Contributor Update: Ananda Lima

Congratulations to Ananda Lima on the upcoming release of her fiction debut, Craft: Stories I Wrote for the Devil! The novel with be available June 18th from Tor Books and is available for pre-order now.

Craft is a surreal literary linked short story collection revolving around the absurdity of our times, art, and writing, as well as a complex view of the immigrant experience. The stories are written by a writer who meets with the Devil again and again throughout her life, after sleeping with him at a Halloween party in 1999.

The book has already received significant praise:

“Here is a collection of stories that not only delights in its ability to subvert the reader’s expectations but also leaves one haunted.”

—The Kenyon Review

“My only problem with this book is the title, and that’s because I love it so much. Ananda Lima didn’t write these stories for the Devil, she wrote them for me! An absolutely thrilling reminder that short stories can be the best kind of magic, conjuring up not only the devil, but real emotion, real surprise, real strangeness.”

—Kelly Link, author of The Book of Love

Ananda Lima’s poem “Transa” can be found in Issue 20 of s[r]. She can also be found on her website and across her social media accounts: @anandalima: i | t | b | fb | @.

Ananda Lima is a poet, translator, and fiction writer born in Brasília, Brazil, now living in Chicago, ILShe’s the author of the poetry collection Mother/land, winner of the Hudson Prize. Her work has appeared in The American Poetry Review, Poets.org, Kenyon Review Online, Gulf Coast, Pleiades, The Common, Witness, and elsewhere. She has been awarded the inaugural WIP Fellowship by Latinx-in-Publishing. She has an MA in Linguistics from UCLA and an MFA in Creative Writing in Fiction from Rutgers University, Newark.

Contributor Update: Cynthia Marie Hoffman

Congratulations to past contributor Cynthia Marie Hoffman who has a new poetry collection coming out on February 6th entitled Exploding Head.

This collection of prose poems chronicles a woman’s childhood onset and adult journey through obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD), which manifests in fearful obsessions and counting compulsions that impact her relationship to motherhood, religion, and the larger world. Cynthia Marie Hoffman’s unsettling, image-rich poems chart the interior landscape of the obsessive mind. Along with an angel who haunts the poems’ speaker throughout her life, she navigates her fear of guns and accidents, fears for the safety of her child, and reckons with her own mortality, ultimately finding a path toward peace.

This book has received significant praise:

“Hoffman’s fourth book compresses the relentlessness of fear and obsession into electrifying prose poems, boxes threatening to burst. Hoffman scrutinizes the child self and the mother self with absorbing candor, precision, music, and urgency in this harrowing world where ‘birds bomb through the air like the skulls of galloping horses.’ The impulses that sprint through the mind—‘a shuddering animal hunkered down inside your skull’—come so frightfully alive that I felt I’d been transported into another woman’s extraordinary brain.”—Eugenia Leigh, author of Bianca

View more of Cynthia’s work on her website. Purchase Exploding Head here.

Cynthia Marie Hoffman is the author of four poetry collections: Exploding Head (Feb, 2024), SightseerPaper Doll Fetus, and Call Me When You Want to Talk about the Tombstones, as well as the chapbook Her Human Costume. Hoffman is the recipient of a Diane Middlebrook Fellowship in Poetry at the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing, an Individual Artist Fellowship from the Wisconsin Arts Board, and a Director’s Guest fellowship at the Civitella Ranieri Center in Italy. Her work has appeared in Smartish Pace, FencediodeThe JournalThe Missouri Review, and elsewhere. Collections have appeared as an intro feature in Pleiades, a featured chapbook in Mid-American Review, and in the annual Introductions Reading Loop online at Blackbird.

View Cynthia Marie Hoffmans’ poems “This Is All True,” “Protection Spell Jar,” and “If You Have Grown Unrecognizable to Yourself” in issue 30 of Superstition Review.

Contributer Update: Terese Svoboda

Available February 1
Winner of the Juniper Prize for Fiction
Available March 1

We at Superstition Review are pleased to congratulate previous contributor Terese Svoboda on her upcoming release of two novels!

