![Minor Literature[s]](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_80,h_80,c_fill,f_webp,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep,g_auto/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fe0117ca3-2d00-451e-b0c5-d09def5e487b_400x400.png)
![Minor Literature[s]](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_36,h_36,c_fill,f_webp,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep,g_auto/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fe0117ca3-2d00-451e-b0c5-d09def5e487b_400x400.png)
Monthly Dispatch #13 — May 2024
A Letter from the editor[s]
Literary community is a complicated thing. On the one hand, there’s the hoary old Romantic cliché of splendid isolation, which we all should have managed to have grown out of by now. But on the other, you have those who gather on social media under hashtag banners, with their inane “craft” questions, engagement bait, and simpering circle-jerks of mutual adoration (so often, it seems, engaged in with half an eye on what one will get in return). It’s enough to make anyone want to off themselves in a garret.
So then how to square the circle? Recent examples, whether it be collective, as demonstrated by the gathering to celebrate Inside the Castle’s anniversary in Kansas, or individual, such as private instances of kindness or the volunteering of time and attention, only go to show that as much as every writer might harbour the fantasy of unique and exceptional genius, we are nothing without each other. And, generally speaking, that has nothing to do with trumpeting #community, but rather is about presence; it is about showing up.
Solidarity, often, is all we have.
And on that note, solidarity with the people of Gaza — now and always. End the genocide, end the occupation: free Palestine.
The Editor[s]
Cake & Prostheses: mini dramas and short prose [excerpt] — Gerhard Rühm (tr. Alexander Booth)
“transference
lying on a piece of white cardboard, i outline my body in black pen. then the drawing is attached to a wall and lashed with a five-tailed whip, the tips of which have been hung with pencils, until the latter are blunt.”
Gerhard Rühm was born in Vienna in 1930. A writer, composer, and visual artist, he is one of the key figures of the post-war European avant-garde.
Alexander Booth s a poet and translator. His translations from the German include work by Friederike Mayröcker, Alexander Kluge, Lutz Seiler, and a new translation of Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus.
Birding [excerpt] — Rose Ruane
“In a small seaside town, autumn is winnowing into winter and two women – strangers – are as yet unaware their lives are about to collide …”
Rose Ruane lives in Glasgow with her ever-expanding collections of twentieth century kitsch and other people’s letters, postcards and photographs. Her debut novel This Is Yesterday was published in 2021. Twitter: @RegretteRuane
Vigilate! — Andriy Sodomora (tr. Roman Ivashkiv and Sabrina Jaszi)
“As I climbed higher and twilight descended, an indescribable feeling congealed in me—a state brought about by what seemed like time’s compression, its clotting or sedimentation: Beneath the slabs I’d tread upon entering through the gate were foundations and cellars, more than half a millennium old. So, though I was mounting the stairs, I felt like I was plumbing the depths of antiquity …”
Andriy Sodomora is a Ukrainian translator, writer, and professor of Classics at the Ivan Franko National University of Lviv, Ukraine. At the age of 85, Sodomora remains extremely prolific in many genres.
Roman Ivashkiv teaches Slavic languages, literatures, and cultures and translation studies at the University of Alabama at Tuscaloosa. With Erín Moure, he published an English translation of the Ukrainian writer Yuri Izdryk’s poetry collection Smokes (2019). Twitter: @roman904
Sabrina Jaszi is a literary translator working from Slavic and Turkic languages. Her published translations include the fiction of Reed Grachev, Nadezhda Teffi, and Alisa Ganieva. She is also a fiction writer. Twitter: @sjaszi
Somebody Walking — Sam Glover
“To begin with somebody much like any other is walking and continues to walk along streets much like any other …”
Sam Glover is a writer from London whose work has appeared before in 3:AM, minor literature[s] and Always Crashing. Twitter: @bruptencounter
Tabitha, Get Up [excerpt] — Lee Upton
“I am an ex-wife, and thus I am inclined to agree with other ex-wives, and so I can hardly breathe when I open the PDF. What has Brent Vintner done? How has he ruined this woman’s life?”
Lee Upton is a writer and poet whose work has appeared in The New Yorker, The New Republic, Poetry, and in many other journals as well as three editions of Best American Poetry. She is the author of books of poetry, fiction, and literary criticism.
A Quickened Thing — Charlotte Geater
“When Jane Todd Crawford’s belly first started growing and growing, her family thought she was pregnant with twins. She was in her late forties. She was getting so big. It was possible. It had to be. But nine months came and went, and there were no babies …”
Charlotte Geater has had one piece of short fiction ('In Sympathy') published as a Galley Beggar Press single. Her poetry has been published in The Poetry Review and The White Review. She lives in London. Twitter: @tambourine
Doppelgänger (A Gonzo Mission) — Alberto Prunetti (tr. Fernando Sdrigotti)
“Twenty years later. Twenty years later I’m on my way to Bristol. Or rather, on my way to the miserable mall where I used to clean the loos …”
Alberto Prunetti is an Italian working-class writer. He is the author of Amianto. Una storia operaia, 108 metri (available in English as Down and Out in England and Italy, in a translation by Elena Pala), and Nel girone dei bestemmiatori. His latest book is an essay on working-class literature and the publishing industry: Non è un pranzo di gala (Minimum Fax, 2022). Read our 2019 interview with Alberto Prunetti by Vito Laterza.
