“That Which We Truly Don’t Know, We Don’t Know That We Don’t Know,” by Glenn Trollip (a review of The Idea That Never Was, by Hiram Junker)
By Joachim Glage
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Unclassifiable books were once fashionable. It may be worthwhile to ask why they no longer are. Time was, works like Jean Paul Sartre’s Saint Genet (is it biography? existential psychoanalysis? literary criticism? an unwitting work of fiction?[1])
[1] Jean Genet famously lied to Sartre about much of his life while the book was being written; Sartre’s own interpretive hubris likely contributed some fictional elements as well.
or the Anti-Oedipus by Deleuze and Guattari (is it a new kind of metaphysics? philosophical stream of consciousness? a poetry of the revolution?) or Guilty by Bataille (is it a novel? a wartime diary? a series of rapturous aphorisms?) were all the literary rage, at least among some of our more adventurous publishers and readers. Nor can we confine such uncategorizable works to the twentieth century: earlier specimens are found in Nietzsche’s Zarathustra, for instance (is it a poem? a parable? self-help avant la lettre?), or even in Hegel’s Phenomenology (calling it just “philosophy” seems preposterous). It may be that, like everything else, genre too must suffer the storms of history, and, after splintering for a time upon the rocks of revolution and world war, only now reconstitutes itself in its old guise, as a kind of tacit law to be pitilessly enforced by publishers and writers alike. Books that straddle too many forms at once, or otherwise elude classification, are reflexively condemned, or no longer feel possible in the first place.
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.”[2]
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.”[2]
[2] Suvin, Darko. “Hiram Junker’s Hypothetical Intellectual History.” Rev. of The Idea That Never Was, by Hiram Junker. London Review of Books, October 8, 2021: 47-49.
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. The beating heart of the book, in other words, is an absence: something is missing from this imagined world, something is missing from the characters’ lives (though they don’t know it), something that we, the readers, possess and even take for granted. The book’s operative question, if I may put it that way, derives from this same slim gap: How must an almost-identical twin of our world be different as a result of one missing thing? How must their world have diverged from our own?
It is a more unique endeavor than one might at first think. For while plentiful examples of so-called “speculative history” are produced and published each year in the genres of science fiction and fantasy (e.g., books of the “What if Hitler won?” variety), what distinguishes The Idea That Never Was from these more fanciful narratives lies in this: in Junker’s book, it is not an event or a person or even a technology that “never happened;” instead, and as you will have guessed already, what is missing from this fictional world is an idea.
Of course ideas do not just pop into existence on this or that date in history. If your objective is to prevent a concept from coming into being, it will not be enough “simply to purge a key thinker or two, or to take a trip in a time machine,” as Martin Jay once put it. [3]
It is a more unique endeavor than one might at first think. For while plentiful examples of so-called “speculative history” are produced and published each year in the genres of science fiction and fantasy (e.g., books of the “What if Hitler won?” variety), what distinguishes The Idea That Never Was from these more fanciful narratives lies in this: in Junker’s book, it is not an event or a person or even a technology that “never happened;” instead, and as you will have guessed already, what is missing from this fictional world is an idea.
Of course ideas do not just pop into existence on this or that date in history. If your objective is to prevent a concept from coming into being, it will not be enough “simply to purge a key thinker or two, or to take a trip in a time machine,” as Martin Jay once put it. [3]
[3] Jay, Martin. Marxism and Totality: The Adventures of a Concept From Lukács to Habermas. University of California Press: 1986. P. 107.
Ideas are themselves thoroughly historical objects, and they are held in common by us all (if only at the level of our subconscious). Such items tend to pass through long periods of incubation in which they are not (yet) fully themselves; they may remain vague and abstract, even for centuries, before becoming clear and concrete. And yet, once the process of their formation has commenced, they can be all but inexorable: some ideas are destined to shoot forth, even if they have to languish underground, in semen scaena, for a thousand years first.
In order for one of our ideas not to happen, then, a great many things must never occur, or must happen differently. For the writer trying to pluck it loose, an idea cannot help but drag behind it a whole tangled and deep-rooted mass; even the simplest notion turns out to be “an ornate tale in time” (ein kompliziertes Märchen in der Zeit, as Ernst Bloch once described the idea of death [4]).
