Literary Magazine Reviews: Part 2

Below is Part 2 of our literary magazine review series, provided as way to help writers find the right place to submit their work.  The reviews below come from student writers in Jacob White's Thursday night Fiction Workshop.

The Indiana Review

Reviewed by Jasmine Ohadi

The Indiana Review publishes fiction, poetry, and prose. They focus on rich imagery, mystery, and most of the works published are a bit dark and edgy. They have many down to earth pieces, knitted with solid juxtaposition that is alluring. The work is formatted artistically; this literary journal is focused on a younger audience; it is contemporary, free style, less conservative form of writing. It has a sense of House of Leaves aura and it works well altogether; each piece is a part of the whole, carefully designed to create that aura. Naturally, judges for some of Indiana’s contests are Stuart Dybek, Samantha Lan Chang, and Natasha Tretheway.

“Obit” by Ted Sanders beautifully is placed close to the middle of the book. It is also formatted with small margins, taking the shape of a glass at the beginning of the page. It works because it begins with: “The boy who falls asleep to the story of bear will grow old and wordlessly die. In the end, he will die across his pancakes,”—juxtaposition—“coughing up blood in a restaurant in a distant town, blood freckling the arms and throat of his latest wife, the table, the dark stone floor, where bright ice and dark water from his spilled glass will also fall.” This all is knitted carefully in elegant symmetry. This story follows this omniscient voice and changes it margins, sometimes closing into two, and merging together as the story progresses and climaxes. It is a prose and a fiction.  Each sentence is beautiful, example: “The man believed at that moment that he would remember this sight of her: the sun across her skin, falling between her just-open lips where a fine mindless shape was curling, her skin lit and blooming, her carved arms raised around her head like a harp’s arms, as if the delicate gesture unfolding through them were being sung wordlessly”—many words are repetitive like ‘wordlessly’—“into sight in her face. The woman will survive this understanding.”

A story that perceives the mystery well, by pace and unfolding, and generates the reader’s treasure for their words and gestures is “Railway Killers” by Anthony Farrington. He does this by creating a murder story and a mysterious 1^st person narrator. The suspense and drama is played by this man’s personality: “I took little stock in rumors. Each murder was an unknowable story; each story had numerous victims. For example, it was rumored that my ex-wife was in love again. Fact: there is nothing new here. Fingers twirl…..rumor had it, someone wanted to murder me. Fact is, it’s a funny story.” The narrator reveals his mystery elegantly, taking time, until it is revealed that he may in fact be the murder himself, but the reader still doesn’t know that: “We are all failures at love, but not at falling in love. Assasins and victims. I like certain words. Quagmire. But if you get stuck in them, my suggestion is this: hold completely still. There are no heros here. No crime fighters…you’ll never escape. And the more you struggle, the more you’ll sink. But even under the most incriminating stares of everyone you meet, the rumors—“You’re guilty. Guilty.”—remember, you have the right to remain silent.” This narrator is obviously in a conflict with himself during the story, and it is not resolved which makes it even more appealing. The format of this story is also artistic.  For example:

“(((((((((wish))))))))))

I want to come

under the cover of darkness.

I’ll be your accomplice

an accessory to whatever crime

And the sound of it—wish—hitting me in waves and waves.

Rumor: Dee loves me.

Rumor: I destroyed their marriage.

Rumor: my ex-wife is taking antidepressants.

Rumor: my children don’t want to live with me anymore.

Notre Dame Review

Reviewed by Micheala Smith

            If I had to take a guess at what the editors at Notre Dame Review are looking for in their fiction submissions I would say they are submissions that work to provide a high quality literary presence. These are works that are highly controlled. The editors are also looking for stories that haven’t been told before. The pieces I read were unique I haven’t read stories that had a similar story line or even a similar theme. They are looking for work that is free of cliques in the language of the actual story. The beginnings of the story are strong and clear. The endings knew how to wrap the story up without presenting it as a package. The characters are developed with a clear sense of who they are. The details draw you in to the worlds being presented. The editors are searching for something they haven't seen on their desk eighty times over. I would suggest submitting here if you think your work in unique, highly defined within the world, and well controlled.

Black Warrior Review

Reviewed by Andrew Coffey

Black Warrior Review is a magazine that publishes very enticing and engaging fiction, but the stories are usually more on the darker side of things.  I read the short story “We All Go Through It”  by Jamey Bradbury.  This story used third person omniscience to take on the perspectives of a classroom of children.  In the story, a classmate disappears from the class and they are never told why, and everything goes on as normal.  The children walk by the missing child’s house every day and see the car in the driveway and begin to question what happened to him.  The children also start to note suspicious behavior from their teacher as the year progresses, as she no longer notices the notes being passed, but just stares at the chid’s empty desk.  The only empty desk in the classroom.  Soon thereafter, a new kid moves into the seat in class, but the teacher still stares at the desk like it’s empty.  Since it’s from a child’s perspective, the story incorporated immersive lines like ‘Jimmy said the smell on her breath was gin, whatever that was.’  In the end, the teacher ends up getting replaced, and the new teacher does nothing relatively similar to their old teacher, and the children are just expected to move on with the unfamiliar like it’s not there.  The children end up taking out their frustrations on the new kid out at recess as they all begin to throw rocks and lunch-boxes at the boy and tell him to not come back.  One of the best lines is in relation to the first toss, “no one threw it; we all threw it.”

