writers

An Excerpt from “An Overcoat” by Tony Covatta

NEW FICTION ALERT

The dinner went well enough. The jokes were good. The wines delicious. Gino sprang for the check, to the gracious thanks of Bentley and Wayne. They had outstayed the rest of the clientele. Most of the waitstaff had disappeared. The party rose unsteadily from their table and searched for the alcove where their overcoats were hung hours earlier. Gino quickly counted five dark-grey and black coats but saw nothing butterscotch brown. Bentley’s coat was missing. The sole remaining waiter, young and inexperienced, offered only feeble excuses. Bentley’s satisfied air disappeared, his brow darkened. Gino, doing his best to lighten the mood and save the situation, told him he would look into the matter. “I’ll take care of it.”

Next morning, his car parked in the firm’s lot, seated at his shiny wood and steel firm desk, drinking firm coffee, munching a firm bagel, Gino’s calls to the Firehouse’s floor captain, manager and owner yielded no trace of camelhair or overcoat. Determined Gino was discouraged but not defeated, when Trey Headley stuck his bald pate in his office door: “Gino, we’ve got an angry architect on our hands. He says you and your friends encouraged him to leave his overcoat in an unlocked closet at that ginmill you went to, and it was stolen. He’s not happy.”

COMING SOON to New Pop Lit!

An Excerpt from “Where the Rivers Meet” by Becky Tuch

NEW FICTION ALERT

Somewhere in the supermarket her daughter has gone to fetch toilet paper. They are supposed to be stocking up on supplies, items Erika has never had before in her life—canned milk, dehydrated meats, freeze-dried vegetables. Astronaut food, as if the whole country were about to shoot off into space.

And perhaps it is. The speaker overhead is playing Dido’s “White Flag”— “I will go down with this ship”—and the glistening floor is lined with social-distance markers. Arrows in each aisle direct customers one way or the other to avoid passing face-to-face. Every customer wears a mask; some of the cashiers wear plexiglas face guards.

Erika might not have come to the supermarket at all, were it not for the city-wide panic, a sudden rush for provisions. The stores were so overwhelmed she’d been unable to get an appointment for food delivery. At any rate, she felt funny about ordering food from home, sending others off to risk themselves on her behalf. Were some lives more expendable than others?

COMING SOON to New Pop Lit!

Nobel Irrelevance

A RANT

(photo c/o worldmagzine)

ANOTHER YEAR almost gone, another Nobel literature prize winner nobody’s heard of, who by all accounts writes “poetic prose,” a phrase which seems a nod by commentators toward the literary, to affirm among themselves (they speak for no one else) “she’s one of us.” She’s previously won the Booker Prize and probably other awards within today’s tiny literary world.

Yes, it’s a laudable event, plucking a dedicated writer from general obscurity and giving that person attention– good for the person; the writer– but for what after all is a glorified PR campaign it’s a failure. Part of consistent failure. PR without purpose. Is Han Kang a more compelling winner than last year’s winner? No doubt. That’s not enough.

Literature’s footprint in the culture is not increased a centimeter. Instead it continues to shrink. Relative to all else it shrinks, because the rest of the world’s noise– from politics, podcasts and polemics to Twitter and Tik-Tok, music and sports– speeds ahead like an expanding universe while the literary art stands still. Stuck. Trapped. An art of the imagination, allegedly, yet no one in credentialed levels of the literary realm has imagined a new idea– aesthetically or commercially– in decades. The same-old obsolete layers of overstaffed institutions and hierarchies. Ivy League academies and Big Five-sustained publicists and agents, akin to 19th century Central European bureaucrats receiving chests full of medals for moving stacks of jargon-filled paper around. Awards as tokens of appreciation for existing, while accomplishing nothing.

I’m not sure what the solution is, but it’s not this.

-Karl Wenclas

“the critics” by Ken Kakareka

HEMINGWAY FESTIVAL 2024

(photo c/o National Book Critics Circle)

they say
that writers
don’t play,
that’s why
they make
such great
observers.
like the
impotent
jake barnes
in the sun
also rises.
well
let me
tell you
something.
writers play.
i’ve stuck
my beak
in depths of
squishy kiwi
and tasted
the sweet,
the sour,
the ripened
and
the bitter.
i’ve snorted,
drank,
and fucked
everything
west of
the sun
and
sat with
the lamest
of ducks
at dead
wine bars
listening to
drowning
conversations,
and i’ve
walked
the walk
at old joints
in new orleans
where what
barflies say
jumps off
the walls
like frogs
off lilies.
so i can
tell you
that writers
play more
than anyone.
don’t believe
the critics –
they’re
the ones
who don’t
play.

See also Ken Kakareka’s other feature in this year’s Hemingway Festival, “Old Bull.”