefits is there to being on staff? (e.g. credits towards coursework? a line on a resume? etc.)
http://ndrmag.org/about/
There is talk of switching the staff to a system where they can receive credits, but that may be a little while coming. Right now only the EIC receives compensation for the position—it comes in the form of a stipend that covers my tuition at LSU; the rest of the staff volunteers their time, which makes it really a labor of love.
Each GENRE EDITOR (poetry, fiction, nonfiction), along with their team of ASSISTANT EDITORS, is responsible for reading all the work that comes in (depending on the genre, it may be up to a couple hundred submissions per semester—not including contest submissions), as well as soliciting the occasional work. Together with the EIC, we vote and deliberate on the ones we want to publish.
The INTERVIEWS/REVIEWS EDITOR helps garner and keep track of which reviews we have lined up for the issue, and helps facilitate the interviews/reviews, orders review copies, looks at drafts, suggests edits, etc.
BLOG EDITOR is a new position—and we have a new series (VERY SERIOUS QUESTIONS) running on it. VSQ is an interview that all our contributors can take part in. So far we're loving learning more about our contributors this way.
The SOCIAL MEDIA DIRECTOR keeps our followers on Facebook and Twitter up-to-date on the latests news, and does the hard work of thinking up literary jokes to keep us entertained.
The ART DIRECTOR helps run our photography contest and solicit art for the issues. They also help a great deal in putting out the chapbooks each year.
Often members of the staff will take turns writing content for the journal and the blog—which is a great opportunity for us to publish our own work and to get the occasional interview from someone we admire.
7) Why does your university have a literary journal? What department/part of the school is it run out of? How is their support of what the students do to put out the journal apparent?
"Why" is a great question! There's lots of reasons why this type of experience is important for students: it helps us learn more about our craft; it gives us access to a larger network of our peers and their work; it teaches us about the process of publishing from an insider's perspective; it gives us "real world" experience that we can use on job applications; it gives us a space to build a community; it brings us joy.
We're run out of the English department—a basement office on campus in the state's capitol. The support of the University is most apparent in that we are allotted this space, and in the fact that the EIC is able to devote themselves full-time (well, 20 hrs a week, officially) to running the journal. It's a big job, and having the time and space to do it well is really essential.
8) What kind of funding does the journal get from the university/department/part of the school that sponsors it? What is the $ used for? How else does the journal make money?
LSU covers the EIC's tuition during their third year, and has sponsored NDR's presence at AWP for several years running. The funding for our contests comes from endowments made by the families of former staff members (these are the Ryan R. Gibbs awards and the Matt Clark prize). The rest of our funding comes from submissions. We charge a small fee ($3) for general submissions and a larger fee for our chapbook prize, which covers the cost of printing our winning chapbook.
Whatever funding we have remaining (after paying our online hosting fees and other small dues) goes towards sponsoring visiting writers, either through Delta Mouth (LSU's MFA-run literary festival), or through the Underpass Reading Series, or on our own. Sometimes we will use the funds to take on a special project, like last year, when EIC Hannah Reed published our 30th Anniversary Anthology—a huge undertaking!
9) What does it mean to you to be part of a university-affiliated literary journal? Anything else you'd like to add?
To me it's a great responsibility: to our readers, our contributors, to the University, and to my staff. I want to make sure they're all getting out of it as much as they're putting in. That means carrying the greatest load of the work, but also knowing when to listen and share responsibility, and making sure to put my best face forward on behalf of all of them at all times. It's a big job, but I couldn't be happier to be entrusted with it.
I think my fellow Editors would agree that one of the greatest pleasures of the job is the friends you make. Sometimes sending out an acceptance can spark that kind of bond. It's a little bit magical.
In addition, to the interview, we thought it would be fun to let you know what our staff is reading this week!
LAURA THEOBALD, editor-in-chief
Tender Data, Monica McClure
Trouble the Water, Derrick Austin
Complicated Grief, Laura Mullen
“These are three recent poetry books I've been peeking at whenever I've had a free hand over the last month or so—and all friends or acquaintances, too (Derrick and I went to undergrad together, Laura is the Director of LSU's MFA program, and I just met Monica earlier this month when she read here for Delta Mouth). I love being able to associate the words with the person in this way. These are each going to be very precious books to me; I can tell already.”
TIM JONES, social media director
“I'll be reading my lord and savior Joan Didion's The Year of Magical Thinking, her memoir of the year her husband John Gregory Dunne (whose The Studio is also on my list) died. I'll also be going back for a second read of Tony Tulathimutte's Private Citizens, a millennial generational novel for which I cannot possibly evangelize enough.”
KATHLEEN BOLAND, fiction editor
The Torturers Wife, Thomas Glave
“This is kind of a cheat since I have to read this for my graduate literature seminar. The professor described this short story collection as a "little unhinged" and nervously laughed when people asked her what she meant. Everyone has to present on one book during the semester and obviously, I chose this one. Excited for the nervous laughter.”
Beauty Is a Wound, Eka Kurniawan
“Can I admit I bought a book based off its title? I bought this book based off its title. I've also heard so much about it since it came out last fall, and now I'll finally have time to read it.”
A Manual for Cleaning Women, Lucia Berlin
“Lydia Davis called Berlin's fiction 'exhilarating’ and spent an entire essay explaining why Berlin is a short story genius, so this is kind of a no-brainer.”
