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Writing That Risks: New Work from Beyond the Mainstream
These twenty-nine authors break rules and bend genres. Inspired by literary risk-takers like Italo Calvino, Margaret Atwood, and Junot Diaz, they are award-winning and emerging writers from around the world. Ranging from surreal to experimental, fabulist to slipstream, these works marry imagination with meaning to create fiction, poetry, and nonfiction that is provocative and fresh. In these pages, you'll meet the mother of a shape-shifting kindergartener, a drug mule in communion with an ancient god, and a woman made to feel through her husband's skin. Open the book and join us on an adventure into the unexpected and wondrous.
Contributors: aJbishop, Catie Jarvis, Christina Olson, Dan Sklar, David Ellis Dickerson, Edmund Zagorin, Erin Fitzgerald, Jenny Bitner, Joanne M. Clarkson, John Newman, Jønathan Lyons, Jordan Reynolds, LaTasha N. Nevada Diggs, Libby Hart, Mariev Finnegan, Michelle S. Lee, Molly English, Norman Lock, Olga Zilberbourg, Patrick Cole, Rachel Yoder, Robert Neilson, Sharif Shakhshir, Soren Gauger, Steve Castro, Thia Li Colvin, Wendy Patrice Williams, xTx, Zach Powers
Contributors: aJbishop, Catie Jarvis, Christina Olson, Dan Sklar, David Ellis Dickerson, Edmund Zagorin, Erin Fitzgerald, Jenny Bitner, Joanne M. Clarkson, John Newman, Jønathan Lyons, Jordan Reynolds, LaTasha N. Nevada Diggs, Libby Hart, Mariev Finnegan, Michelle S. Lee, Molly English, Norman Lock, Olga Zilberbourg, Patrick Cole, Rachel Yoder, Robert Neilson, Sharif Shakhshir, Soren Gauger, Steve Castro, Thia Li Colvin, Wendy Patrice Williams, xTx, Zach Powers
- GenresFiction
214 pages, Paperback
First published July 2, 2013
1 person is currently reading
100 people want to read
About the author
Liana Holmberg
1 book2 followersLiana Holmberg writes fiction, poetry, and reportage. Her work has received several awards and been published in a variety of venues. Her poem "Aunt Ida's Box" was selected by National Book Award winner Mark Doty for inclusion in the Academy of American Poets anthology New Voices. Her articles and reviews have appeared in the alternative newspaper Honolulu Weekly and the literary journal Manoa. She has given readings in San Francisco and Honolulu.
Inspired by the likes of Margaret Atwood, Anne Carson, and Bruno Schultz -- writers who mine the seam between reality and the fantastic -- Liana's work explores the hybridity of modern experience. Other influences include ancient mythology, film noir, and a life spent exploring boundaries. Her sensibility is both imagistic and grounded in the physical.
Liana holds a Master's Degree in Creative Writing from the University of Hawai`i. Her thesis, Reportage: Stories and Poems, was written under the direction of Pulitzer Prize short-listed poet Faye Kicknosway and multiple award winning novelist Ian MacMillan. She earned her Bachelor's in English from Colorado College, where her thesis on William Gibson's Neuromancer earned top marks. She has also attended the Stanford Professional Publishing Course and Reed College, and she graduated from Punahou high school.
Liana grew up in a multicultural, rural community on the North Shore of O`ahu, where she could usually be found barefoot on land or under the water. As a young woman, she embraced the physical and psychological tests of backpacking and rock climbing around the West and sailing the Pacific. She is equally challenged these days by the adventure of motherhood, still climbing and sailing when she can. Liana lives with her partner and her son in San Francisco, where she writes at her stand-up desk and in local cafes.
Inspired by the likes of Margaret Atwood, Anne Carson, and Bruno Schultz -- writers who mine the seam between reality and the fantastic -- Liana's work explores the hybridity of modern experience. Other influences include ancient mythology, film noir, and a life spent exploring boundaries. Her sensibility is both imagistic and grounded in the physical.
Liana holds a Master's Degree in Creative Writing from the University of Hawai`i. Her thesis, Reportage: Stories and Poems, was written under the direction of Pulitzer Prize short-listed poet Faye Kicknosway and multiple award winning novelist Ian MacMillan. She earned her Bachelor's in English from Colorado College, where her thesis on William Gibson's Neuromancer earned top marks. She has also attended the Stanford Professional Publishing Course and Reed College, and she graduated from Punahou high school.
Liana grew up in a multicultural, rural community on the North Shore of O`ahu, where she could usually be found barefoot on land or under the water. As a young woman, she embraced the physical and psychological tests of backpacking and rock climbing around the West and sailing the Pacific. She is equally challenged these days by the adventure of motherhood, still climbing and sailing when she can. Liana lives with her partner and her son in San Francisco, where she writes at her stand-up desk and in local cafes.
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Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
August 18, 2013
This much-anticipated anthology did not disappoint, presenting one glimpse after another into the mind of a strange-thinker, which I'd say are hands down the most refreshing and enlarging minds to glimpse.
