Minor Dispatch #12 — April 2024

A Letter from the editor[s]

A year of doing this now, and with the anniversary arriving in springtime, the cycle complete, thoughts of renewal come easily to mind.

But rather than the rutting bunnies and frolicking lambs, the budding brighter days bring as winter recedes, what of the humble slug? When slugs fuck, they entwine hermaphroditically, mutually delivering cummy loads, their appendages extending and vining as they hang from a supportive branch. According to the venerable Attenborough, a leftover slime is the only evidence the encounter ever takes place.

You can draw your own conclusions about how this might apply to the production of an online literary magazine. Our hands are too sticky to type.

The Editor[s]

P.S. There are still a few days left to submit for our Paris series, details here.

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Experimental Prose & Poetry

Dionysos Speed [excerpt] — Rainer J. Hanshe

“To the digito-humanists, who continued to technologize reality and move farther and farther from biologism and further and further into virtuality, into what they prized as the hyperreal, the earth had long been considered an outmoded planet …”

Rainer J. Hanshe is a writer, translator, and the founder of Contra Mundum Press and Hyperion. He is the author of two novels, The Acolytes and The Abdication, and Shattering the Muses and Closing Melodies. Some of his translations include Charles Baudelaire’s Belgium Stripped Bare and Antonin Artaud’s Journey to Mexico.

Fiction

Daybook [excerpt] — Nathan Knapp

“Just to the east of the many graves of children of which I earlier wrote—all of whom, it now strikes me, according to a certain doctrine mentioned some pages above, deserved destruction—I saw a fenced-in plot, the wire a deeply rusted red. It was the only fenced-in plot in the entire cemetery …”

Nathan Knapp lives in Nashville, Tennessee. Daybook is his first novel. Twitter: @nate_knapp24

Miniaturen // Miniatures — Martin Lechner (tr. Millay Hyatt)

“Gestern, er war heruntergestiegen in den Keller, um einen Hammer zu holen, entdeckte er die Kurbel. Hinter der Werkzeugkiste ragte sie aus der Wand …

“Yesterday, when he had gone down to the basement to get a hammer, he discovered the crank handle. There it was, sticking out of the wall behind the toolbox. He turned it three times and looked up at the light …”

Martin Lechner currently lives in Berlin. His debut novel Kleine Kassa (Petty Cash) was longlisted for the German Book Prize 2014, his short story collection Nachfünfhundertzwanzig Weltmeertagen (After Five-Hundred and Twenty Days of Sea) (2016) was shortlisted for the Clemens Brentano prize 2017. Twitter: @AUTOMARTZWEI

Millay Hyatt is a Berlin-based freelance writer and translator. Her book Nachtzugtage (Days on the Night Train) will be published by Friedenauer Presse this summer.

Risky Business — Drew Gummerson

“You are working in a Korean restaurant in Scarborough as a dishwasher and you live above it with your wife and kid. You are not Korean. Your wife is not Korean. But somehow your kid is Korean …”

Drew Gummerson is the writer of The Lodger, Me and Mickie James and Seven Nights at the Flamingo Hotel. His latest book, Saltburn, will be published early 2025. He is a Lambda Award finalist, winner of the Leicestershire Short Story Competition. His stories have been on Radio 4 and in various anthologies. Twitter: @drewgum

American Abductions [excerpt] — Mauro Javier Cárdenas

“A Random Carrington Generator as a gift for his daughters, Antonio thinks, which he can code in his sleep since the task consists of numbering each sentence from the complete stories of Leonora Carrington and letting a random number generator choose from the numbered sentences …”

Mauro Javier Cárdenas is the author of American Abductions (Dalkey Archive, 2024), Aphasia (FSG, 2020) and The Revolutionaries Try Again (Coffee House Press, 2016). Twitter: @IneluctableQuak

Essays & Features

Editing the Aesopic Body — Nick Norton

“What is at hand, what surrounds, what is in-between, and close by we find the Aesopic Body as a twenty-first century expression of fable-function …”

Nick Norton is the author of AKA: A Genealogy of the Saddle. Other recent work can be found in Soanyway, Mikrokosmos, Fatal Flaw, Tether’s End, 3:AM, Selkie, Shooter, The Happy Hypocrite, and elsewhere. Essays, short nonfiction, and artwork appeared via Inventory, 1995-2003.

