I found the note, transcribed below, stuck in a yellowing copy of Jacques the Fatalist, borrowed from the Stavros Niarchos Foundation Library a few months ago. I submitted it to the online magazine you’re now reading because it seems to be what the author would have wanted—to make sure the contents continue on.
The note wasn’t dated or signed, but it looked fairly old (semi-brown, stained in parts, and wrinkly, but not falling apart).
Did you know that I was an incredibly gay kid when I was 4 years old? I don’t mean that I knew that I liked men at that age, but I definitely was such a stereotypical caricature of a gay man. I never loved Disney princes, only princesses. My favorite colors were pink and purple, and I always wanted to wear those massive rainbow beads. However, there was one thing that was the cream of the crop of my four year old flamboyance. This shiny, purple tutu with ruffles. We have video footage of me prancing around outside with a glittering tutu whilst my parents make snide, but non-offensive comments that I couldn’t understand because I lacked any sort of cognitive ability.
Reviewed by Zoë Collins & Shura Price from Todmorden Writers’ Collective
Writer: Sam Reese
Publisher: Platypus Press
Release date: September 2021
Price: £8.70
Today my husband told me
I must know the ABCs of poetry.
”Take it seriously”, he said
It’s no longer A for Apple, B for Ball, and C for Cool
Now it’s a game of AABBCC and ABABAB,
Alphabets will stay closer together.
Bernard had planned for today to be the last day of his life. He stared out the window of his office on the 35th floor of the Maxwell building, overlooking the San Francisco Bay. If he peered through the telescope he kept near the window, he could see The Campanile of the University of California, Berkeley campus. It supposedly resembled St. Mark’s Campanile in Piazza San Marco in Venice. He didn’t see it that way. He saw it as an artifice, an historical pastiche derived from a tower in an ancient European city. As far as Bernard was concerned, it was a failure, same as him.
Four days after I moved with my family from Mumbai, India, to Cleveland, Ohio, I picked up the phone to order pizza. I had eaten pizza twice before in Mumbai–at a small eatery that served a spicy-sweet sauce and cheese on a six-inch pizza base. (This happened over twenty years ago. In 2021 pizza is widely available in India.) But now in Cleveland, I couldn’t wait to try the exotic version I’d seen in American TV shows and comic books.
I dialed a number from a flyer that had come in the mail. “Hello, I would like to order pizza.”
“Sure,” said a young male voice at the other end. “You have Q-pins?”
Reviewed by Shura Price, Andy Fraser, Steve Welsh, Theresa Sowerby & Zoe Collins from Todmorden Wednesday Writers
Writer: Gordon Lish
Publisher: Dzanc Books
Release date: 13th April 2021
Price: £17.92
I am not the voice of my generation
and yet, I am a voice of my generation
An inspirational English teacher will stay with you forever, infuse your mind mind with a love of language and literature, and an appreciation of the beauty of the language. I met Phil Riley when I was in my second year at Grammar School, and he almost put me off the subject for life. He spent the first lesson talking about himself, and how wonderful we would find his class if we were refined enough to appreciate it.
Ah, no, that’s unfair, Jason. He was a decent man trying to explain his expectations. He would have preferred, I’m sure, to have been extolling the delights of Wordsworth: it’s just gobshites like you that made the talk necessary.