For Sara Ludy, an American artist from Bluemont, a town in rural Virginia near the Appalachian Trail, the unknown, the unseen, and the ghostlike is what drives her creativity to those shadowy and unfamiliar territories. This is where questions and what she refers to as paranormal experiences, help gauge her sense of belonging while getting inside the virtual and the metaphysical worlds, touching on what Sara regards as “energy” that produces and shapes her works of art.
Read moreMarc Palmieri’s Struggle to Keep His Daughter Alive and Pursue His Art
by Sonja Killebrew and Afsana Ahmed
Marc Palmieri is a professor, a writer, an actor, and even a baseball coach having once played for the Toronto Blue Jays. His plays, such as Waiting for the Host, Poor Fellas, and NY Times’ “Critic’s Pick” Levittown have been performed not only in New York City but around the country. His script for Telling You was produced by Miramax and stars Jennifer Love Hewitt.
Read moreSalar Abdoh on Writing in and Outside of War Zones
by David Saccone-Braslow
Salar Abdoh is a novelist, essayist, and translator born in Tehran, Iran. He attended a boarding school in England before relocating to Los Angeles when his father left Iran for the United States following the 1979 Iranian Revolution. Abdoh received his undergraduate degree from U.C. Berkeley and his Master's from the City College of New York, where now teaches creative writing.
Read moreKafka’s Passover, From the Desert to Canaan
by Mark Jay Mirsky
The Diaries of Franz Kafka is a new translation of Franz Kafka’s Journals by Ross Benjamin and his extensive notes open up a new chapter for readers in English who want to understand the inner life of Franz Kafka, a writer whose work has influenced many of the major writers of 20th and 21st century fiction as well as serious thinkers in fields as diverse as philosophy, history, and sociology.
Read moreLouise Brooks: Silent Muse
by Thomas Gladysz
The fictional character at the heart of Jerome Charyn’s “Lulu in Love,” an excerpt from a forthcoming novel, was inspired by a real person, Louise Brooks. Today, this 1920s film star is best known for two things. The first is her iconic look. What defined her image was her sleek bobbed hair—a “black helmet” as critic Kenneth Tynan once put it. Brooks’ legend also rests on her role as Lulu in G.W. Pabst’s 1929 film, Pandora’s Box. Like her oft-copied haircut, Brooks’ memorable portrayal of Lulu has inspired more than fashion, including a handful of other films and film characters.
Read moreTo Sneer At Robert Musil
by Mark Jay Mirsky
As a novelist, I read one way, and as I suspect as a teacher, I read another. There is a third way I occasionally read—as an editor. (I once was privileged to read as a critic, but since a change of editors at The Washington Post’s Book World and the extinction of Partisan Review, and various other publications whose editors knew me, I have lost a ready access to a soapbox.) Every now and then, however, some stunning stupidity, in The New York Times, The New York Review of Books, or The New Yorker takes my breath away.
Read moreOn Gila Green's "Passport Control"
Gila Green [Tal] was a student of mine some years ago in the graduate creative writing program at Bar Ilan University. Since then I have followed her fiction with pleasure and printed it in Fiction, [See—Gila Tal, Brass Knuckles, Fiction Magazine, Volume 20, #2]. Some years ago she left her home in Canada to eventually settle in Beit Shemesh and her work often echoes of the disparate worlds of those who come to live in Israel from other places.
Read moreIn This Issue: Number 61
by Mark Jay Mirsky
The editors at Fiction thought it might be worthwhile for me to comment on stories that we published in the current issue so as to give readers of our Web page an incentive to find the magazine in bookstores or to subscribe. At the same moment a note came in from a writer whom I prize and whose work I teach, Cynthia Ozick, and she has given me permission to print it here. Since she has mentioned my story, “On Account of an Apple,” her comment will suffice.
Read morePuddingstone by Mark Jay Mirsky
Reviews & Testimonials
by Joseph McElroy
Mirsky of Boston has an ear for longing, anger, contradiction, family, a smelting pot of confounded and ironic heritage; an eye for wild progress, flood, violence, the hands-on politics of Irish police force and Black power, and here, so convincing and droll and painful, the fugitive, all but isolated will of outlying Native America.
Read moreK. O.
by Katherine Q. Stone
According to James Wood, The New Yorker literary critic introducing Karl Ove Knausgaard this afternoon, the first time the Norwegian novelist came to New York there were about twenty people at his reading. The room was filled with empty seats.
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