In Roxy and Coco, the namesake sisters are two glamorous harpies—mythical bird women—attempting to outrun extinction and fix the planet by preventing child abuse, one child at a time. Navigating urgent social work with abusive parents, personal attractions with complicated suspicions, curious homicides and surprise interventions, Roxy and Coco is a mythical reimagining with the soul of modern woes and foes, and the thrill of modern superheroes. 

Winner of the Juniper Prize, The Long Swim is a collection of cynical, irreverent, and formally daring short stories. From a runaway circus lion that haunts a small town where two lovers risk more than their respective marriages, to a junket to Cuba and an ambassador’s dalliance with a niece hide dark secrets and political revolution. Inventive, dark, and absurd, these stories capture Svoboda’s clear-eyed, wry angle on the world: a place of violence and uncertainty but also wild beauty, adventure, and love both lasting and ephemeral. Globe-trotting, barbed, nuanced, and deeply human, The Long Swim will speak to fans of Lauren Groff, Helen DeWitt, George Saunders, and Amy Hempel.

Both novels have already received enthusiastic reviews:

“There are many mythic reimaginings out there, but I can guarantee you that Roxy and Coco is unlike anything you’ve read—Terese Svoboda’s harpies are winged avengers, a celestial task force who save kids who have been abused by their terrestrial protectors.” 

—Karen Russell, author of Swamplandia! and Sleep Donation

“Existing at the sweet spot between Rachel Ingalls’ Mrs. Caliban, Donald Barthelme’s Snow White, and James Purdy’s I Am Elijah ThrushRoxy and Coco plucks a creature out of myth to bring it into our present—and does so in a way that keeps a steady eye on the flaws of our own weird moment. Rarely has fantastic fiction managed to say so much so deftly about the real while still offering a terrific, strange and highly original read.”

—Brian Evenson, author of Last Days and Song for the Unraveling of the World

“Terese Svoboda is a master of the dire and the blackly comic and a virtuoso of economy and voice, and The Long Swim features the jaunty and the wounded who in extremis maintain their wit and lacerating self-awareness.”

—Jim Shepard, author of The Book of Aron and Like You’d Understand, Anyway

“One of those writers you would be tempted 
to read regardless of the setting or the period 
or the plot or even the genre.”

—Bloomsbury Review

Terese Svoboda is the author of over twenty books, including fiction, poetry, biography, translation, and memoir, including the recent novel, Dog on Fire (2023). Her many honors include a Guggenheim fellowship, the Bobst Prize in fiction, the Iowa Poetry Prize, An NEH translation grant, The Graywolf Press Nonfiction Prize, a Jerome Foundation grant, the O. Henry Award for the short story, and a Pushcart Prize for the essay.

You can read her story in Superstition Review Issue 7 here. You can read her interview for s[r] here. She has also published guest posts on our blog. Her work can be found in its entirety on her website.

Contributor Update: Timothy Reilly

We are excited to celebrate Timothy Reilly’s recent publication of his fiction chapbook, Short Story Quartet.

“If I find in myself desires which nothing in this world can satisfy, the only logical explanation is that I was made for another world.” — C.S Lewis

As the title suggests, this fiction chapbook (published by Bottlecap Press) contains just four stories. The tone is set by a flash fiction titled “Tom Corbett and the Cadets of the Academy.” The flash is something of a “junior” quest story: via a 1950s TV space adventure show, and a box top from Kraft caramels. The stories in this miniature collection are certainly diverse, but they are all stories of longing —with skirmishes and hints of reconciliation between physics and metaphysics. The collection ends with a story blending youth and old age: with an unapologetic nod to The Wizard of Oz.

This book has been well received, hailed “A beautifully nostalgic collection” by Fictive Dream literary magazine.

Timothy Reilly has contributed stories to Superstition Review in both Issues 16 and 19. He also wrote two guest posts for s[r]: “Mozartean,” (November 21, 2020) and “How a Former Tuba Player Becomes a Writer of Short Stories” (October 18, 2018).