A Brief History of Seven Killings, Marlon James
“Have you caught on yet that my reading list is like six months behind everyone else's? Like BEAUTY and MANUAL, I meant to read this over winter break. But then I spent winter break reading what I meant to read over summer break. It's a never-ending cycle.”
Gutshot, Amelia Gray
“I read an interview with a bookseller who described this collection as "way too weird" for most readers. I don't think I've bought a book faster. I've already started it, and Gray's style is amazingly unique and creepy. Plus, it's mostly flash. I have that tingly ‘new favorite book’ feeling about this one.”
Life on Mars, Tracy K. Smith
“Been meaning to get this book for ages, and Bowie's death felt like an appropriate time to buy it. The thought of reading this on my redeye at the end of the week is getting me through a lot of midterm grading.”
RONNIE PELTIER, poetry editor
The Trumpets of Jericho, Unica Zürn
Cheer Up, Femme Fatale, Kim Yideum
Everything Must Go, La JohnJoseph
“Here's a diverse list for fellow freaks. Be safe.”
MARY PAPPALARDO, nonfiction editor
Blackass, A. Igoni Barrett
“This might be cheating, because I'm already about halfway through, but this book--about a Nigerian man who wakes up one morning having been transformed into a white man (except for his titular black ass)--is fantastic. It just came out from Graywolf Press at the beginning of March, and I can't put it down. I've also been reading it on the bus a lot lately, and it's been fun to see people's reactions to the cover.”
Infinite Jest, David Foster Wallace
“Only SOME OF IT, of course. Maybe a couple footnotes. You hear this book's got footnotes?”
White Girls, Hilton Als
“I try to keep at least one nonfiction book going at all times, and this has been on my list for a while. It recently jumped to the top of the stack after one of our contributors from the last issue, Andrew Bomback, recommended it. Really can't wait to dive into this.”
My Brilliant Friend, Elena Ferrante
“My parents bought me the first of Ferrante's Neopolitan Novels for Christmas, and before I opened it my dad made me promise to let him read it before I flew back to Baton Rouge. He did, and has since bought it in the original Italian. I want to finally know what everyone's been buzzing about, but mostly I'm looking forward to talking about it with him.”
AMANDINE FAUCHEUX, assistant nonfiction editor
“My spring break reading list is basically my comps reading list so I don't know if it relates any ‘aesthetic,’ so here are a bunch of other random books I might be reading.”
The Geek Feminist Revolution, Kameron Hurley
“Hurley is a fantasy writer whose books include magical bugs that can power our houses, cars, and technology so I figured her nonfiction could be nothing short of amazing.”
The Traitor Baru Cormorant, Seth Dickinson (re-read)
“This book is Game of Thrones if it was written from Littlefinger's point of view. But a woman. A brown, queer woman.”
The Best of All Possible Worlds, Karen Lord
“I'm listening to the audiobook, which is really cool because the voice actress is great at accents.”
PHILLIP SPOTSWOOD, assistant poetry editor
The Elephant Vanishes, Haruki Murakami
“Everything I love about Murakami-weirdness is here: perfect ears, wind-up birds, phone-sex operators who tell you about your blind spot. I owe a lot of my love for the surreal to Murakami, and am taking this Spring Break to tap back into these spaces.”
Disidentifications, José Esteban Muñoz
“I'll be reading bits and pieces of this, knowing that there is no way I could grasp everything in this theoretical work in one week. What I love about Muñoz's theory is that it insists a living model--a performance I can see enacted (and enact myself) every day.”
Farther Traveler, Ronaldo Wilson
“Wilson combines poetry, prose, and (anti) memoir in his newest book and I'm reading through it yelling ‘YES QUEEN, SLAY!’ after every page.”
LEAH POWELL, assistant poetry editor
Our South: Geographic Fantasy and the Rise of National Literature, Jennifer Rae Greeson
“I attended a lecture by Dr. Greeson at a recent conference, and she blew my mind with her thoughts on the insidiousness of the North/South binary. I like thinking about imagined geographies, so I think I'll like this book.”
Undead Souths: The Gothic and Beyond in Southern Literature and Culture, ed. by Taylor Hagood, Daniel Cross Turner, and Eric Gary Anderson.
“What a cool title, right? Southern studies is all about memory and trauma--thinking about the ‘undead’ seems like a refreshing take on these themes.”
A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole
“Whenever I tell a Louisianian that I'm studying southern literature, they respond: ‘A Confederacy of Dunces!!!’ I'm tired of having to admit I've never read it.”
Every month in our Collaboration Q & A, we ask the creators of that month’s Broadside if they’ve read any good books lately. Here are some recent recommendations: Jericho Brown: Matt Siegel's Blood Work is beautiful! Stacy Isenbarger: Mary Szybist's Incarnadine--more, please!--and enjoying my way through Victoria Finlay's Color currently. Catherine Pierce: Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray, Sherman Alexie's Blasphemy and Keetje Kuipers's The Keys to the Jail. Lisa Sette: Just started The Motion Of Light In Water: Sex And Science Fiction Writing In The East Village by Samuel R. Delany--loving it. Dara-Lyn Shrager: I just read Dylan Thomas in America by John Malcolm Brinnin because my son loved it and lent it to me.
The annual Read Across America Day coincides with the birthday of Dr. Seuss. The National Education Association’s nationwide reading celebration takes place at thousands of museums and libraries this weekend as well as on Monday, March 2. This year’s theme focuses on the Seuss classic, Oh, The Places You’ll Go.
For anyone who appreciates art, loves science and a good story, Theodor Seuss Geisel,…
