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Tim Hunt’s The Textuality of Soulwork: Jack Kerouac’s Quest for Spontaneous Proseexamines Kerouac’s work from a new critical perspective with a focus on the author’s unique methods of creating and working with text. Additionally, The Textuality of Soulwork delineates Kerouac’s development of “Spontaneous Prose” to differentiate the preliminary experiment of On the Road from the more radical experiment of Visions of Cody, and to demonstrate Kerouac’s transition from working within the textual paradigm of modern print to the textual paradigm of secondary orality. From these perspectives, Tim Hunt crafts a new critical approach to Beat poetics and textual theory, marking an important contribution to the current revival of Kerouac and Beat studies underway at universities in the U.S. and abroad, as reflected by a growing number of conferences, courses, and a renewal in scholarship.

Sui generis, Dana Roeser's poems are spoken by a stand-up comic having a bad night at the local club. The long extended syntax, spread over her quirky, syncopated short lines, contains (barely) the speaker's anxieties over an aging father with Parkinson's, the maturation of two daughters, friends at twelve-step meetings and their sometimes suicidal urges—acted on or resisted—and her own place in a world that seems about to spin out of control. Bad weather and tiny economy cars speeding down the interstate next to Jurassic semis become the metaphor, or figurative vehicle, for this poet's sense of her own precariousness. 

Roeser brings a host of characters into her poems—a Catholic priest raging against the commercialism of Mother's Day, the injured tennis player James Blake, a man struck by lightning, drunk partygoers, an ex-marine, Sylvia Plath's son Nicholas Hughes, a neighbor, travelers encountered in airport terminals, various talk therapists—and lets them speak. She records with high fidelity the nuances of our ordinary exigencies so that the poems become extraordinary arias sung by a husky-voiced diva with coloratura phrasing to die for, “the dark notes” that Lorca famously called the duende. The book is infused with the energy of misfortune, accident, coincidence, luck, grace, panic, hilarity. The characters and narrator, in extremis, speak their truths urgently.

Through this translation of As Três Marias the literary achievements of Rachel de Queiroz may at last be judged and appreciated by the English-reading public. Since none of her four novels has previously been translated into English, The Three Marias will be, for many non-Brazilians, an introduction to this nationally known South American author whose books have been widely praised for their artistic merits. Her literary works are colored by her projected personality, by an intense feeling for her own people, by an omnipresent social consciousness, and by personal experiences in the arid backlands of her native state of Ceará.

Basing this story on certain of her own recollections from the nineteen-twenties, Rachel de Queiroz tells of a girl growing up in the seaport town of Fortaleza, in northeastern Brazil. Fred P. Ellison, whose special field is Brazilian and Spanish-American literature, has captured in his translation the author's graceful style and simplicity of language, and has successfully retained the perspective of an idealistic and gradually maturing girl.

WINNER OF FC2’S CATHERINE DOCTOROW INNOVATIVE FICTION PRIZE

Stories haunted by the remains of the industrial Midwest, the opioid epidemic, and the technology of war

Located somewhere in the rust belt in the early twenty-first century, residents of the town of Whispering Dolls dream of a fabled and illusory past, even as new technologies reshape their world into something different and deeply strange. Dolls walk down the streets, cradling their empty heads and letting the wind turn them into flutes. A politician heads to Washington, DC, and leaves a toxic underground plume in his wake. A woman eats car parts instead of confronting the children who have forgotten her. A young woman falls in love with the robot who took her job at the candy factory.

In The Town of Whispering Dolls, it is usually the grandmothers and the children who grieve. Feeling invisible, in the story “Here,” a woman who has buried her children looks up at the sky where commercial and military jets fly overhead and tries to express her rage to the rich and powerful: “Keep flying above us in your planes. From one coast to the other, keep right on flying over us! We test your bombs and your beloved warriors. Here. Right here. Look down.”

 

A contemporary gothic delving into the power of unmoored lust and familial bonds

When Baxter, a young writer and recent college graduate, accepts a live-in nanny position for an affluent professor’s family in the foothills of the Rocky Mountains, she rapidly becomes aware of strange happenings orbiting the family and their children, Quinn and Thebes. After the father becomes estranged and the mother disappears into the night with only one child, Baxter is left utterly lost and in charge of the baby, Thebes, as she struggles to make sense of the bizarre occurrences within the family, the house, and even her own body. But the unnatural occurrences are far from over, and as Baxter stumbles in the dark to protect the child, something sinister stalks the night, looking to sink in its teeth. 

For fans of gothic classics such as The Turn of the Screw and Carmilla, The Turn is an eerie and magnificent modern gothic tale about the monstrous bond of love between caregiver and child.