You can purchase Short Story Quartet from Bottlecap Press here.

Timothy Reilly had been a professional tubist (including a stint with the Teatro Regio of Turin, Italy) until around 1980, when a condition called “Embouchure Dystonia” ended his music career. He gratefully retired from substitute teaching in 2014. Three-times nominated for a Pushcart Prize, he has published in Zone 3, The Main Street Rag, Fictive Dream, Superstition Review, and many other journals. His chapbook, Short Story Quartet, is published by Bottlecap Press Features. He lives in Southern California with his wife, Jo-Anne Cappeluti: a poet and scholar.

Contributor Update: Christopher Burawa

Contributor Update: Christopher Burawa

Congratulations to past contributor Christopher Burawa who recently published Where I Came Here From.

Where I Came Here From is a collection of Zen Buddhist inspired poems that occasionally wander a path to the north-to Iceland, Christopher Burawa’s birthplace. The Iceland poems reflect, as Cynthia Hogue suggests, an “Icelandic Zen,” of the Self examining itself, unearthing what remains of his connections to the past and the trauma of separation, of being caught in the illusion of the fixated, isolated self. In these poems he follows the schematics of the skandhas and dependent origination, tracing the activity of mind and as the reborn self that arises from its dwelling.

The book has received significant praise:


Very few books of poetry move me the way Christopher Burawa’s Where I Came Here From has with its celebration of the imagination. The poems are like trapdoors, giving way to a world where you are both lost and found. Here, you find your way—through wit and earnestness, the playful and the profound—until “the cosmos breaks / open to let you through.”

–Blas Falconer

The perceptions inside Christopher Burawa’s collection invite you to track and take-in, live and breathe within some profound and defamiliarized spaces. These poems exist on a continuous and steep terrain, there to observe the rock’s jagged path, as well as the traveler’s clear-eyed navigation of an obscure map—and so these poems comfort you amidst all that’s unknowable; they ask you to gaze headlong while your hands pass uncut through a cold window, because, despite what you’ve understood before holding this book, “really, a river is a door, / until it opens.”

–Melissa Cundieff

“With deepest humility, a profound commitment to love, and reverence for truth, a book like Where I Came Here From appears. This does not happen frequently, this peeking into the ordinary with a view to what is there, not really there, but there in the sense of where we live. Burawa takes us beyond the illusion of thought and the firm conviction that some things hurt beyond what we think we can bear, and other things give us immeasurable joy, or hopefulness. We all should know what it takes to write a book of poems like this one. This is Zen.”

–Afaa Michael Weaver

Read more about Christopher’s book on the Finishing Line Press website.

Christopher Burawa is a poet, translator, high school language arts teacher, and ordained Rinzai Zen Buddhist monk. He received an MFA in poetry from Arizona State University. He has received numerous awards for his work, including an NEA Translation Fellowship, Joy Harjo Poetry Prize, an American-Scandinavian Foundation Creative Writing Research Fellowship, Witter Bynner Poetry Translator Residency, among others. He lives with his wife and daughter in Red Wing, Minnesota.

View Christopher Burawa’s’ poems in issue 10 and issue 23 of Superstition Review

Contributor Update: Vanessa Lopez Aziz

Contributor Update: Vanessa Lopez Aziz

Congratulations to past contributor Vanessa Lopez Aziz who recently published Play it Back.

In her debut novel, Aziz tells the story of a 27-year-old Asian-American woman, Carmen, who reels she has a perfect life. She has a hard-won life and independent lifestyle with a rewarding job, a loving boyfriend, and great friends. She grew up from a socially awkward teenager with immigrant parents and no college acceptances to the person she is today. She has no reason to want to relive her teen years, but that’s exactly what happens when she reluctantly attends her high school reunion and finds herself transported ten years in the past to relive her senior year. Knowing how her life turns out, she figures while she’s in 1999, she might as well enjoy it. She joins drama club, goes to parties, and flirts with the boy who will become her future fiancé. It’s not all fun and games, though, as she realizes her best friends chafe under the changes and her parents’ marriage implodes. As she struggles to navigate her past life, Carmen must confront the question of why she was sent here in the first place – a question that may lead her to the realization that the life she thought had turned out so perfectly may not be everything she dreamed of after all.

