NewPages Blog

Katy Haas

Steinke’s ‘Flash Count Diary’

Posted by

Guest Post by Joe Taylor.

For sure, this book is about menopause and all the related inconveniences, silly jokes, and notions—but it’s also about sexuality, patriarchy, mortality, acceptance, spirituality, wisdom, and whales. Yes whales, for it seems those creatures that can live well over a century elect matriarchs who have experienced menopause to lead their packs in something of a crone’s position. And why not? Experience matters. Lack of distraction matters. It’s called wisdom. And this, Steinke tells us, is precisely why women should not pursue hormone treatment, why men should not pursue Viagra. Acceptance of life’s stages and the accompanying wisdom, not denial and infantile retreat.

This book presents Darcey Steinke par excellence, perhaps a bit angrier than her usual when discussing the mostly male-dominated medical and pharmaceutical fields, but then, as she would no doubt insist, she has earned that anger. As have we all.

Flash Count Diary: Menopause and the Vindication of Natural Life by Darcey Steinke. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, June 2019.

Reviewer bio: Joe Taylor has published five novels and three story collections. He is the director of Livingston Press: https://livingstonpress.uwa.edu.

Buy this book from our affiliate Bookshop.org.

An Action Adventure Sports Novel

Posted by

Guest Post by Lorraine “Lorrie” Morales

If you’re looking for a great story from a self-published author, check our Jim Malner’s Big League. The book is an action adventure sports novel and a great read for anyone who loves hockey and mystery.

David Stone, an undrafted walk-on player, dreams of playing in the NHL. Riley Sawyer, the league’s number one draft pick, is Detroit Red Wings favorite to lead the team to the Stanley Cup. Their meeting at the summer training camp is a battle, not only on the ice, but against Russian mobsters and professional assassins. The boys will discover what real team work is in professional sports and the world of organized crime.

Big League by Jim Malner. Self-published, 2019.

Reviewer bio: Lorraine “Lorrie” Morales is a published author from Alberta, Canada
Press: https://www.lorriemorales.com.

NewPages Mag Stand: South Dakota Review

Posted by

South Dakota Review is delighted to announce the release of Volume 55 Numbers 1&2. Featuring Marcia Arrieta, Carol Berg, and Anne Barngrover. Plus work by Annie Christain, Lisa Fay Coutley, Aisha Down, Kimberly Glanzman, and Jeannine Hall Gailey. See more contributors at the Mag Stand.

NewPages Mag Stand: Radar Poetry

Posted by

Welcome to the contest issue, on this week’s Mag Stand. Read Laura Villareal’s winning suite of poems, as well as work from finalists Hilary Berg, Mary Craig, Shannon Elizabeth Hardwick, Jessica Hincapie, Amy Miller, Meredith Stricker, and Sarah Wolfson. Cover art by Erin Case.

NewPages Mag Stand: Plume

Posted by

Visit Plume for this month’s Featured Selection: On Queer Poetics, Writing Courageously, and Becoming Otherwise: An Interview with Nomi Stone by Amanda Newell. In nonfiction, Peter Johnson provides “The Edson Letters.” Mark Wagenaar reviews Eric Pankey’s Alias. See this month’s poetry contributors at the Mag Stand.

NewPages Mag Stand: The Main Street Rag

Posted by

This issue’s featured interview is with Doralee Brooks, whose poetry is also included. Also in this issue: creative nonfiction by Frederick W. Bassett; fiction by Nathan V. Baker, Mari Carlson, Linda Griffin, Alan Nelson, and Eudora Watson; and poetry by Joan Barasovska, Rachel Barton, Ranney Campbell, Maria Ceferatti, Sally Dunn, Caroline Goodwin, Cleo Griffith, Dorinda Hale, Dennis Herrell, Zebulon Huset, Craig Kittner, Mike Jurkovic, and more. Visit the Mag Stand to see more contributors.

