Contributor Update: Sloane Crosley

Congratulations to previous contributor Sloane Crosley on her new memoir Grief Is for People. The memoir goes on sale February 27th, 2024 but you can pre-order it from her website here.

Grief Is for People is a deeply moving and surprisingly suspenseful portrait of friendship and a book about loss packed with a verve for life. Sloane Crosley is one of our most renowned observers of contemporary behavior, and now, the pathos that has been ever-present in her trademark wit is on full display. After the pain and confusion of losing her closest friend to suicide, Crosley looks for answers in friends, philosophy, and art, hoping for a framework more useful than the unavoidable stages of grief.

For most of her adult life, Sloane and Russell worked together and played together, as they navigated the corridors of office life, the literary world, and the dramatic cultural shifts in New York City. One day, while Russell is still alive, Sloane’s apartment is broken into. Along with her most prized possessions, the thief makes off with her sense of security, leaving a mystery in its place.

When Russell dies exactly one month later, his suicide propels her on a wild quest to right the unrightable, to explore what constitutes family and possession as the city itself faces the staggering toll brought on by the pandemic.

Crosley’s search for truth is frank, darkly funny, and gilded with a resounding empathy. Upending the “grief memoir,” Grief Is for People is the category-defying story of the struggle to hold on to the past without being consumed by it. A modern elegy, it rises precisely to console and challenge our notions of mourning during these grief-stricken times.

Crosley has received astounding reviews for this piece:

“[An] aching meditation on loss and friendship… Crosley elegantly links the two losses by explaining how her fevered desire to reclaim her burglarized items stood in for her inability to reclaim Russel. Her characteristically whip-smart prose takes on a newly introspective quality as she reinvigorates dusty publishing memoir tropes and captures the minutiae of a complicated friendship with humor and heart. This is a must-read.”

—Publishers Weekly

“Novelist and essayist Crosley is a tightrope writer of devastating wit and plain devastation, a balancing act no doubt requiring even more muscle in this memoir of her grief…Also a story of the shifting sands of the last two decades in book publishing and the author’s and her friend’s changing places within it, this is a searching, impassioned, cathartic, and loving elegy.”

—Booklist

Sloane Crosley is the author of The New York Times bestselling essay collections, I Was Told There’d Be Cake (a 2009 finalist for The Thurber Prize for American Humor) and How Did You Get This Number, as well as Look Alive Out There (a 2019 finalist for The Thurber Prize for American Humor) and the bestselling novels, The Clasp and Cult Classic. She served as editor of The Best American Travel Writing series and is featured in The Library of America’s 50 Funniest American Writers, The Best American Nonrequired Reading, Phillip Lopate’s The Contemporary American Essay and others. She was the inaugural columnist for The New York Times Op-Ed “Townies” series, a contributing editor at Interview Magazine, and a columnist for The Village Voice, Vanity Fair, The Independent, Black Book, Departures and The New York Observer.

Superstition Review did an interview with Crosley in issue 7, you can access that here. To learn more about her and her work, visit her website here.

Contributor Update: Sloane Crosley Releases Look Alive Out There

Sloane Crosley's Look Alive Out There CoverToday we are pleased to announce the recent release of Sloane Crosley’sLook Alive Out There. The collection of essays, which was released April 3rd, 2018, is available through multiple outlets including Amazon and Barnes and Noble.

Sloane will also be touring for Look Alive Out There; the list of date and locations are available on her website.

Sloane contributed an interview in Superstition Review Issue 7. Former Superstition Review Editor Britney Gulbrandsen and Sloane touch on several of Sloane’s works where epigraphs and inspiration are just a part of the conversation. The interview is a great introduction, and wonderful read, if you are unfamiliar with the author.

Congratulations Sloane!

Contributor Update: Jackie Shannon Hollis and This Particular Happiness

Jackie Shannon HollisThis Particular Happiness, a memoir, by author Jackie Shannon Hollis has been announced! The memoir is scheduled to be released in Fall of 2019 by Forest Avenue Press.

This Particular Happiness follows Hollis’s experiences such as marriage and decisions about having children. Laura Stanfill, a Forest Avenue publisher, stated in the release that ” [it] would resonate deeply with readers. . . a guide for the heart when two people who love each other want different things.”

Jackie was interviewed in Superstition Review’s Issue 7. During the time of interview she was working on her first novel, At the Wheat Line. Jackie’s interview has some wonderful discussion about her works and writing choices, covering topics such as knowing when a story ends.

Congratulations, Jackie!

