Monthly Dispatch #16 — September 2024

A letter from the editor[s]

We took off running after the summer break with our take on the kind of list feature you see pop up every now and then, except it’s not, or doesn’t want to be, refuses, even — plug into the rhizome below (and if we’ve ever published your stuff and you want to contribute, get in touch …)

Barely was that seeded, did we kick into high gear in preparation for our event in Paris in October with a special series of texts guest edited by Ben Libman. minor [i]ncident is fast approaching (info here), and as exciting as it is, it’s also difficult to know what to make of the thing actually happening and what it means to be gathering, actually, physically gathering, for this sort of do.

In the past, we’ve expressed scepticism about the literary community, and what it means/represents/can be — especially online. Well, pretty soon we’ll have to confront these ambiguities in the flesh. To pretend that it isn’t disconcerting would be dishonest.

We are profoundly grateful to the readers and participants, and indeed to everyone who has supported the endeavour in any way; call our ambivalence cold feet, butterflies, performance anxiety — but do not ignore or deride the frisson. Desire has a neurotic energy, and as September winds down and its vibrations ramp up, we do ourselves a disservice with attempts to tamper, allay and coddle.

Legs-a-whirl, stick around to see whether we collapse into the canyon or the road rises up to meet us. See you there?

The Editor[s]

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Over the past few months, we’ve been asking writers whose work has been published in or featured by minor lits to suggest texts for an anti-canon of minor literatures. In order to avoid anything too hierarchical or prescriptive, contributors were free to interpret the call as they wished. Suggestions of any kind/genre of text were accepted, as were any reason for the nomination — they could be personal favourites, texts that felt the most significant, inspiring or generative, perhaps the one most representative of the what minor literature means to the contributor — no rationale was out of bounds when it came to justifying an inclusion …

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This series of texts, guest edited by Ben Libman, is being published in the run up to minor [i]ncident, a night of readings and discussion happening in Paris on October 12th, 2024. You can find more information about the event and its participants here.

PARIS I: Le Temps des Cerises — Marc de Faoite

“Bocar usually got home just before me. I sometimes wondered if we hadn’t shared the same train. He worked the late shift in an unnamed branch of the many-tentacled RATP. He was a slim man, hair clipped tight, always neatly dressed, as if he worked an office job …”

Marc de Faoite is a freelance writer and editor. His short stories, articles, and book reviews have been published both in print and online. Tropical Madness, a first collection of his short stories, was published in 2013. Lime Pickled and Other Stories, his second collection, was published in January 2023. Twitter: @marcdefaoite

PARIS II: Sentient Paris — Maureen Alsop

Maureen Alsop, Ph.D. is the author of a debut collection of fiction: Today Yesterday After My Death (Erratum Press, forthcoming); Arbor Vitae: Tender to Empress (visual poetry); Pyre; Later, Knives & Trees; Mirror Inside Coffin; Mantic; Apparition Wren, and several chapbooks. Her visual poetry  has featured in galleries and journals including Riverside Art Museum, Umbrella Studio, Perc Tucker Art Gallery, Tupelo Quarterly, Drunken Boat and ctrl + v.

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Two Poems — Alexander Booth

“Years ago and I don’t remember when. Bodies ground air in the breath ash of the lived asking what is this what animates the dust?”

Alexander Booth is a poet and translator who lives in Berlin. Recent translations include books by Friederike Mayröcker, Alexander Kluge, Gerhard Rühm, and a new translation of Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. His collection of poems Triptych was published in 2021 and Kantor in 2023.

