Tottenville Review

By Pat Finn

In his 1940 essay “Inside the Whale,” George Orwell famously asserted that “good novels are written by people who are not frightened.” In the context of his essay, this statement denotes a familiar idea, namely that novelists ought to attend to the integrity of their work rather than the fickle and, for Orwell, often politically suspect demands of critics. When considered literally, however, this statement, like so many of Orwell’s absolutist proclamations, takes on the weight and luminosity of a universal law: an axiom that is all the more attractive because of the absurdity of its grand ambition, doomed from the start, to make a totalizing claim about a subject as inexhaustible as the novel. The idea that good novelists are always unafraid isn’t true, but it feels true, which is more important because it gets at something essential in the way we think about the novel, the “most anarchical of all forms of literature” as Orwell writes in the same essay. Bound up with the idea of the novel, it seems, is the idea of freedom, and if novelists are to embody their vocations they themselves must be free. And people who are truly free are not frightened.

Continue reading "As Impalpable as Energy: Freedom and Possibility in Clarice Lispector’s First Novel"…

By Noah Charney

Once upon a time, a book release was a major event.  There were few enough books published that each one was looked upon as noteworthy, the conduit of new and often foreign ideas, a treasure to be purchased, carefully wrapped, gifted with a degree of reverence, and discussed in dark cafes and across bottle-strewn dinner tables.  This concept will surely sound foreign to readers today who are overwhelmed with words flowing from so many magazines, newspapers, books, and blogs that we’re forced to skim as a defense mechanism.  Several hundred thousand books were self-published last year, leaving aside those published by established presses, after having been selected by agents and acquiring editors, then polished and edited into a finished state (around 350,000 such books are published annually in the U.S. alone). Continue reading "Publishing in Slovenia"…

by R. Salvador Reyes

The Wayward Ones
Poets move like shoals of fish through the ocean of our literary history. Gathering along the currents of time, dividing into separate schools, exploring myriad paths forward—some break off to join different shoals, others dart away in tiny clusters, quickly collecting streams of new followers. But there are those few loners, the daredevils, the quixotic: the pioneers who wander wayward, diving into unexplored depths, unfollowed, and sometimes forgotten. Yet their journeys are often the most fantastically revealing, and, ironically, the most powerfully memorable. Continue reading "Future Paths Unfollowed: The Poetry of Joseph Ceravolo & Laurence Lieberman (Part 1)"…

By R. Salvador Reyes

First confession. I didn’t start out this way: believing that art is a Godless domain, a tactically-consumed, evolutionarily-wrought siren to the mind—just another victim hunted by our massive, pulverizing desire to devour and catalog every pattern in the universe that presents itself to our perpetually-ravished brains. I didn’t believe any of those things. Not in the beginning. Continue reading "Story Theory: Confessions of a Literary Darwinist"…

By Samantha Ecker Angerame

It feels strange to look at an old photo, one taken long before you or your parents were born, and recognize something.  It’s a disconcerting feeling that uproots you from your present life.  Suddenly you find yourself in a faraway place that feels antiquated and remote—but it’s also eerily familiar.  You realize that you once knew it very well. Continue reading "Letter to the Editor: A Homecoming"…

Hobby Horse Hill came into my possession by way of my mother, who herself had read it as a girl. At perhaps eight, I discovered it in a box with dozens of her other childhood favorites. Of all of them, only Hobby Horse Hill became important to me, so much so that I read it dozens of times. At one point I could recite the entire opening chapter by heart. Even now, certain lines or scenes will occur to me spontaneously: a sudden embarrassment, for example, will bring to mind the idea of having “the grace to be ashamed,” which one character says approvingly to another, and which I thought, at eight or nine, was romantic.

Continue reading "Re-Reading Hobby Horse Hill"…

From the paperback edition of The Unknown Knowns by Jeffrey Rotter. Visit the Museum of the Aquatic Ape to take a virtual tour of Nautika, view their collected works, and browse the gift shop where you can buy the book. Visit Jeffrey at The Books of Rotter.

Click to View the Comic

Comic art copyright © 2010 by Margaret McCartney.

I love poetry. Really, I do. In fact, to repurpose what Alvie told Annie in Woody’s “Annie Hall”… Love is too weak a word for what I feel. I luuurve poetry, you know, I loave poetry, I luff poetry, two F’s. So, this isn’t easy for me to say. But it’s time for a talk. We need to surround poetry with all of its closest friends and family—maybe in that den with the nice window overlooking the maples or the dusty book-stuffed office where poetry counsels its earnest undergrads—and have a talk. You know, that talk—the one that starts with those four hard-to-hear words: you have a problem. Yes, Poetry, it’s time for an intervention.

Continue reading "A Literary Intervention: Sending Poetry to Rehab or How Bugs Bunny Can Save Poetry"…