 

Contributor Update: Terese Svoboda News

Terese SvobodaWe are excited to share that Terese Svoboda will be reading some new poetry along with Dennis Nurske at Local 138 on February 10, 2017. Terese has several other upcoming events such as The Lives of Others: Biography as Creative Nonfiction panel at AWP on March 10, 2018, and celebrating the paperback of  Anything That Burns You: A Portrait of Lola Ridge, Radical Poet at Book Culture with Ajay Chaudhary on March 12, 2018. For more information and events with Terese we recommend visiting her events page at teresesvoboda.com.

Terese’s appearance in Superstition Review begins with an interview in issue 5. She has contributed several guest posts, and has been part of our SR Pod/Vod Series, which can be found hereMadonna in the Terminal, a fiction piece by Terese, can be read in issue 7.

Contributor Update: Kevin Prufer

Greetings, dear readers! We’ve got some tremendous news for you all today: past contributor Kevin Prufer, featured in the Interviews section of our 7th Issue, has a poem in the Spring 2017 issue of The Paris Review, titled “The Translator.” Check it out here, and do yourself the kindness of reading our interview with Kevin here. If you’d like to see more Kevin’s work, go ahead and check out his website, found here. Congratulations, Kevin! And readers, stay posted for more updates on the happenings of the incredible community here at Superstition Review.

Read "The Translator!"
Past contributor Kevin Prufer, whose poem “The Translator” was featured in the Spring 2017 issue of The Paris Review.

Contributor Update: Patricia Clark

Hello everybody! We here at Superstition Review are pleased to bring a bit of follow-up news regarding past contributor Patricia Clark (featured in the Poetry section of our  7th, 8th, and 17th issues) and her brilliant new book, titled “The Canopy.” Clark was interviewed by WYCE 88.1, a local radio station in Grand Rapids, as part of their Electric Poetry series, while “The Canopy” was recently reviewed by Cultured.GR, an art blog based in Grand Rapids.  The entire review can be read here, and while you’re at it, do yourself a big favor and listen to the interview here. Patricia Clark’s “The Canopy,” out now from Terrapin Books, can be purchased here. Do yourself a favor and check out “The Canopy” and see for yourself what all the hype is about!

Buy this book! Tell yr friends!
The beautifully rendered cover for The Canopy, out this year from Terrapin Books.

SR Pod/Vod Series: Writer Lynda Majarian

Each Tuesday we feature audio or video of an SR Contributor reading their work. Today we’re proud to feature a podcast by Lynda Majarian.

Lynda MajarianLynda Majarian earned a Master of Fine Arts degree in Creative Writing from the University of Arizona (home to one of the country’s leading graduate writing programs) and has had several short stories and essays published in print and online literary magazines including The Faircloth Review, Eastlit, Narrative, PIF, Superstition Review, Marco Polo, Thin Air Review, and Spelunker Flophouse. Her short story, Postscript to Cloud Nine was a runner-up for a short fiction prize by England’s Stand magazine. Lynda formerly wrote articles and essays for Seven Days magazine, and her work has also appeared in The Burlington Free Press and Rutland Herald newspapers. She left a lucrative career in public relations to become a college English Instructor. Her teaching experience includes nearly seven years of teaching Creative Writing, Introduction to Literature, Introduction to the Novel, and English Composition at Community College of Vermont, and two academic years teaching oral and written English composition skills to both undergraduate and graduate ESOL students in Shenyang and Shanghai, China, respectively. She is currently writing a memoir about her experiences living and working in China.

You can listen to the podcast on our iTunes Channel.

You can read along with the work in Superstition Review.

SR Pod/Vod Series: Writer Terese Svoboda

Each Tuesday we feature audio or video of an SR Contributor reading their work. Today we’re proud to feature a podcast by Terese Svoboda.

Terese SvobodaRecipient of a 2013 Guggenheim, Terese Svoboda is the author of five novels, most recently Bohemian Girl, named one of the ten best 2012 Westerns by Booklist and an Historical Book of the Year Finalist in Foreword. Tin God, a finalist for the John Gardner Prize, was reissued this spring, with Publisher’s Weekly deeming her a “fabulous fabulist.” “Astounding!proclaimed The New York Post in a review of her memoir Black Glasses Like Clark Kent that won the Graywolf Nonfiction Prize and The Japan Times “Best of Asia 2008.” Vogue lauded her first novel, Cannibal, as a female Heart of Darkness.

You can listen to the podcast on our iTunes Channel.

You can read along with the work in Superstition Review.

s[r] Goodreads #FridayReads

This week on Goodreads.com we featured a review by our Poetry Editor, Abner Porzio.