Alexander will be reading at minor [i]ncident …

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Confederacy — Austin Adams

“The Lost Cause of the Confederacy, that grand ol’ folktale alleging life under Lee to have been a convocation of gentleman lording over their lessers who were grateful to have been restored to their natural position beneath the boot, functions something like Agnes’s whitewashing of her early years …”

Austin Adams is a writer from Tennessee. His work has appeared in The New York Times, Prelude, The Los Angeles Review of Books, and elsewhere. He was a finalist for The Sewanee Review’s Fiction Contest, A Public Space’s Fellowship, and the Kenyon Review Editorial Development Fellowship. Twitter: @__AustinAdams

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High Solitude — Léon-Paul Fargue (tr. Rainer J. Hanshe)

“Leaning on my window, I watch the news, the feelings, the pants, the heads of soldiers and the hearts of spring pass by, heavy eyelids and oranges waxed like cannonballs, all in the sweetish halo of Mr. Bedloë’s memories. The panorama unfurls …”

High Solitude is now available from Contra Mundum Press.

Léon-Paul Fargue (1876 – 1947) was a poet and essayist whose worked spanned numerous literary movements. As works such as D’après Paris (1932) and Le Piéton de Paris (1939) attest, his writing was often steeped in love for the city of his birth. A renowned nightbird and socialite, he was none-the-less familiar with the solitude of city life.

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

Bloom — Israel A. Bonilla

“He speaks as if I cared the least bit about English usage. He lets no sentence go without some form of emendation. By fits and starts, he recounts a vivid childhood betrayal. There is a grasping for elegance, correctness …”

'Bloom' is taken from the short story collection Sleep Decades, available now from Malarkey Books.

Israel A. Bonilla lives in Guadalajara, Jalisco. He is author of the micro-chapbook Landscapes (Ghost City Press, 2021). His work has appeared in Your Impossible Voice, Firmament, Able Muse, Exacting Clam, BULL, new_sinews, and elsewhere. Twitter: @iab9208

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“The more you go on into the novel the more the future is handled as an historical fact. To me, the past is handled more as a dream and future is handled more as history”: An Interview with Claudia Durastanti — Cristina Politano

Claudia Durastanti is a Rome-based author whose recently-published novel, MissItalia, tells the story of the Italian South in three parts. Part One tells the lives of brigantesse, the female brigands who lived outside the law during the years of Italian Unification; Part Two targets the lives of Southern Italians during the post-war Boom Era; Part Three narrates a lunar colony where migrants from the South attempt to eke out an existence amid scarcity of resources and inequalities that mirror those on Earth. I sat down with her to discuss the unique challenges of historical-fiction writing, the enduring ways in which Southern Italy is mythologized in the Anglosphere, and the ways in which collective memory must be renegotiated in order to imagine a different future that transcends the injustices of the past.

Claudia Durastanti is the author of five novels. She has translated Elizabeth Hardwick, Joshua Cohen, and Donna Haraway into Italian and writes for several literary supplements. Strangers I Know (Premio Strega Off in 2019, Pen Translates Award) has been translated into 21 languages. Missitalia (La Nave di Teseo, Premio Mondello 2024) will be published by Fitzcarraldo in the UK and Summit in the US. She currently lives in Rome and curates the feminist imprint La Tartaruga. Twitter: @CDurastanti

Cristina Politano is a writer from New Jersey. Her essays and fiction appear in Return.Life, The Dodge, La Piccioletta Barca, The Dodge, and on her Substack. Twitter: @monalisavitti

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ECCE HOMO / ECCE FEMINA — Ryan Ruby [01/03/21]

“As his mother, who transmitted to him the gift of song, he had accomplished what no other mortal had or could: the journey to the underworld …”

Ryan Ruby is the author of The Zero and the One: A Novel (Twelve, 2017) and Context Collapse, out soon from 7 Stories Press. ‘Ecce Homo / Ecce Femina’ is an taken from his prose project Into the Middle of Things, for which he received an Einstein Fellowship from the Einstein Forum in Potsdam in 2019. He lives in Berlin. Twitter: @_ryanruby_

Ryan will be appearing at minor [i]ncident …

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Coming in October …

Nicole Caligaris on Gabrielle Wittkop, non-fiction from Bradley David and Micaela Brinsley, experimental work from Daniel Beauregard, an extract from Michael McAloran’s latest book with Erratum Press, fiction from Corina Bardoff, an interview with Eric Williams, as well as some of his weird fiction for Halloween, and much more …