I most loved the fiction ... some of which was seriously repellent: I kept having to put down Patrick Cole's "It Happened to Paul Sescau," a story in which a character's anxieties about purpose and meaning manifest themselves physically as ... how to put it without giving the story away ... a booger on steroids? The author brilliantly evoked the protagonist's anxiety in this reader, and I'm certain this is not a story that any editor would inflict on any but the edgiest, riskophilic readership. Don't shy away!
Edmund Zagorin's "A Dream of the Aztec" weaves together a similarly acute mix of anxieties. Will drug-filled balloons in the young protagonist's belly burst? Will the airplane carrying him crash? Will the brute in the next seat beat or rape him? Is the story behind this story the irritation of an unimaginably powerful god, with "hands the size of archipelagos and a grip that can throttle the wind itself"?
Zach Powers story, "When As Children We Acted Memorably" is another worlds-behind-the-world story, in the mold of Haruki Murakami or Neil Gaiman. "Minnows" by Jønathan Lyons is one of the weirdest and most compelling mashups of formally self-conscious fiction and emotionally wrenching story I've ever read (it somehow reminded me of Malcom Lowry's Under The Volcano , but I'm not sure I can explain why).
"We ♥ Shapes" by Jenny Bittner is a story I've been waiting to finish since I attended a "Small Press Love Fest" at a bookstore in San Francisco earlier this year (I blogged on the event, focusing on Jordan Reynolds technology-inflected take on found poetry, cf. Dragons, Google Translate, and 'found' poetry ). That afternoon, Bittner read the first part of her story and left me literally hanging off the edge of my chair in the back of the room, ravenous for What Happens Next. I had to read almost to the end of this anthology to find out; Bittner's story is the penultimate piece. And, yes, it was worth both the wait and the circuitous ride through haunting and rarely-visited literary terrain.
I most loved the fiction ... some of which was seriously repellent: I kept having to put down Patrick Cole's "It Happened to Paul Sescau," a story in which a character's anxieties about purpose and meaning manifest themselves physically as ... how to put it without giving the story away ... a booger on steroids? The author brilliantly evoked the protagonist's anxiety in this reader, and I'm certain this is not a story that any editor would inflict on any but the edgiest, riskophilic readership. Don't shy away!
Edmund Zagorin's "A Dream of the Aztec" weaves together a similarly acute mix of anxieties. Will drug-filled balloons in the young protagonist's belly burst? Will the airplane carrying him crash? Will the brute in the next seat beat or rape him? Is the story behind this story the irritation of an unimaginably powerful god, with "hands the size of archipelagos and a grip that can throttle the wind itself"?
Zach Powers story, "When As Children We Acted Memorably" is another worlds-behind-the-world story, in the mold of Haruki Murakami or Neil Gaiman. "Minnows" by Jønathan Lyons is one of the weirdest and most compelling mashups of formally self-conscious fiction and emotionally wrenching story I've ever read (it somehow reminded me of Malcom Lowry's Under The Volcano , but I'm not sure I can explain why).
"We ♥ Shapes" by Jenny Bittner is a story I've been waiting to finish since I attended a "Small Press Love Fest" at a bookstore in San Francisco earlier this year (I blogged on the event, focusing on Jordan Reynolds technology-inflected take on found poetry, cf. Dragons, Google Translate, and 'found' poetry ). That afternoon, Bittner read the first part of her story and left me literally hanging off the edge of my chair in the back of the room, ravenous for What Happens Next. I had to read almost to the end of this anthology to find out; Bittner's story is the penultimate piece. And, yes, it was worth both the wait and the circuitous ride through haunting and rarely-visited literary terrain.
December 2, 2013
Reviewed in Trop Magazine by Lauren Eggert-Crowe. Highlights:
* "What does it mean to risk, and what is being risked? Loss of readership? Alienation? Revulsion? Getting lost in translation? I would argue that the twenty-nine writers of Writing That Risks go straight towards those precise edges, and I would argue still that some hope to careen off of them. The result is a fresh, sometimes exhilarating view."
* On fiction by Molly English, "This was an instance where text art really worked for me as a reader".
* On poems by Christina Olson and Jordan Reynolds, "The verdict is in: Mixing the Internet the way a DJ mixes song samples and beats produces a melted Dadaist mix of the mundane, the surprisingly poignant, and the intimate."
* "What does it mean to risk, and what is being risked? Loss of readership? Alienation? Revulsion? Getting lost in translation? I would argue that the twenty-nine writers of Writing That Risks go straight towards those precise edges, and I would argue still that some hope to careen off of them. The result is a fresh, sometimes exhilarating view."
* On fiction by Molly English, "This was an instance where text art really worked for me as a reader".
* On poems by Christina Olson and Jordan Reynolds, "The verdict is in: Mixing the Internet the way a DJ mixes song samples and beats produces a melted Dadaist mix of the mundane, the surprisingly poignant, and the intimate."
June 27, 2016
Some stories and poems in this collection work better than others, but the good ones are great. "Minnows", "The Stork", and "We Love Shapes" were particular highlights.
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews