Not A Novel

“An aura of legendary prestige surrounds the work of Alejandra Pizarnik,” writes César Aira. Her last collection to be published before her suicide in 1972, A Musical Hell is the first book of poems by Pizarnik to be published in its entirety in the U.S. Pizarnik writes at the edge of poetic impossibility, opening with a blues singer, expanding into silence, and closing into a theater of shadows and songs of the drowned.

Midwinter Day, as Alice Notley noted, is an epic poem about a daily routine. A poem in six parts, Midwinter Day takes us from awakening and emerging from dreams through the whole day-morning, afternoon, evening, night-to dreams again:...

a plain introduction to modes of love and reason/ Then to end I guess with love, a method to this winter season/ Now I've said this love it's all I can remember/ Of Midwinter Day the twenty-second of December// Welcome sun, at last with thy softer light/ That takes the bite from winter weather/ And weaves the random cloth of life together/ And drives away the long black night!

Nightwood, Djuna Barnes' strange and sinuous tour de force, "belongs to that small class of books that somehow reflect a time or an epoch" (Times Literary Supplement). That time is the period between the two World Wars, and Barnes' novel unfolds in the decadent shadows of Europe's great cities, Paris, Berlin, and Vienna—a world in which the boundaries of class, religion, and sexuality are bold but surprisingly porous.

The outsized characters who inhabit this world are some of the most memorable in all of fiction—there is Guido Volkbein, the Wandering Jew and son of a self-proclaimed baron; Robin Vote, the American expatriate who marries him and then engages in a series of affairs, first with Nora Flood and then with Jenny Petherbridge, driving all of her lovers to distraction with her passion for wandering alone in the night; and there is Dr. Matthew-Mighty-Grain-of-Salt-Dante-O'Connor, a transvestite and ostensible gynecologist, whose digressive speeches brim with fury, keen insights, and surprising allusions. Barnes' depiction of these characters and their relationships (Nora says, "A man is another persona woman is yourself, caught as you turn in panic; on her mouth you kiss your own") has made the novel a landmark of feminist and lesbian literature.

In Água Viva Clarice Lispector aims to 'capture the present'. Her direct, confessional and unfiltered meditations on everything from life and time to perfume and sleep are strange and hypnotic in their emotional power and have been a huge influence on many artists and writers, including one Brazilian musician who read it one hundred and eleven times. Despite its apparent spontaneity, this is a masterly work of art, which rearranges language and plays in the gaps between reality and fiction.

Clarice Lispector (December 10, 1920 – December 9, 1977) was a Brazilian writer acclaimed internationally for her innovative novels and short stories. Born to a Jewish family in Podolia in Western Ukraine, as an infant she moved to Brazil with her family, amidst the disasters engulfing her native land following the First World War. 

The devastating final work by Brazil’s greatest modern writer, The Hour of the Star tells the haunting tale of Macabéa—a typist who lives in the slums of Rio—underfed, sickly, and unloved, yet inwardly free.

Translated from the Portuguese by Benjamin Moser. With a contribution by Paulo Gurgel and Valente Colm Tóibín.

The Hour of the Star, Clarice Lispector's consummate final novel, may well be her masterpiece. Narrated by the cosmopolitan Rodrigo S.M., this brief, strange, and haunting tale is the story of Macabéa, one of life's unfortunates. Living in the slums of Rio de Janeiro and eking out a poor living as a typist, Macabéa loves movies, Coca-Cola, and her rat of a boyfriend; she would like to be like Marilyn Monroe, but she is ugly, underfed, sickly, and unloved. Rodrigo recoils from her wretchedness, and yet he cannot avoid realization that for all her outward misery, Macabéa is inwardly free. She doesn't seem to know how unhappy she should be. Lispector employs her pathetic heroine against her urbane, empty narrator—edge of despair to edge of despair—and, working them like a pair of scissors, she cuts away the reader's preconceived notions about poverty, identity, love, and the art of fiction. In her last novel she takes readers close to the true mystery of life, and leaves us deep in Lispector territory indeed.

Installed alongside the Grand River in downtown Grand Rapids, Michigan, Alexander Calder’s public sculpture La Grande Vitesse has come to symbolize the city. Tess moves there from Ypsilanti, Michigan in 2001—the same year that her mother dies, when everything begins to move, for her, in slow motion. Thrust into adolescence nearly rudderless, fifteen-year-old Tess is intoxicated, angsty, and sexually awake. A decade later, inspired by diary entries and TV reruns, she remembers this summer in the suburbs as the one that redefined her. Its echoes of death are frozen in time like the waves represented in the Calder sculpture or the concrete steps leading down to the churning river. She comes to see Grand Rapids as a collection of architecture and emblems, another home to which she cannot return.

Natasha Stagg is the author of Sleeveless: Fashion, Image, Media, New York 2011–2019 and Surveys: A Novel, both published by Semiotext(e). Her work has appeared in Artforum, Bookforum, Texte Zur Kunst, n+1, Spike Art, Flash Art, Dazed, V, Vice, 032c, and other publications.

