Good morning, friends. I hope the week has been good to you.

It's early here in the Netherlands so even earlier six hours ago at my home where I usually write these newsletters. But I'll write this now and schedule it to be sent in a few hours at the usual time, as if the difference never happened at all. Fascinating all the little ways in which communication can obscure distance and time. Communication, and also art — as I mentioned last week, I attended the Rotterdam Bluegrass Festival, where I had a great time, enjoying the music of course and also the nearly but not quite familiar experience of US roots music, itself arisen from so many traditions, filtered through a Dutch perspective on that music and the cultures of food and fashion around it (it was, perhaps, Rotterdam's largest gathering of cowboy hats for the year?). Wild to think a music that seems so culturally specific can speak to people whose lives and landscapes are so far removed from it, but if the arts can't do that, what can?

Anyway, here's what spoke to us this week:

Thomas Mar Wee, in our pages for the first time, reviewed The Island by Antigone Kefala (Transit Books). Reviewed by Thomas Mar Wee. 

Then our summer flash fiction series continued with "The Persistence of Salt" by Dana Wall, also a first time contributor.

And Joanna Howard shared some research notes about her novel Porthole from McSweeney's Publishing. 

Don't forget that submissions to be read by guest editor Nicholas Claro are open for a few more days, until July 20.

Thanks for reading,

Steve Himmer