In order for one of our ideas not to happen, then, a great many things must never occur, or must happen differently. For the writer trying to pluck it loose, an idea cannot help but drag behind it a whole tangled and deep-rooted mass; even the simplest notion turns out to be “an ornate tale in time” (ein kompliziertes Märchen in der Zeit, as Ernst Bloch once described the idea of death [4]).
[4] Bloch, Ernst. The Principle of Despair. Translated by Neville Plaice, Stephen Plaice, and Paul Knight. MIT Press: 1995. Vol. 3, p. 1106.
Modifications both subtle and grand have to be made to the historical record to ensure that the idea does not, as it were, sneak back into being. As Darko Suvin puts it: “An author attempting to imagine present-day society, but with some foundational concept omitted from it, has no choice but to connive with history—lest that same history lurch forth to accuse him.” [5]
[5] Suvin 48.
But let us not delay the obvious any longer, and say clearly what this idea is that Hiram Junker seeks to expunge from his imaginary world. As it happens, the first trace of it appears in the very opening paragraphs. We are at once introduced to Dr. Rubin Thale, arguably the book’s protagonist (and the only character upon whom I’ll touch in this present note), whose story crops up at multiple points throughout the text. It must be acknowledged straightaway, however, that there is nothing much resembling a unified narrative here; The Idea That Never Was contains hundreds of such “characters,” and in hundreds of short, mostly unrelated episodes (Junker calls them “Glimpses” rather than “Chapters”). Some of these episodes run for several pages, others consist of only a sentence or two; some are stories, some are letters or emails, some are diary entries, some are newspaper articles or quotations drawn from longer works, some even are judicial opinions or government records. Often they are excerpts or fragments, all but free-floating. (It is certain that, whatever else one might say about The Idea That Never Was, it can only loosely be described as a novel; if a comparison must be made, the book is far closer in its structure to something like Benjamin’s Arcades Project than to, say, War and Peace.) At any rate, it happens that Dr. Thale—the last remaining classics professor to teach at his university, and described as being “tall and stoop-shouldered” and with “a waxy, peach complexion like clay” and “flexed, trembling paws” and “a vanishing way about him—one almost expected him to disappear before one’s eyes”—it happens that Dr. Thale has decided to attend a church service. He is not religious, but he is feeling contrite for a crime he has committed (it is revealed at length that he has been embezzling funds from the university in a well-nigh devout act of retaliation against the school’s administration for eliminating his department). The service is led by the all-but-Dickensian Pastor Stonewit, who, “glaring at the mostly-empty pews” with a face that was “spotted and droopily jowled as though clasped by seething little hands,” begins rhapsodizing about Jesus’s habit of writing with his finger in the dirt. The pastor reads aloud from the beginning of the eighth chapter from the Gospel According to John. Readers familiar with the Bible, however, sense at once that something is amiss; the verses Stonewit recites feel wrong somehow. This intuition of course proves correct; here are the verses as read by Stonewit, compared with the actual verses from John 8:
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John 8:1-11, as read by Stonewit
1. But Jesus went to the Mount of Olives. 2. At dawn he appeared again in the temple courts, where all the people gathered around him, and he sat down to teach them. 3. The teachers of the law and the Pharisees brought in a woman caught in adultery. They made her stand before the group 4. and said to Jesus, “Teacher, this woman was caught in the act of adultery. 5. In the Law Moses commanded us to stone such women. Now what do you say?” 6. They were using this question as a trap, in order to have a basis for accusing him. But Jesus bent down and started to write on the ground with his finger. 7. When they kept on questioning him, he straightened up and said to them, “If any one of you is without sin, let him be the first to throw a stone at her.” 8. Again he stooped down and wrote on the ground. 9. At this, those who heard began to go away one at a time, the older ones first, until only Jesus was left, with the woman still standing there. 10. Jesus straightened up and asked her, “Woman, where are they? Has no one condemned you?” 11. “No one, sir,” she said. “Then neither do I condemn you,” Jesus declared. “Go now and leave your life of sin.” |
John 8:1-14, actual verses