Raphaëlle Milone's first novel, a dive into the heart of desires, acclaimed by Simon Liberati as well as by Jean-Luc Nancy.

Raphaëlle Milone (born 1991 in Riom) is a French writer.

The first comprehensive biography of Adrienne Rich, feminist and queer icon and internationally revered National Book Award winning poet.

Adrienne Rich was the female face of American poetry for decades. Her forceful, uncompromising writing has more than stood the test of time, and the life of the woman behind the words is equally impressive. Motivated by personal revelations, Rich transformed herself from a traditional, Radcliffe-educated lyric poet and married mother of three sons into a path-breaking lesbian-feminist author of prose as well as poetry. In doing so, she emerged as both architect and exemplar of the modern feminist movement, breaking ranks to denounce the male-dominated literary establishment and paving the way for the many queer women of letters to take their places in the cultural mainstream. Drawing on a wealth of unpublished materials, including Rich's correspondence and in-depth interviews with numerous people who knew her, Hilary Holladay digs deep into never-before-accessed sources to portray Rich in full dimension and vivid, human detail.

A special issue focused on performance writing, with work by Tanya Lukin Linklater (with Michael Nardone), Jibade-Khalil Huffman & Simone White, Jean-Thomas Tremblay, Claudina Domingo (trans. Ryan Greene), Kim Rosenfield, Nathan Walker, Liz Knox, Rona Lorimer, Léo Richard, & Hector Uniacke, Mohamed A. Gawad & Dalia Neis, Mei-mei Berssenbrugge & Teddy Yoshikami, interviewed by Michelle N. Huang, Kyoo Lee and Jocelyn Saidenberg, Adriana Garriga-López, Gabrielle Civil, plus a Kevin Killian Tribute, with Eileen Myles * Scott Hewicker * Cliff Hengst * Karla Milosevich * Craig Goodman * Michelle Rollman * Anne McGuire * Wayne Smith * Tanya Hollis * Steve Orth * Lindsey Boldt * Maxe Crandall * Arnold J. Kemp * Carla Harryman, Lee Ann Brown & Tony Torn * Susan Gevirtz * Laynie Browne * Patrick Durgin * Norma Cole * Jo Giardini. & reviews: Jessica Lopez Lyman & Jocelyn E. Marshall on Gabrielle Civil, alex cruse on Merce Cunningham, Rob Stanton on Anne Boyer, Jack Chelgren on Miyó Vestrini, David Grundy on Stephen Jonas, Virginia Konchan on Sarah Vap.

An homage and reimagining of the classic German Bildungsroman, Schernikau paid tribute to the form even as he challenged stylistic, sexual, and political conventions. Written in all lower-case, SMALLTOWNNOVELLA is a brilliant stream-of-consciousness narrative that follows b, a teenager navigating politics and queer desire in a small, West German town. When b—who is interested in communism and knitting—falls in love with leif, a popular jock, b’s life at school is very predictably upended.

“A mighty, slender record of the provocative intelligence of a queer teenage mind.” —Eliot Duncan

Ronald M. Schernikau was born in 1960 in Magdeburg, East Germany and grew up in Hanover, West Germany. After completing his Abitur in 1980, he moved to West Berlin and studied German literature, philosophy, and psychology. In 1986, he started studying at the Institut für Literatur Johannes R. Becher (German Institute for Literature) in Leipzig, GDR. In 1989 he obtained GDR citizenship and relocated to Berlin. He worked as a dramaturge, and in radio and TV until his death in 1991. His publications include Kleinstadtnovelle (Small-Town Novella, 1980); Die Tage in L. (The Days in L., 1989); Legende (Legends, 1999); Königin im Dreck (Queen in the Dirt, 2009); and Irene Binz. Die Befragung (Irene Binz. The Interview, 2010).

Lucy Jones is a British translator and writer based in Berlin. She is the translator of Brigitte Reimann’s Siblings, (Penguin Modern Classics), Anke Stelling’s Higher Ground (Scribe) and Annemarie Schwarzenbach’s Lyric Novella (Seagull Books), among others. Her translations and book reviews have appeared in Asymptote, Words Without Borders and CulturMag. She is the runner-up for the Society of Author’s Schlegel-Tieck Prize in 2023.

PRAISE

“This slender book is a fierce account of queer teenage imagination: provocative, haughty, coy, insolent, and wild. As angsty as it is intelligent, Schernikau’s prose also feels protective and sweet. SMALLTOWNNOVELLA is the book, the friend, I wish I had in high school.” —Eliot Duncan

“…an earnest, seemingly offhand account of a brilliant young man growing up in a small town and realizing that his queerness and his communist politics will come to structure his life. (…) the first of Schernikau’s many attempts to lay out a gay politics that would open him to the world rather than fating him to a specific lot within it: an identity politics not constructed to elaborate and defend a single perspective, but one that sought to locate the self within a broader movement to transform society." —Ben Miller & Nicholas Courtman, LARB