The book has received significant praise:

Play it Back thrives on a simple, but compelling premise – What would happen if you woke up in the body of your younger self? What does it mean? What would you do differently? The novel is an intriguing read from page one, establishing Vanessa Lopez Aziz as an engaging literary voice who deftly blends adult sensibilities with an anxious environment of adolescent uncertainty – and the pressure to navigate (or renavigate) the final year of high school with the promise of college on the horizon. Along the way, Aziz explores the complexities of everyday life – family and friendship, love and loyalty – while seamlessly weaving elements of her own Filipino heritage into a narrative that never strays from its relatable tone. The nostalgic references are a welcome touch for those who remember using printed MapQuest directions instead of GPS systems to drive our teenage friends around to weekend parties.” – Rob Kachelriess, Trivago Magazine

View more of Vanessa’s creative work on her website. Purchase Play it Back here.

Vanessa Lopez Aziz spent the first decade of her adulthood adventuring. She has lived along California’s coast, Nevada, the Alaskan frontier, England, and Eastern Europe. She’s jumped off mountains, excavated ancient archaeological sites, and lived out of a backpack for years at a time. These days, she is more often found writing than living adventures. She is a first-generation half-Filipino and half-Pakistani. She felt a lack of media representation growing up and now writes stories she has always wished to see more of, populated with quirky protagonists finding their way when traditional labels don’t fit. When she’s not writing, she works as a nurse in child psychiatry.

View Vanessa Lopez Aziz’ “Three Parables” in issue 31 of Superstition Review

Contributor Update: Marcia Aldrich

Contributor Update: Marcia Aldrich

Congratulations to SR Contributor Marcia Aldrich on her forthcoming essay collection Studio of the Voice, coming out in February 2024.

In her essay collection, Aldrich invites readers on a journey of personal exploration of women’s lives, discussing themes such as the complicated love of mothers for daughters and daughters for mothers, slinky blue dresses and sultry red lipstick, Hollywood beauties and the stories we tell about them, the losses and treasures of getting older, her lifelong swim, and much more. The essays speak in a voice that is uniquely hers: revealing, comic, elegiac, perceptive, and wise. Each essay takes on dazzling form; some as shape-shifters, some fragmented and experimental, others in the classic mode–each of them to be discovered, savored, and shared.

Award-winning Aldrich has received significant praise for her newest essay collection.

“Essaying is the best way to freeze and examine and better understand the shifting phantasmagoria of our experiences in families and societies, and Marcia Aldrich’s Studio of the Voice is a whole collection of essays par excellence. With an eager, associative mind, Aldrich gathers and explores intergenerational conflicts and conundrums, generating meditative momentum toward a new vision of how we should, and can, relate to one another.” —Patrick Madden, author of Disparates: Essays

“In Studio of the Voice, Marcia Aldrich creates a studio of the voice-driven essay. Endlessly curious, digressive, formally inventive, these essays shine a light on an essential quality of the essay: it’s not about the epiphany, but process, the questions one asks. Long one of our very best essayists, Aldrich is undaunted at the dark door of the multifaceted truths self-investigation can yield, though sometimes, surprisingly, it is only the door that is dark. One essay by Marcia Aldrich is a cause for celebration. This rangy new book should provoke a parade. A signal achievement, Studio of the Voice is an essential book of essays.” —David Lazar, author of Celeste Holm Syndrome and founding editor of Hotel Amerika