1. But Jesus went to the Mount of Olives. 2. At dawn he appeared again in the temple courts, where all the people gathered around him, and he sat down to teach them. 3. The teachers of the law and the Pharisees brought in a woman holding a child born of adultery. They made her stand before the group 4. and said to Jesus, “Teacher, this woman was caught in the act of adultery. 5. In the Law Moses commanded us to stone such women. Now what do you say?” 6. They were using this question as a trap, in order to have a basis for accusing him. But Jesus bent down and started to write on the ground with his finger. 7. When they kept on questioning him, he straightened up and said to them, “If any one of you would condemn this woman to death, let him do so who will not bereave a mother of a child, or a child of a mother.” 8. Again he stooped down and wrote on the ground. When he spoke again, Jesus said, 9. “You would punish the wicked, yet you punish the innocent more severely. 10. Should an honest man also be flogged for the crimes of his neighbor? Do you band together against the righteous and condemn the innocent to death? Do you devour orphans as you devour widows’ houses? 11. Surely you belong to your father, he was a murderer from the beginning.” 12. At this, those who heard began to go away one at a time, the older ones first, until only Jesus was left, with the woman still standing there. 13. Jesus straightened up and asked her, “Woman, where are they? Has no one condemned you?” 14. “No one, sir,” she said. “Then neither do I condemn you,” Jesus declared. “Go now and leave your life of sin.” |
It takes a certain nerve to rewrite the Bible, perhaps even more so to take an eraser to it. Thanks to some clever story-telling on Junker’s part, the reader is able to deduce that the verses read by Stonewit are no abridgement, nor are they an expression of the pastor’s own creative license. This is how the eighth chapter from the Gospel of John actually reads in this alternate world. Omitted from their Bible, then, is any mention of the child in the woman’s arms (the child who will likely starve if the woman is killed); omitted is Christ’s turning of the Pharisees’ own error against them (by condemning them for who their parent is, i.e., the devil); omitted is the reference to Psalm 94:21; omitted is the memorable verse, You would punish the wicked, yet you punish the innocent more severely. In place of all this we have instead only the simple, if not simplistic, pronouncement, If any of you is without sin, let him be the first to throw a stone at her. By comparison with the verses that Junker has stripped from the text, this imagined sentence is anti-climactic to say the least; and while it is not without its merits—there is an almost childish eloquence to it—it is surely no substitute for the real thing.
But then that is very much the point. The deficit of their Bible is meant to draw our attention straightaway to just what it is that our world possesses and their world lacks, i.e., a particular moral idea which, for us, is taken virtually as a given thanks to its extensive theological and philosophical pedigree, and because it came to be developed in the common law before being encapsulated most influentially, at least for the modern era, by Blackstone in his Commentaries:
But then that is very much the point. The deficit of their Bible is meant to draw our attention straightaway to just what it is that our world possesses and their world lacks, i.e., a particular moral idea which, for us, is taken virtually as a given thanks to its extensive theological and philosophical pedigree, and because it came to be developed in the common law before being encapsulated most influentially, at least for the modern era, by Blackstone in his Commentaries:
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From what has been observed in the former articles we may collect that the quantity of punishment [to which a criminal is sentenced] can never be absolutely determined by any standing invariable rule; but it must be left to the arbitration of the legislature to inflict such penalties as are warranted by the laws of nature and society, and such as appear to be the best calculated to answer the end of precaution against future offenses, with these qualifications only, that in the manner of the execution of such penalties it must always be of paramount concern that no innocent is harmed, and that nothing barbarous or approaching cold-blooded murder be done. [6]
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[6] Blackstone, William. Commentaries on the Laws of England. Book IV, § 10 (emphasis added).
But in Junker’s world, this entire strand of moral and legal thinking was never taken up; as a result, it simply does not occur to any of the characters that, for example, the methods of criminal punishment practiced by their society—in particular incarceration, or what Sade, writing at the close of the eighteenth century, denounced as “that most scandalous disfigurement of every polity on the earth” [7]
[7] Sade (Donatien Alphonse François). Letters From Prison. Translated by Richard Seaver. Arcade Publishing: 1999. P. 77.
