Online Issues

  • Interviews,  Issue 40

    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,

  • Interviews,  Issue 40

    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,

  • Interviews,  Issue 40

    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,

  • Issue 40,  Nonfiction

    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,

  • Issue 40,  Nonfiction

    Twins

    art by Kevin Wei

    by Minyong Cho

    The first hotel was small but pretty with a garden behind the decorative wrought iron gate that was firmly closed. I found a piece of paper on the gate with the handwritten English word, “Closed.” I didn’t know a hotel could close. If they were full, wouldn’t the gate be open to let the guests come and go? I still had two more to try, so I moved onto the next.

    Either Heidi was considerate, or cheap hotels were clustered in Jerusalem, because it only took ten minutes to walk to the next one.

  • Issue 40,  Nonfiction

    36 Hours in the Strategic Crescent

    art by LEGEND BARD

    by Adam Day

    With lines from Philip Levine’s “Angel Butcher” 

    Joined by friends from Musayyib, we wandered down narrow lanes through which a union strike had rushed earlier that evening, to Hanh Men’ Panjshir, a cozy restaurant known for its steaks. Today, the dark, stone dining room was crowded, so while we waited outside for a table, a blind man regaled us with a snippet of a quaint folk song: “Man, shed thy clothes, cover thy head with ashes, run in the street and dance in thy madness…” Then,