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Teddy Wayne LIVE
JOIN US TODAY, MARCH 31 AT 6 p.m.
For the first installment of LIT Magazine’s newest series, LIVE with LIT, where book reviews come to life!
What really makes a great writer? Education? Hardship? Talent? Or luck? Find out tonight when LaVonne Roberts interviews Teddy Wayne on his latest novel, Apartment, a story about two students in Columbia’s MFA program in New York in the 1990s. (Read more: “Apartment by Teddy Wayne” by LaVonne Roberts).
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“By Bread Alone” by Danny Bellinger (wil’um)
When I was a young boy I learned that you could shoot a man for disrespecting your sister, even if he was her husband and your brother in law. All you had to do was trick your kids into believing the weapon was a cap gun by putting caps in the hammer, before you fired into the night air at the man who’d limp for the rest of his life for reasons unbeknown to me. That’s what my father did. My brother tells me years later that the fake cap gun is the reason why my uncle limps like he does.
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“Regnum” A short story by Bronka Nowicka (translated from the Polish by Katarzyna Szuster) Artwork by Lula Bajek
Regnum
Mad Mary, Ursula, insane Nina, haunted Agnes, guide me. Let me stick my hands in the pockets of your housecoats, where the keys are nestled in the bundles of your handkerchiefs. Let me steal them and set the door to the kingdom ajar.
At night Nina kneads bread and weeps into it. In the kitchen, the milk gives off light until she pours it into dun flour and then it goes out. The woman kneads the dough in the dark. The table squeaks,
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“Apartment by Teddy Wayne” Reviewed by LaVonne Roberts
Apartment is Teddy Wayne’s fourth novel and an easy read in just over 200 pages. Wayne’s novel gets to the crux of every writer’s angst in an MFA program: when you strip away the art of craft, is your writing any more interesting than yourself? Offering a rare glimpse of what happens in a workshop and the sheltered creative writer’s MFA community, Apartment speaks to what a privileged, highly-competitive MFA degree does or does not do for a writer. Moreover, it speaks to male identity in relation to male friendship.
Set in 1996,
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Five Poems from “In the morning we are glass” by Andra Schwarz (translated from the German by Caroline Wilcox Reul) Artwork by Hannu Töyrylä
In the morning we are glass
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Am morgen sind wir aus glas
My hands reach into emptiness what is left under earth
I walk to the black mill at its edge the spring
nothing moves I still hear the grinding of wheels
the spray of water and how they revolve decades
in the millworks the building the dismantling the change
finally the child from then no one knows what might have been
every year another ring grows wolves prowl in the
forest now that I’m gone everything is large & -
Excerpts from the book length poem “Melismas” by Marlon Hacla (translated from the Filipino by Kristine Ong Muslim) Artwork by Tilde Acuña
Excerpts from
Melismas
Because I had been given healing salts, objects
that bring restoration, I shall brave the ripeness
of the week for you. I will sing about strengths
that seek loneliness but capable of saving
the world from impairment caused by its own
design. I have no more use
for you but each time I discard
the list that condones your utility,
a rice paddy’s hue turns pale, blankets are suddenly blown away
to reach every layer of the sky.