—might themselves be unjust or even wicked. Indeed it now becomes clear that it was no mere flourish on Junker’s part to make Rubin Thale a professor of antiquity; for thanks to the nature of that occupation (along with Thale’s voracious reading habits), we the readers are furnished with a window through which to glimpse some of the ways the intellectual landscape of The Idea That Never Was differs from our own. Gone from this imaginary world, for example, is the influential Book XIII from Plato’s Laws, dealing with just and unjust forms of punishment. Gone from his Politics is Aristotle’s classic rebuke to the court of the Areopagus for its harshness and cruelty. Gone is the great rabbinical tradition from twelfth century Alexandria, which dared find corporal punishment more humane than imprisonment, on the grounds that the latter, by erasing a period of an individual’s life, succeeds essentially in shortening it, and thus is a violation of the sixth commandment (“[g]allows and spears and chains all cut lives short,” or so says Martin Buber in his famous gloss, “not so the whip or the vise or the rack, when these are used temperately”). Gone is the late conversion of Henry VIII and his public atonement for the seventy-two-thousand he’d hanged or put into dungeons. Gone is Douglass’s condemnation of all incarceration as but a form of enslavement. Gone is Nietzsche’s keen insight from The Genealogy of Morals which recognized that all criminal justice and even tort litigation, in their essence, reduce ultimately to a single process, namely, the quantification and administration of pain. Not gone, but diminished down to a mere pamphlet, is Wilde’s titanic treatise De Profundis (for us, perhaps the most blistering and systematic attack on imprisonment ever written down; for them, a mild and almost frivolous squabble with Lord Alfred Douglas). Gone is Kafka’s monumental novel The Penal Colony. Gone is Ernst Bloch’s vast historical meditation, in the second volume of The Principle of Despair, on the burgeoning use of prisons in early modern Europe and the ways this corresponded with the rise of exploitative capital. Gone are the great juridical developments of the twentieth century, notably those of Eighth Amendment jurisprudence in America, which, beginning with Weems v. United States, 217 U.S. 349 (1910), eventually found all extended incarceration to be presumptively “cruel and unusual.” Gone, too (perhaps as a result of the aforementioned deficits), is any common-sense understanding that, given the choice between a few days of agony, on the one hand, or ten years in a prison, on the other, almost no one would choose the latter (thus obliterating the old notion—seemingly alive and well in Junker’s world—that captivity is somehow a more humane form of punishment than the infliction of physical suffering). Gone as well is that other instinct of common sense, implicit in many of the texts adduced above, which feels revolted by the use of extended imprisonment because of the collateral harms it inflicts upon the innocent (“[a] man is locked up,” the young Camus writes in Sisyphus and Infinity [another volume, not incidentally, that has been vanished from Junker’s world], “but he is not the only one punished: the man’s wife and his children and all his relations who are deprived of him, his employer or employees or co-workers who count on him, his friends and peers, indeed anyone who benefits, or even who might in the future benefit, in any way from his individual contributions to society—all of them are innocent, and yet they too are punished”).
That Junker is able to convey all these historical omissions in a manner that feels more or less natural may be the most admirable feat of The Idea That Never Was. How does he do it? Sometimes subtly, [8]
That Junker is able to convey all these historical omissions in a manner that feels more or less natural may be the most admirable feat of The Idea That Never Was. How does he do it? Sometimes subtly, [8]
[8] For example, we can infer that, in Junker’s world, Kafka never wrote his gigantic novel The Penal Colony: Junker’s Kafka dies in 1924 (as we learn in passing in Glimpse #229), a full decade before The Penal Colony was completed.