            I read another interesting prose story called “Mule Hour” by Terrance Hayes.  One of the most impelling lines in the story is “Ma and me ride a blue mule until its dumb heart gives out. She grips its tail and I its ears and we drag it to the side of the road like a bag of garbage on trash day, its muscles soft as cushion and its bones soft too like coil gone lazy in a couch, and we leave it burning with all the humanity fire strips away.”  I think that about sums it up.  Dark, but engaging, vivid and concrete fiction that ‘grabs you by the lapels’ right from the beginning. 

Epoch

Reviewed by Liz Spier

Epoch boasts a handful of short fiction that continues in the way of expanding the boundaries of the short story, as well as expressing new ideas. Many reviews for the magazine call it “some of the best short fiction,” and a “journal that has earned its way into the importance of literary history.”

            Epoch proclaims itself as an “eclectic collection of short fiction” and goes on to say that they do not publish criticism or reviews of fiction to keep the magazine clean and imaginative.

            When reviewing the editorial staff of the magazine, the reader may find that they have a preference for the odd, for the experimentation with syntax and language, and are looking for the story to linger in your mind for hours. Many of the short stories published are vignettes, or slice of life stories, in which the characters may not progress very far, or, if they do, progress in a manner that almost seems like digression. I can honestly say that each piece was interesting and full of delightful language and vocabulary, but the majority left the reader mildly sad, or at least with a depressing calm.

The Southern Review
Reviewed by Chelsea Sicely                                                                                                  

            Upon reading “Overpass,” my first impression was that The Southern Review was “southern” in value. Because the short story mentions god and the belief (and even though it did seem a little more “raw” and less “sophisticated”), I had the impression that every story would be southern-inspired (such as gumbo, fried chicken and church).  
            I then read the submission directly after that. A short poem titled “My wife and I learn to accept our clutter.”  This poem was about a couple who were messy, but content with that life.
            The poem snuffed my first assumption. Quickly browsing through the rest of the book, I found it was a mixture of short stories, poems, art, and “reflective” essays? Curiosity got the better of me and I googled it. Taken from their page, “About us”:  “The Southern Review publishes fiction, poetry, critical essays, interviews, book reviews, and excerpts from novels in progress, with emphasis on contemporary literature in the United States and abroad.”
            I didn’t see any interviews and was surprised that they published “book reviews”; I imagine every issue is different and does not have the same number of poems, or novels, per each publication.

Bat City Review

Reviewed by Taylor Shaw

Bat City Review seems to have a wide variety of fiction pieces. There does not seem to be a specific style that draws the attention of the Editors of this particular magazine, or form. The two pieces I read from the magazine were both approximately page and a half, first-person narratives that showed two different looks into the human psyche. The first, “The Engagement,” is about a man who spends his life selling woman’s wear out of his own shop, hates it (for a reason he himself cannot explain), and ends up torching his shop out of frustration with it. The next, “Hollow Bones” is about a man constructing a bird skeleton out of a bio book for a medical degree while his girlfriend is upstairs painting nudes. He contemplates flight, the physiology of the birds, and connects it to his own relationship. But at a quick glance, there are also third-person narratives of much larger length that, at a quick glance, offer different sets of characters and dynamics than the ones I read. Their only requirement, based off of their submission guidelines and they want their submissions to make them ecstatic to read their work and they want quality writing, which seems extremely apparent through the diverse lengths and styles that I looked at by skimming through the journal.

Alaska Quarterly Review

Reviewed by Justin Little

            The first article I read in the AQR was a non-fiction piece named “The Last Time,” by Margaret MacInnis. This was a very serious story for Ms. MacInnis, who recorded her memories of her parent’s divorce in those pages. The story’s uniqueness comes from its chapter structure; each chapter details a memory of the last time she shared some experience with her father, whether it is overhearing both sides of an argument or being threatened with a smack across the face. As one might guess, the father really was a terrible husband and parent all-around, unable to even articulate why he did not get along with Margaret’s mother. Despite all his wickedness, though, he comes off as a pathetic and distressingly human individual, and Margaret cannot help but show sympathy for him. Like many stories, its villain carries its narrative, and the terrible father is serviceable in this regard. Saying the abusive parent is a cliché only cements how depressingly common such people can be.

            The other story I chose to study, “Box of Light” by Warren Slessinger, is similarly depressing. This purely fictional account also details a divorce, but this time it is from the man’s perspective. This man has a sympathetic reason for his breakup, though; he is simply so traumatized by his time spent as a soldier that he is incapable of forming a mundane romantic relationship. He currently works in a cubicle for some generic white-collar company, which he considers his “box of light” because it gives him clear objectives, gives his post-army life some meaning. He also was an accomplice in a cold-blooded murder, but that’s neither here nor there. The story ends with the man unable to sleep, fantasizing about enemy combatants bringing a siege to his house just so he could be back in combat, where he belongs. The story of a broken, shell-shocked soldier is at least as old as All Quiet on the Western Front, and “Box of Light” does very little to bring anything new to the table.

            In all, the feeling I get reading the AQR is a feeling of dead seriousness. The Alaska Quarterly Review has no room for jokes among its thought-provoking articles. Of course, there are a few duds among its bleak fiction, but sometimes magazines have “off” issues.