Hello again, friends. Here's what we've been up to this week, in addition to seeing so many of you find us over on the now lively Bluesky:

On Monday, Geri Lipschultz reviewed Pilar Adón’s novel Of Beasts and Fowls, translated by Katie Whittemore and published by Open Letter. Geri previously reviewed Joan Conner's The Corner of East and Dreams for us. 

Then on Wednesday our featured story for the week was "Apocalypse" by Mileva Anastasiadou. From my first read of this one in the submissions queue through every read after I felt gripped by how well this narrator's voice captures a sense of being overwhelmed in ways that are both pervasively vague and specific at once — a feeling I suspect many of us can relate to. 

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In contributor news, Roy Kesey's translation of Savage Theories by Pola Oloixarac is newly published in the UK by Serpent's Tail. The US edition was published in 2017 by Soho Press, who also published Roy's translation of Oloixarac's Dark Constellations in 2019.

Frank Haberle's story "Only That You Remember Me" received the Letter Review Prize for Short Fiction.

Rémy Ngamije ("Nine Months Since Forever") will see his collection Only Stars Know the Meaning of Space: A Literary Mixtape published next month by Gallery/Scout Press.

On December 7, Amber Sparks will teach a Zoom class on "The Modern Gothic: Making Haunted Fictions for the 21st Century." Seats are nearly sold out, according to the website, but perhaps some will be left between the time I type this and when you read it.

And, for those of you who teach or are undergraduates, Éireann Lorsung is hosting a new online series of conversations for students about "writing as a life alongside paid work."

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I've been reading the late Stanley Crawford's essay collection The River In Winter, and found this moving tribute to Crawford written by Alex Trimble Young which I'd missed when it was published last spring. I'm a fan of Crawford's brilliant, playful fiction as well as his nonfiction — Some Instructions to My Wife: Concerning the Upkeep of the House and Marriage, and to My Son and Daughter Concerning the Conduct of Their Childhood and Log of the S.S. the Mrs Unguentine are particular favorites. But I knew him first through A Garlic Testament, about farming in New Mexico, and he was on my running mental list of Writers I'd Like To Take A Conversational Walk With Some Day because of his descriptions of the landscape he knew and wrote so well. I'm sorry I never got that chance.

I also missed that opportunity to with Robert Finch, who died at the end of September. I've been working my way through reading or rereading all of his books and was trying to stir up the nerve to write Finch a letter about what his work meant to me, how it came to me through my father as a bond between us and how it has shaped me in different ways at different times as a writer and person. I regret not doing it sooner, though I'm grateful for having spoken to him briefly in 2001 at a reading from his collection Death of a Hornet and Other Cape Cod Essays.

The writers and artists and people who shape us are fleeting, more than their works, so maybe this coming week is a good one in which to take the risk of emailing or writing to someone whose work matters to you and letting them know. Or for introducing someone else to the work that has made you who you are. And, who knows, if you're lucky that person might invite you to join them for a walk.

Thanks for reading,

Steve Himmer