sometimes with plodding directness. [9]
[9] Glimpse #402, for example, consists of nothing but a reproduction of that most influential passage from Kant’s Metaphysics of Morals, having to do with punishment and the law of retribution. But of course it is not the text that we know. Here is the actual, almost magisterial passage from Kant:
"The law of punishment is a categorical imperative, and woe to him who crawls through the windings of utility in order to discover something that releases the criminal from retribution, or redirects part of the force of punishment upon someone other than the criminal, by the advantage this promises, in accordance with the pharisaical saying, “It is better for one human being to die than for an entire people to perish.” For the true meaning of this saying is, “It is better for one innocent human being to die than for an entire people to perish,” or which saying violates justice utterly. Accordingly, the sacrifice that is revealed by the Gospels, in which the Savior receives punishment on behalf of the whole human race (in apparent contradiction to the law of retribution), and yet still preserves perfect justice, can only be a mystery to us. At most we can say of such “punishment” that it is exceptional and spiritual, and not a matter of human or earthly law. Still, the scriptures are clear that this same atonement was borne by Him and only Him, who was destined to bear it; which fact, it must be granted, bears at least a formal resemblance to the law of retribution, i.e., the principle that every punishment has exactly one true recipient (who must accept it in full), and cannot justly be changed or foisted upon another, in total or whatever partial degree. The learned Knutzen reasons, “The Son of Man and only He bore the punishment for the sins of humanity; we may therefore deduce that the nature of His sacrifice was not any physical travail or suffering, for if that were the case then Simon of Cyrene, who helped Jesus carry the cross to Golgotha (Mark 15:21), would have borne part of the punishment, making him a second savior, which is absurd.” — What, therefore, should one think of the proposal that punishment might be inflicted, not only upon the criminal himself, but also upon innocent members of his family, causing the criminal to undergo great moral anguish and thus more effectively deterring future crimes? A court would reject with contempt such a proposal, for justice ceases to be justice if it afflicts the innocent, or if it can be traded for any good of civil society whatsoever. (Kant, Immanuel. The Metaphysics of Morals. Translated by Mary Gregor. Cambridge University Press: 2017. Pp. 114-15.)"
And here is how, in The Idea That Never Was, Junker reimagines this text, abridged and gutted and all but a travesty of the original:
"The law of punishment is a categorical imperative, and woe to him who crawls through the windings of eudaemonism in order to discover something that releases the criminal from punishment or even reduces its amount by the advantage it promises, in accordance with the pharisaical saying, “It is better for one human being to die than for an entire people to perish.” For if justice goes, there is no longer any value in human beings’ living on the earth. — What, therefore, should one think of the proposal to preserve the life of a criminal sentenced to death if he agrees to let dangerous experiments be made on him and is lucky enough to survive them, so that in this way physicians learn something new of benefit to the commonwealth? A court would reject with contempt such a proposal from a medical college, for justice ceases to be justice if it can be bought for any price whatsoever."
But in any case the effect is the same: Junker’s is shown to be a world in which our modern wisdom concerning justice and criminal penalties has been reversed: in that other world, not only are the collateral harms of such penalties scarcely even addressed, but, in the realm of the horrible, pain outstrips lost time; accordingly, the State will not sully its hands with physical suffering, except secretly or indirectly (“[t]here is nothing more hideously evil in all the world than physical torture when used as a penalty,” says a nameless functionary from the Bureau of Prisons in Glimpse #441: “any pain that comes from being in prison is an accident”). In this fantastic world, a convict being locked away for several years while his family suffers is considered appropriate retaliation for, say, a theft crime; but if that same criminal were to be disciplined by the state with pain instead, perhaps only for a handful of days or even just a few hours, then that would be considered the height of barbarity. Is this madness? Or is it, as the book’s title suggests, simply the result of a missing idea?
It goes without saying that in Junker’s world there are no Pain Centers; there is no Federal Retribution Administration; no metric has been designed to measure the exact quantity of suffering warranted by a particular criminal infraction; no technology has been devised to induce states of physical pain that cause no lasting mental or bodily harm. These things are not even on their horizon. Wholly unknown to them, consequently, is the revelatory fact—discovered by our own justice system as a result of the Victims’ Rights Movement of the 1960s—that, when given the opportunity to observe the administering of a pain-sentence to a convicted felon, even the victims of that felon tend to become satisfied that retribution has been done after less than an hour.
