Issue 40
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Life on Three Wheels
Six prose poems by E.M. Palitha Edirisooriya
Translated into English from Sinhala by samodH Porawagamage and Kasun Pathirage
SEPTEMBER 04Lionel Ranwala mahaththaya’s shows and speeches are superb. I came on a hire and stayed on to watch.
Everyone remembers the cake and the bottle on their birthday. Who remembers the birthday as the day their mother went through unimaginable pain? Why have we become brown sahibs? Fine–import the guitar from Germany, but let’s play Asian music.
At the end, Ranwala Sir sold CDs and cassette tapes for cash.
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Bought Woman
art by C. Christine Fair
by Veena Verma, translated from the Punjabi by C. Christine Fair
The entire village was abuzz. A short, stygian Bengali woman had appeared in the home of Driver Maggar Singh, the local truck driver. She had come to Desu Ram’s shop to buy dal and rice in the morning.
The customers milling about gushed forth salaciously, “No one has seen this woman in the village before.”
The woman grabbed a packet of dal and rice and left. Three men began to follow her,
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Fools For Love: An interview with Helen Schulman on her short story collection
Interview by LIT Books Editor Jonathan Kesh
While reading Fools for Love, the new collection of short stories from New School MFA professor Helen Schulman, it won’t take long until you see names begin to reappear between stories.
While comprised of separate, standalone tales, the full collection blends together into a much more interconnected world, and follows a number of different New Yorkers from different corners of the city over multiple generations. As hinted by the collection’s name, unsustainable relationships and characters with dysfunctional ideas of love abound. The title story follows a web of bohemian partnerships in the heyday of the East Village,
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Ghost Fish: An interview with Stuart Pennebaker (MFA ‘23) on her debut novel
Interview by LIT Books Editor Jonathan Kesh
Like plenty of great ghost stories, Stuart Pennebaker’s debut novel Ghost Fish begins as an extremely grounded tale. That it continues to feel realistic in its natural, interior way, even when a spirit entrenches itself into the story, is what makes it especially unique.
Ghost Fish follows a young twenty-something named Alison, who recently arrived in New York in hopes of a fresh start after a series of family tragedies left her isolated and entirely on her own. In particular, Alison is heavy with memories of her nearly twin sister — they were almost a year apart,
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Cyborg Fever: An Interview with Laurie Sheck on her Third Novel
Interview by Mal Ward
In Laurie Sheck’s, Cyborg Fever, she transports readers into a meditative state of profound thinking, focused on humanness and its complexity in the age of technology and AI. The novel centers around Erwin, an orphan named after the physicist, Erwin Schrödinger. After a year-long fever dream, he experiences hallucinatory-like visions that begin by observing Funes (of Jorge Luis Borges’s story, “Funes and the Memorious”) meticulously researching on a computer.
The array of facts that Funes discovers introduces us to Austrian physicist, Ludwig Boltzmann, and the theory of entropy,
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Tapestry
art by Stephanie Ann Farra
by Seth Kaplan
Let’s play a game. Imagine it’s the depths of winter. You wake from deep sleep to find your dwelling is burning. The fire rages. You have time to grab only three things. What would they be?
This game has rules, but because this game is a figment of my imagination, I make the rules, and the rules are, everybody in the end, is safe.
First: Family/pets don’t count toward your list. But if you have a cat (or a son that’s dragging you down) by all means,