Prose
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“Out of Sorts” by Muzzafer Kale Translated from the Turkish by Ralph Hubbell
Photo by Giovanni Apruzzese
When you come across someone in one place after only ever seeing him in another place, you’ll likely have trouble remembering how you know him; but that’s not how this was!
He comes in and takes a seat four or five tables away. I doubt he notices me. He looks preoccupied. One can get a little disheveled sometimes, it’s inevitable; somehow you can’t pull yourself together, which then makes it hard to notice whatever is going on around you. Or maybe he hasn’t woken up yet. There’s a fog in his head and it hasn’t even begun to clear.
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New! LIT Monthly Writing Prompt: April Edition
Happy poetry month everyone!
Here at LIT we are starting a new series of monthly writing prompts. This month’s prompt is from our nonfiction editor Vicky Oliver:
Write about a time when you were lost and how you found your way home.
The hero’s journey is sometimes a parable on the transformation of being: old habits and emotional reactions that are shed out of necessity as they become stumbling blocks to the journey. The old ways are replaced by new strengths or new ideas that have been germinating out of sight, waiting to come into play as fresh discoveries in a moment of crisis,
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Three Short Vignettes by Mariella Mehr (translated from the German by Caroline Froh)
Artwork by Isabel Peterhans
WHEN CHESTNUT BLOSSOMS GREW INTO YOUR BEDROOM
Laughter is a bright wall around us. A ceremony of drunken greetings over at the next table, the noise of belonging together. Hanging overhead, whiffs of cool oil and hungry desire – rosy, edged in black. Housewife faces, student faces, plump party mouths, little girl faces, intellectuals, sensitives – but mostly males. The Weavers, you say, was always a waiting room. The host carries bad wine from table to table. You have your I-am-strong-on-my-own face on.
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Lasting Art: A Review of Cole Swensen’s Art in Time
Art in Time is a book that resists the idea of it ever becoming a “timeless work of art.” For poet,
translator, and academic Cole Swensen, the very notion of a “timeless work of art” not only implies a
refusal to engage with the present moment, but also exposes a fundamental problem in our viewership:
our tendency of looking at rather than from within. In this collection of lyric essays, Swensen studies
the work of twenty artists, all of whom have “found ways through landscape to become an active
element in the view and its viewing.”The book itself remains neatly tied to its own present moment.
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“Lovingly, Peaches” by Michaela Rae Luckey
My mother named me Posie, but my nickname is Peaches. When we were young, my mom would read me and my older brother bedtime stories every night until we fell asleep.
One night, I asked, “Why do people call me Peaches?”
She put down our book and said, “When God put you in my tummy, I had this craving for white peaches–craving means something you’re really hungry for.”
My brother and I nodded.
“I ate those peaches all the time even though I’d never really liked them before. When you were born,
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“Kind of a Short-length Letter for a Full-length Film” by Luis Miguel Rivas (translated from the Colombian Spanish by Valentina Calvache) Artwork by Daniela Moreno Ramirez
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This story is from Rivas’ debut in the Latin American fiction industry: an anthology of short stories written from one of Colombia’s literary outcasts — he didn’t gain recognition until the Guadalajara Book Fair named him one of Latin America best-kept secrets, and his works went through the roof, with translations in French and the signing of his latest novel with Sony Pictures.
“Kind of a Short-length Letter for a Full-length Film” is a magnificent story that encloses and discloses — at the same time — Colombian reality seen through the eyes of a sharp writer,
