Volume 6, Issue 2
FICTION
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"The absence of such amphibious works in our present moment may explain why Hiram Junker’s latest effort, The Idea That Never Was (HarperCollins, 2022), feels like such an anomalous and refreshing achievement. (Whether this book is in fact a harbinger of some larger development in the offing, or just adventitiously washed ashore, we need not decide here.) I’ve read the book twice now, and I still don’t know how best to describe it. Provisionally I would characterize it as a kind of science fiction, though I also take seriously Darko Suvin’s proposal that the whole text—all nine-hundred pages of it—ought to be subsumed under the general heading of “a thought experiment.” For the audacious object that this work sets out to imagine is nothing less than our world exactly as it is (or as close to it as possible), but with something subtracted from it.
[READ FULL WORK]
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POETRY
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"Mirror your view to shift the effect. Search the ending to get help to process the change. Answer that back to yourself for enough evidence to build and support your construct. Construct your support and build to evidence enough for yourself to back that answer. Change the process to help get to ending the search. Effect the shift to view your mirror."
[READ FULL WORK] |
POETRY
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“So Jim thou art, and Tom, and Dick,
Some lily-livered candle-wick Who’d coward run to early grave!” —And lo, he heard an answer: “Grave!” “A pox on thee, and any knave Who’d turn against his sovereign brave, And taint his standing to deface me! —And lo, he heard an answer: “Face me!” [READ FULL WORK] |
FICTION
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"Mr. Fred Biedeblieck.
You, Fred, are that irrepressible raconteur who has wooed us at last into print, that civilized rogue who broke into our dreams (see illustration) to torment us with standards of excellence far beyond our capacity to imagine. Cruel, cruel Fred Biedeblieck. Sole originator of that inimitable Biedlebleiek--ian style so widely admired among his contemporaries, he takes the keys to his '67 Chevy Nova two-door with the green shag carpet and the Coca-Cola stains across the busted rear window and tosses them to the concierge at the RJB Tuna Co. Canning Factory and Smelt Mine that he might be escorted without delay to his favorite seat. The Red Chablis in the chilled decanter? Of course. The linguino della carbonica in the white clam sauce? As you wish, sir. Garcon! Another loaf of filleto de scampini for Mr. Fred Biedeblieck." [READ FULL WORK] |
FICTION
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"Something is looming over us. And we know without even looking up—at neither sky nor story title—that it is a piano. Of course, it is. And not just any piano, but THE piano, EL PIANO GRANDE, the one with your name on it, the one that will get you in good time.
We know it is coming. It must. It is the period at the end of this sentence. It is the third act, the punchline to this existential tragicomedy. When God closes a door, he opens a window—then proceeds to hang a large piano out of it. We know. We know. And we close our eyes and wait…." [READ FULL WORK] |
Customized illustrations for all published pieces provided by Evgenia Barsheva.