NewPages Mag Stand: The Gettysburg Review

Posted by

The first edition of Volume 33 is out and features paintings by Tollef Runquist, fiction by Julialicia Case, Martha Shaffer, Kirsten Vail Aguilar, and Andrea Marcusa; essays by Elizabeth Kaye Cook, Kathy Flann, Don Lago, Christine Schott, Rebecca McClanahan, and Melissa Haley; poetry by Christopher (c3) Crew, Peter Grandbois, Despy Boutris, Douglas Smith & George Looney, John Hazard, Brian Swann, Maura Stanton, Cindy King, John Brehm, and more. See other contributors at the Mag Stand.

NewPages Mag Stand: Anomaly

Posted by

In the new issue: comics by Tamara Jong, Jennifer Murvin, Chloe Martinez, Andie Frein, Amelia L. Williams, and Alina Viknyanskiy; poetry by Tian-Ai, Stephanie Jean, Shay Alexi, Saddiq Dzukogi, Noor Ibn Najam, Noʻu Revilla, Michal Jones, KL Lyons, Irteqa Khan, Ima Odong, Heather Simon, Eunice Kim, Chavonn Williams Shen, Bailey Cohen-Vera, Asmaa Jama, and Amanda Holiday, fiction by Laurence Klavan, LaToya Jordan, K-Ming Chang / 張欣明, and Carson Faust; and nonfiction by Tasha Raella, Jody Chan, and Anjoli Roy. See what else the issue has to offer at the Mag Stand.

Driftwood Press Adrift Contest Winners

Posted by

Earlier this week, Driftwood Press announced the winners of their third annual Adrift Chapbook Contest.

Winner
Lily-livered by Wren Hanks

Runner-up
Dead Uncles by Ben Kline

Guest Judge Sandra Beasley chose each of these chapbooks which will be available in 2021.

In fiction, T. Geronimo Johnson selected “Myopic” by Mason Boyles as this year’s Adrift Contest winner. This story will appear in the January 2021 issue of Driftwood Press.

If you’re disappointed you missed your chance to submit this year, no worries! The Driftwood Press Poem Contest and the Driftwood Press Short Story Contest are both currently open for submissions until January 15.

Fresh Fiction from Gilbert Allen

Posted by

Guest Post by Elizabeth Genovise

If you’re hunting for some fresh fiction from a small press, check out Gilbert Allen’s newest book, The Beasts of Belladonna. This book features fifteen linked tales of quirky characters in a South Carolina foothills community. Expect the unexpected in these unsettling yet often hilarious stories, in which characters rub up against their own failures, yearnings, and secrets.

A minister nails a bird to a couple’s front door; a woman accidentally kills her cat and finds an unconventional way to grieve its loss; a man’s foxy neighbor goes to outrageous lengths to destroy his marriage. Domestic animals have a hefty influence on these people’s lives, sometimes comical and sometimes tragic; the same could be said about church as we’re introduced to the Mosquito Ministry, the Faster Pastor Challenge, and couples who pass witty notes during sermons. We meet “treenappers,” a Grandfather Against Garbage, and a character known as the Jesus of Malibu, and in these encounters are powerful flashes of raw humanity in all its complexity.

The Beasts of Belladonna by Gilbert Allen. Slant Books, October 2020.

Reviewer bio: Elizabeth Genovise is an MFA graduate from McNeese State University and the author of three short story collections, the most recent being Posing Nude for the Saints from the Texas Review Press. https://www.elizabethgenovisefiction.org/

At Home In The Dark With Carol Morris’s ‘Into The Lucky Dark’

Posted by

Guest Post by Susan Kay Anderson

Into The Lucky Dark by Carol Morris, who is part of the Diane Wakoski circle, is much like being invited to coffee at a friend’s house where every time you go there you can be yourself and when you leave you feel like more yourself than ever before. Morris believes that life is a struggle but to read her poems and look at her utterly delightful artwork in this book, it would seem that life is also a place that we seem to haunt long before getting to the ghostly stage of things. This takes a bit of getting used to. It takes a while to read Morris’s poems because to languish in their harsh settings of bars and other meetings/gatherings is to feel the freeze, feel the edges of being an outsider even to oneself and then find the self in the touchstones of such leaving: “Houses in which my talents were useless” (from “A June Divorce”) to finding art and abstractions which make concrete sense. [Read more…] about At Home In The Dark With Carol Morris’s ‘Into The Lucky Dark’