Instead of our carefully developed methods, then, what they possess in Junker’s world are cages, jails, prisons—many of which (in what is surely Junker’s most dystopian flourish) turn out to be privately owned by corporations, and so beholden to shareholders. In Glimpse #812, for example, we find one of the private operators of a prison, along with the advocacy firm of Hakin, Sump, Auer, & Geld, holding a gala for the senators of their state, where they openly lobby for longer sentences in the criminal code.
Predictably—I dare say I spoil nothing with the following summary, and at any rate this plot is but one in a thousand of such narratives in The Idea That Never Was—Rubin Thale’s fate proves to be a tragic one. He is found out, arrested, and then convicted for the crime of embezzlement from a public institution, and is barbarously sentenced to nine years in a prison (the conditions of which can only be described as squalid). As a result of this official confiscation of his person, one of his daughters commits suicide; the other falls prey to drug addiction. Thale’s wife develops health problems owing to stress and a grueling new work schedule, and gradually becomes an invalid. The remnants of the support staff from Thale’s academic department are laid off; a handful of his devoted students are forced to change their focus of study. Thale himself ends up murdered by other inmates while serving his sentence.
Does Junker’s book descend to the implausible? Is it, to borrow a phrase from Borges, merely astonishing? Perhaps. Readers might well find it difficult to swallow the idea that a rational people just like ourselves could be so backwards when it comes to the subject of criminal justice. Still, the deeper question that is raised by the book cannot be dismissed so easily: For how can any people ever truly know if there is an ethical principle they’ve overlooked? What profound moral ideas might yet be out there, or even just under our noses, that we ourselves simply have failed to grasp?
The first time I finished reading this book, I felt ill at ease. The second time I finished it, I understood why.
It goes without saying that in Junker’s world there are no Pain Centers; there is no Federal Retribution Administration; no metric has been designed to measure the exact quantity of suffering warranted by a particular criminal infraction; no technology has been devised to induce states of physical pain that cause no lasting mental or bodily harm. These things are not even on their horizon. Wholly unknown to them, consequently, is the revelatory fact—discovered by our own justice system as a result of the Victims’ Rights Movement of the 1960s—that, when given the opportunity to observe the administering of a pain-sentence to a convicted felon, even the victims of that felon tend to become satisfied that retribution has been done after less than an hour.
Instead of our carefully developed methods, then, what they possess in Junker’s world are cages, jails, prisons—many of which (in what is surely Junker’s most dystopian flourish) turn out to be privately owned by corporations, and so beholden to shareholders. In Glimpse #812, for example, we find one of the private operators of a prison, along with the advocacy firm of Hakin, Sump, Auer, & Geld, holding a gala for the senators of their state, where they openly lobby for longer sentences in the criminal code.
Predictably—I dare say I spoil nothing with the following summary, and at any rate this plot is but one in a thousand of such narratives in The Idea That Never Was—Rubin Thale’s fate proves to be a tragic one. He is found out, arrested, and then convicted for the crime of embezzlement from a public institution, and is barbarously sentenced to nine years in a prison (the conditions of which can only be described as squalid). As a result of this official confiscation of his person, one of his daughters commits suicide; the other falls prey to drug addiction. Thale’s wife develops health problems owing to stress and a grueling new work schedule, and gradually becomes an invalid. The remnants of the support staff from Thale’s academic department are laid off; a handful of his devoted students are forced to change their focus of study. Thale himself ends up murdered by other inmates while serving his sentence.
Does Junker’s book descend to the implausible? Is it, to borrow a phrase from Borges, merely astonishing? Perhaps. Readers might well find it difficult to swallow the idea that a rational people just like ourselves could be so backwards when it comes to the subject of criminal justice. Still, the deeper question that is raised by the book cannot be dismissed so easily: For how can any people ever truly know if there is an ethical principle they’ve overlooked? What profound moral ideas might yet be out there, or even just under our noses, that we ourselves simply have failed to grasp?
The first time I finished reading this book, I felt ill at ease. The second time I finished it, I understood why.
Joachim Glage lives and writes in Colorado, where he also enjoys no longer being an attorney. His fiction has been published recently in issues of The Georgia Review, Litmag, Santa Monica Review, Juked, Philosophy and Literature, The Rupture, and various other periodicals.