“No writer evokes the way Marcia Aldrich evokes. For every scene she writes, story she tells, detail she describes, she palpates the imagination. This book is physicality incarnate. I can feel her hands as they clutch a bedpost, soothe a cheek slap, twist the chain of a pair of smudged reading glasses hanging around the neck, warm with a flash of menopause, rub the arch of Marilyn Monroe’s foot, burnish beauty, weigh the heaviness of rejection, thrill at the joy of a backflip, and press through dark water with the joy of swimming. Studio of the Voice maintains that we are most human when we are most embodied. Aldrich makes us feel fully human as she gives voice to her own body and the bodies of others in this vibrantly corporeal book.” —Nicole Walker, author of Processed Meat: Essays on Food, Flesh, and Navigating Disaster

In addition to Studio of the Voice, Aldrich also recently wrote “My First Old Person” on Oldster. Additionally, “In My Head: Tinnitus” was nominated for Best of the Net 2023.

Marcia Aldrich is the author of Girl Rearing, Companion to an Untold Story, Haze Underway, Waveform, and Edge. Her writing has received awards such as the AWP Award in Creative Nonfiction. View more of Marcia’s work on her website, where you can also view how to order Studio of the Voice.

View Marcia Aldrich’s “The Year in Review” in issue 23 of Superstition Review.

Bill Gaythwaite’s Underburn

Bill Gaythwaite’s Underburn

Congratulations to SR contributor Bill Gaythwaite on his debut novel, Underburn.

Underburn explores the emotional vicissitudes of a family in flux while introducing endearing and irresistible characters. The story follows Iris Flynn, an acerbic self-sufficient seventy-three-year-old widow with a minor Hollywood career in her past and some streamlined kitchen cabinets inspired by Marie Kondo. Her composed and simplified existence is disrupted when her son Frank lands on her doorstep after his rental home is destroyed in a wildfire, the latest in a string of personal setbacks in his life. He arrives with Logan, his twenty-five-year-old “startlingly handsome” boyfriend, a featured extra on a teen soap opera with a loyal Instagram following. Soon, news from Iris’ estranged family in Maine forces everyone out of their comfort zone. Iris convinces Frank and Logan to travel with her to the potato farm which she made a quick getaway fifty years earlier, unleashing a funny and poignant family saga about secrets, forgiveness, and the fluctuations of the human heart.

The book has received significant praise:

“A quirky family story told with wit and wisdom, with shades of Anne Tyler or Elizabeth Strout.”  Kirkus Reviews 

“A wonderfully engaging tale of both family and the underside of fame, Bill Gaythwaite’s debut novel Underburn mirrors the deceptive richness of the very generational ties it so charmingly explores: the long memories, conflicts big and small, surprisingly pivotal moments, and rediscovered bonds. One rarely encounters characters drawn with such candor, warmth, and humanity: you will gladly cheer and care for everyone as they seek to make peace with the past, while risking it all for a brand-new future.” —Natalie Jenner, author of the international bestseller The Jane Austen Society

“A poignant, funny, and timely family drama following the often-twisted paths we navigate toward understanding, reconciliation, and forgiveness.” —Christopher Castellani, author of Leading Men

“A witty, heartfelt novel with endearing, imperfect characters who are impossible to resist, a deft examination of a family in flux.” —Kristyn Kusek Lewis, contributing books editor, Real Simple

Learn more about Bill at his website. Preorder the hardcover of Underburn here.

Bill Gaythwaite is an established writer whose short fiction has appeared in Subtropics, Chicago Quarterly ReviewPuerto Del Sol, december, Solstice, and many other publications. Gaythwaite’s work can also be found in the anthologies Mudville Diaries: A Book of Baseball Memories and Hashtag Queer: LGBTQ+ Creative Anthology, vols. 1 and 2. Gaythwaite has worked at Columbia University since 2006, where he was on the staff of the Committee on Asia and the Middle East. He is currently the Assistant Director of Special Populations at Columbia Law School. Gaythwaite grew up in Boston and raised his son in New York City and its suburbs. An avid swimmer, movie aficionado, and football fan, he lives in New Jersey with his partner, Tom. He has been writing stories since he was six years old. Underburn is Gaythwaite’s debut novel.

