Good morning, friends.

Here's what we've been up to this week:

On Monday, Yvonne Kim — a new contributor — reviewed Blowfish by Kyung-Ran Jo, translated by Chi-Young Kim for Astra House. 

Then our summer flash fiction series continued with "An Ogre Looks Into the Future" by Stephen Tuttle, also in our pages for the first time.

And in research notes, Case Q. Kerns wrote about his novel Habitat, which is newly available from Black Lawrence Press.

Elsewhere, Nicholas Claro — who has been reading submissions for us recently as a guest editor — will see his debut collection This Is Where You Are published later this month by Roadside Press. And I also want to recommend Kelly Pedro's flash fiction "Preserves" at Tahoma Review.

I also want to mention two books I've read lately, neither of which is exactly an under the radar title but having them in mind at the same time has me thinking about their overlaps and connections. Strands: A Year of Discoveries on the Beach by Jean Sprackland (Vintage UK) and The Notebook: A History of Thinking on Paper by Roland Allen (Biblioasis) each do what they say on the tin, or in this case the title, but in both cases — Sprackland's walking and rewalking the shoreline, and Allen's tracing the histories of written records — I'm struck by the ways in which a practice of deliberate attention makes new things possible.

Whether it's knowing a beach well enough through repeated visits to recognize when something has changed in the overnight tide, or the appearance of affordable paper sketchbooks making it possible for artists to observe and record everyday life in new ways, technique and tools are no substitute for simply doing the work but maybe they make new kinds of work possible. I don't know what your version of that might be, but I'm going to spend some time reflecting on what might be mine. And I recommend both books highly.

Thanks for reading,

Steve Himmer