The Critic and Their Readers — Michel Butor (tr. Mathilde Merouani)

“One always writes with a view to being read. This word I am writing is intended for a gaze, even if it is my own. The very act of writing implies an audience …”

Michel Butor (1926-2016) was a French poet, novelist, teacher, essayist, art critic, and translator. He was the author of four novels, including L’Emploi du temps (1956; Passing Time), which won the Prix Fénéon, and La Modification (1957; Changing Track), which won the Prix Renaudot. He also wrote several books of nonfiction, including the essays Répertoires [I–V] (1960–1982), from which this excerpt is taken.

Mathilde Merouani is a teacher from Toulouse, France. Twitter: @MathildeMerwani.

This Is a Cathedral and You Are a Moth — Bann Ister

“In a description of this sort we have to emphasise that its content is, in fact, positive – a moth, you call us, and we are supposed to be happy – well isn’t every being of equal importance: a moth, a snake, a giraffe, a human; they glide determinedly towards the end of their lives …”

Bann Ister lives in Brighton. They have been published in Cephalopress’ Inksac. Twitter: @atravelleronaw1

Interviews

“I wanted to tell a story about Americans paying in the present for the US’s crimes in the past”: A Conversation with Lily Meyer — Bronwyn Scott-McCharen

Lily Meyer’s Short War tells the story of Operation Condor through the eyes of Gabriel Lazris and his daughter Nina, each grappling with the individual and collective complicity and guilt that comes from being North Americans in a region that is still reeling from the carnage the United States set into motion with Condor. Gabriel is an idealistic teenager living in Santiago who learns his father could be working as a CIA asset to undermine Allende’s government; decades later, Nina finds herself in Buenos Aires, where she discovers information that could shed light on her father’s past and what all he may have left behind in Chile. Innovative and unique in its portrayal of recent history and its contemporary resonance, Short War is a novel that examines the uses and misuses of First World privilege and the price paid by those who were never afforded it.

Lily Meyer is a writer, translator, and critic. She is a contributing writer at the Atlantic, and her translations include Claudia Ulloa Donoso’s story collections Little Bird and Ice for Martians. She lives in Washington, D.C.

Bronwyn Scott-McCharen is a freelance writer and editor. Her work has appeared in The Millions and Review 31. She currently lives in Tirana, Albania. Twitter: @BronwynScottMcC

“Contemporary poetry is quite nearsighted, historically speaking. I’m interested in expanding the conversation”: An interview with Alexander Dickow — Béatrice Mousli

Alexander Dickow is poet, translator and academic based in the USA. He spoke with Béatrice Mousli about his interests, influences and his most recent poem Hob’s Game.

Alexander Dickow is a poet, translator and literary scholar who teaches French at Virginia Tech. His literary works in French and English include Caramboles (Argol Editions, 2008, bilingual poetry) and Appetites (MadHat Press, 2018). He has translated work by Sylvie Kandé, Max Jacob, Gustave Roud and Henri Droguet.

Béatrice Mousli is the author of numerous works of literary history as well as four biographies published in France by Flammarion. The latest, Susan Sontag, was published in 2017. She is currently working on a biography of Marguerite Yourcenar.

“I wrote every sentence in American Abductions the same way. I started with a human impulse that I attempted to exhaust”: An Interview with Mauro Javier Cárdenas

With his typically fluid and digressive verve, in American Abductions, his third novel, Mauro Javier Cárdenas explores the impact of family separations on Latino families, and how familial bonds can endure in a techo-dystopic near future. Over email, he spoke of his process, influences, and the “Search for Unexpected Linkages” that powers his prose.

American Abductions is out from Dalkey Archive Press on July 5th. You can pre-order a copy here.

From the Vaults

Two poems — Martha Sprackland [16/04/20]

“Like trepanation, I assume, this light.
Transcendent hole. Small rock poked from drystone
with a fingertip, for looking through
to the wide field, the I restored its sight.”

Martha Sprackland is a writer and editor from Merseyside, now living between London and Madrid. She was co-founder and poetry editor of Cake magazine, and is one of the founding editors of multilingual arts magazine La Errante. She is the editor of independent press Offord Road Books.

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Coming in May …

Excerpts from new novels by Rose Ruane and Lee Upton, Andiry Sodamora in a translation by Roman Ivashkiv and Sabrina Jaszi, stories from Sam Glover and Charlotte Geater, and much more.