To promote his novella “Temper CA,” published Jan. 2019 by Miami University Press, author Paul Skenazy sat down with Sam Keeling, a Creative Writing and Media & Culture major and Editorial Intern for the Press. Their discussion covered everything from Skenazy’s writing rituals (or lack thereof) to the nature of truth and memory. For more on the novella, read this article from The Miami Student. Continue reading
Han Kang’s Human Acts, in translation by Deborah Smith, is an exercise in memory and postmemory, a necessarily brutal rendering of trauma and its complex relationship with time and language. In this 2017 novel, which inhabits the framework of real historical occurrences, Han employs strikingly human voices (including her own) to recall the loss of a young boy’s life during the Gwangju Uprising of 1980. Each chapter steps forward in time to visit another life that struggles to understand its own living after this death. The Gwangju Uprising itself was an occasion of death, a violent ten days that saw Gwangju citizens organizing themselves against South Korean national military forces who had killed local university students protesting against the looming Chun Doo-Hwan dictatorship. The death toll is still unknown, recently placed by a BBC News report as somewhere “between one and two thousand.” These murdered bodies are where Han begins, a viscerally overwhelming motif in the novel’s first chapter, illustrating the magnitude of tragedy that Han proceeds to slice slowly into, so that the reader bares and must bear the buried bones of human cruelty with each chapter. Continue reading
All The Names They Used for God is a debut collection from Anjali Sachdeva, a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. The collection features nine stories of varying lengths, styles, and plots, albeit all sharing unusual and idiosyncratic elements. What links these stories is previewed by the title. Every character uses a different name for the ‘gods’ in their lives, and they are all let down by these gods. Sachdeva is interested in what happens when one’s life does not turn out as expected. When things are broken, how do you pick up the pieces and move on? Continue reading
Miami University Press Marketing Intern Leah Gaus interviews 2017 Novella Prize winner Patricia Grace King on her latest work, her writing process, and the importance of gratitude.
Having traversed many countries and lived in vastly different cities, Patricia Grace King fell in love with travel at an early age. Her prize-winning novella, Day of All Saints (Miami University Press, 2017), takes place in Guatemala, where Patricia lived for three years. While there, she worked as an accompanier of refugees with grassroots organization Witness for Peace during the civil war. She holds an MFA from Warren Wilson College and a PhD in English from Emory University. Hard at work on her forthcoming novel, King currently resides in Durham, England. For more, visit her website at www.patriciagraceking.com. Continue reading
On October 30th, the seats of Irvin 40 filled quickly with poetry enthusiasts, there to see the reading of cris cheek and Peter Manson, two writers hailing from across the pond. Manson is from Glasgow and is the author of a variety of works including a book-length translation titled Stéphane Mallarmé: The Poems in Verse (Miami University Press). cheek, originally from England, now teaches here at Miami. He has done it all—music, publishing, dancing, and e-poetry. It made for an interesting scene, Scottish and English poets who cut their teeth performing and writing abroad and in online spaces now reading together for a US crowd. The reading was a melting pot of European Anglophone styles, countries, cultures, and languages as each author brought his own flavor to the mix. Continue reading
“She was truly happy for the first time in her life, and it felt just like living in a small room painted all white…”
So begins Alexandra Kleeman’s Jellyfish, the short story she read this past Thursday to a crowd of people in the Miami University Bookstore. Continue reading
MUPress Author Garth Greenwell returned to Oxford, OH last week to teach a graduate workshop and visit the undergraduate capstone course. He also read from his acclaimed book What Belongs to You, which was recently named PEN/Faulkner Award finalist. Greenwell spoke on the importance of place in storytelling, an element he considers crucial yet sometimes under-acknowledged. Continue reading
I first stumbled across Katherine Karlin’s work in the Winter 2015 edition of The Cincinnati Review. The story, “We Are the Polites,” is told from the point of view of the youngest daughter of five children born to a large, famous Greek family. Her name is Honey, all of her other siblings have normal, “non-stripper” names, and they lead clean-shaven, non-stripper lives. Not that Honey is a stripper (she’s not); Honey is an uninteresting accountant whose life pales in comparison to those of her theatrical siblings. Continue reading
On Tuesday, January 26, 2009, a friend and I drove over an hour round trip in the Columbus snow, spinning out twice, to buy Franz Ferdinand’s third album, Tonight: Franz Ferdinand, at a record store on its release date. Continue reading