View “Dear Coach Carl” in issue 14 of Superstition Review or read Gaythwaite’s guest posts on the Superstition Review blog.

Perishable by Stelios Mormoris

Perishable by Stelios Mormoris

Stelios Mormoris has a forthcoming poetry collection, Perishable, which will soon be published from Tupelo Press.

Mormoris’ first book, The Oculus, received generous praise from established voices. Award-winning poet Donald Revell says of The Oculus, “Like memory, sunlight itself is both elusive and overwhelming. We live and we compose our lives in the interstices, in gaps both riven and secured by Vision. In The Oculus, Mormoris bodies forth a vivid myth of the interstices, bathed in sunlight, swathed in shadow … Here are poems of serenity in turbulence, dearly welcome now.” Other literary voices such as Kylie Minogue, Christine Kondoleon, Renée Fleming, Courtney Love Cobain, and Dan Beachy-Quick praised the book.

Poet and NEA fellow Emma Bolden observes, “As the title suggests, Stelios Mormoris’ The Oculus offers the reader a lush and vibrant view of the world. Mormoris’ view is expansive, revealing the gorgeous, rich vistas that surround us all in daily life. In these beautifully constructed poems, the humble objects of everyday life—‘tournedos of barley,’ ‘the fresh mint on a wet green melon’—become divine, while the divine is humbled and humanized. More than flight, what Icarus remembers is his ‘cat purring in a stand of reeds, my father sleeping with his hands on his face.’ Mormoris reminds us of how ‘necessary it is to lose yourself in tangles,’ in the beauty that surrounds us, no matter where we look.”

Stelios Mormoris is a widely published poet, author, and CEO of SCENT BEAUTY, Inc. A dual citizen of Greece and the United States, Mormoris was born in New York and spent most of his life living in Paris. He has held positions on the Boards of the French Cultural Center of Boston, New England, The Fragrance Foundation, SYMRISE, ACT-UP, and is a member of Kytherian Society of Greece.

Order a copy of The Oculus here. Keep up to date with Mormoris’ work and the upcoming publishing of Perishable here.

Spring Fever by Thomas Legendre

Spring Fever by Thomas Legendre

Thomas Legendre recently published Spring Fever, a quantum romantic techno-thriller novel with a literary sensibility.

The book is set in London and Nottingham and follows Amanda Nigh, an employee of HocusLocus who recrafts digital content with viral potential while beta-testing radical new software and enjoying London nightlife. But, she discovers a strange story involving American ice hockey player Craig Merleau, who talks like a European philosopher, inexplicably propelling his team to victory with his cerebral pronouncements. All the while, the world is threatened by a subatomic virus that affects computers and humans in bizarre ways. While global networks run awry and everyone struggles with quantum superposition and gravity quakes, Amanda and Craig remain blissfully untouched and attempt to avert technological and biological Armageddon.

“Strangely enough, I started writing Spring Fever before COVID-19, mainly as a way of addressing the rift or gap between our everyday experience and the imperceptible world described by quantum physics, which in some ways corresponds to the gap between appearance and reality that underlies so much of social media. This really was a vexation of mine. I’m not normal. But then of course the pandemic had a huge effect. Suddenly my research on viruses and related issues was in the mainstream and I could draw from the daily news instead of articles on JSTOR. And social media went absolutely bonkers with everyone trapped at home. It was eerie in many ways, a bit like writing about a naval disaster a few months before the Titanic,” Legendre told Jamie McGarry of Valley Press.

Thomas Legendre is a fiction writer, with published works including Keeping Time, The Burning (longlisted for the Warwick Prize for Writing) and Double Jeopardy. He has also written Half Life, a play performed as part of NVA’s art installation in conjunction with the National Theatre of Scotland, and a radio drama entitled Dream Repair for BBC4. He is an Assistant Professor in Creative Writing at the University of Nottingham.

Spring Fever is available from Valley Press. Visit Legendre’s YouTube channel to hear readings of different excerpt from Spring Fever. Read more about Thomas Legendre here.