Fernando Sdrigotti is an Argentinean writer, translator, and cultural critic. He’s the author of Shitstorm (Open Pen), Jolts (Influx Press) and We Are But Nothing / No somos nada (Rough Trade), among other books in English and Spanish. Read and Subscribe to Fernando’s Substack ‘The Leftovers’ here.
Exhibit 1: Peter Hujar — L.A. Leere
“Palermo Catacombs #7 (Two Girls Together)
Sisters, probably, hopefully—uncomfortably morbid if friends, not that the baseline morbidity of the whole catacomb schtick screams comfort. If not for the skulls, we could think them all fabric. Surrounded by reclining monks, long past sleep, the only vertical recess, twins not standing, but propped—a dead body can’t pose, but it can be posed. See? Death hides in admissible syntax, acceptable subjects, irreducibly explains certain grammatical judgements. A standing corpse is a joke, like giving your friend a tree that you don’t own.”
L.A. Leere is a writer and editor living in Chicago, reachable at lou.a.leere@gmail.com for barter opportunities, field reports, gainful employment, and queening out. Twitter: @la_leere
Rules of the Game, Volume 4: Frail Riffs by Michel Leiris (tr. Richard Sieburth) — Joseph Schreiber
“With a life that spanned almost the whole of the twentieth century, Michel Leiris (1901–1990) knew and formed close friendships with many of the most important intellectual and artistic figures of Parisian society, and yet his activities and interests defy simple categorization …”
Michel Leiris (1901 – 1990) was a profoundly influential and versatile French intellectual and the author of Manhood and Phantom Africa. His four-volume autobiographical essay, The Rules of the Game, serves as a primary document of artistic life in the twentieth century.
Richard Sieburth is professor emeritus of French and comparative literature at New York University.
Joseph Schreiber is a writer based in Calgary, Alberta, Canada. His essays, reviews, and poems have been published in a variety of online journals and print anthologies. He is a former nonfiction editor at 3:AM Magazine and maintains a literary blog called roughghosts. Twitter: @roughghosts
“I have a weird fearlessness with translation […] I don’t think they can’t speak with an accent”: An interview with Max Daniel Lawton — Cristina Politano
Max Daniel Lawton is a Los Angeles-based writer and translator who has distinguished himself by the breadth and variety of his English translations. I sat down with him to discuss the recent publication of his translation of Vladimir Sorokin’s Blue Lard, the unique challenges that Sorokin’s work poses, and the changing nature of literary translation as automation smooths the gap between any two languages.
Max Daniel Lawton is a novelist, musician, and translator. He has translated many works by Vladimir Sorokin and is currently working on translations of works by Michael Lentz, Antonio Moresco, Stefano D’Arrigo, Fyodor Dostoevsky, and Louis-Ferdinand Céline. Twitter: @maxdaniellawton
Cristina Politano is a writer from New Jersey. Her essays and fiction appear in Return.Life, La Piccioletta Barca, and on her Substack. Twitter: @monalisavitti
Better Shopping Through Living VIII: Dis[s] Tract — Frank Garrett
“An organization for writers that dismisses what writers say can’t really be described as working for freedom of speech at all.”
Writer and translator Frank Garrett shops in Dallas, Texas, and is essays editor at Minor Literature[s]. His series Better Shopping Through Living will appear (mostly) monthly. He was never going to play Sun City.
Decolonial Daughter: Letters from a Black Woman to her European Son by Lesley-Ann Brown [22/05/2018]
“I think of the children torn from mothers. I think of the children whose mothers were raped. I think of the women whose lives are not valued. Who are the women who came before you? What are their stories? What are their names? Say their names. Smash patriarchy with their names."
Lesley-Ann Brown is a Brooklyn-born writer, educator and activist who currently lives in Copenhagen, Denmark. Her parents hail from Trinidad and Tobago. She studied writing and literature at the New School for Social Research and has worked as a freelance journalist for Vibe and The Source. She also created the critically-acclaimed blackgirlonmars blog and in the founder of Bandit Queen Press.
Coming in June …
New fiction from Jeremy Stewary and Addison Zeller, excerpts from new books by Timothy Thornton, Nour Abi-Nakoul and Greg Gerke, as well as interviews with Gerke and Abi-Nakoul, textos en español, and more …