Snow Water CoveSnow Water Cove by Jeannine Savard

Simply superb from start to finish! Poet Jeannine Savard’s debut poetry collection Snow Water Cove is both pleasant and fascinating. The mastermind’s affinity with nature makes the ineffable more tangible. The elusiveness of childhood is examined realistically through nostalgia.

Savard’s colorful speakers and characters, spectacular settings, profound prefigurative language (plot), place readers in the landscapes of the soul. Locale influences the fullness of possibilities, provides wakefulness changes that prove to be transcendental. Savard’s attentiveness to imagery raises alertness. Inquiry, meditative qualms, and accurate observations render the perfectly nuance of uncertainties and certainties.

Whether it’s Savard’s speaker’s question if one can dream the same dream twice in her poem “CLASSICISM ON THE WATER,” or if it’s the respondent’s absolute certainty of disbelief, the reader can be the witness such paradoxical moments. Nor can one deny the moment flesh heals itself. This fact as well as the news of a deadly accident arrives in her poem titled “THE STITCH.” The naive child may see the world with all its innocence; however, Savard’s adult speakers make sense of caramelized identities and roles within the mythical community while exploring what it feels like to define the boundaries and limitations of returned to memories and also learned physicalities.

Savard’s eloquent style, her sophisticated descriptions unfold with deep harmonious ideas intertwined masterfully. Purified meditative lyrics can be found ever so resonating, can be heard for example in her title poem “SNOW WATER COVE”:  “The blond violin resting/ In the glass case shines as no other, a face/ In wintertime lifting off a stretcher.” What cadence! Meditational poise lyrically composed, gorgeous music between the lines; elegant euphony, eloquently put language and diction heightens these poems. Also technical satisfaction can be found with Savard’s effects of not using punctuation at the end of her lines.

Some lines that I really enjoyed:

“I’ll learn/ To breathe another way just as my eyes/ Will sharpen, cut a precise line/ Wide enough for my whole body/ To slide through to the other side.”

“For acquiring the sense of something new,/ Something on the verge of becoming, and the names,/ Say, the yellow burrs of sticktight, I prize/ Will have more to do with the water they drink,/ With the steps we didn’t take, taken from us,/ Gladly.”

“The sky/ Was too blue ever to be real, overexposed/ And as thick as a wall painted over/ By generations.”

“As I stand on the shore holding the hand/ Of someone who feels like an ancestor./ We are without faces here. We are the stars/ We look at.”

Superstition Review is fortunate to have published Jeannine’s poetry twice! You can read her work in our Issue 1 and in Issue 7. Enjoy!

s[r] Goodreads #FridayReads

This week on Goodreads.com, our Content Coordinator, Chelsea Brogi shared her thoughts about her latest read.

Drowning TucsonDrowning Tucson, by Aaron Michael Morales

“Theres those goddam spics I was telling you about.” This chilling first sentence of Aaron Michael Morales novel, Drowning Tucson, sets the tone for the rest of the book. Morales creates a very dark and alarming tale of  young thugs and the inner workings of South Tucson.

Each chapter in this breakthrough novel is written through a different person’s eyes, allowing the reader to get a sense of each character’s story. It is also written with six different ways to be read, with each section titled after a possible reader’s view.

Felipe Nunez is the newest (and reluctant) member of the Latin Kings gang. Felipe does not want to join the Latin Kings and admits before his initiation

“It made him sick the way they suck up to him. Especially because he knew they all talked shit behind his back and were probably bursting with anticipation for the after school initiation. All except Ricardo. He was the only one who knew Felipe’s secret– that he didn’t want to be in a gang. That he didn’t want to spend his life pretending to hate the cops when really he was afraid of them. If Felipe joined the Kings, he would be one forever.”

Throughout the novel, we watch him find his place within the gang, and see him transform from an innocent young boy to a violent man. It is heartbreaking to see this boy, who loves books and learning, turn into everything he never wanted to be. Morales shows the power of peer pressure here, by having Felipe join even though he doesn’t want to. The boy is innocent to begin with, he loves his mother, loves to learn, was confused by Rainbow the prostitute when she tried to solicit him. Yet, his brothers were very prominent members of the Latin Kings, and therefore he was expected to follow in their footsteps.

Rainbow, a young prostitute, also discovers the trials and tribulations that come with living in South Tucson during the 1980’s. She lives through molestation, rape, and eventually prostitution. Her life is incredibly tragic, and yet she manages to continue on, with only her strength and will to survive.

Morales creates a tragedy out of his characters lives, creating this tragic novel for his readers. It is uncomfortable to read, leaving readers feeling awkward and thoughtless at the end. This novel truly depicts the lives of those gang members and south Tucson natives.

You can read Aaron Michael Morales’ story A Shoebox. A Thimble. A Onesie in our Issue 7.