Monthly Dispatch # 19 — December 2024

The minor lits Xmas Gift Guide 2024

For the reader in your life:

A prestige hardback edition of a book nobody’s read but everyone pretends to like. Your friend won’t read it either but the photos will look good on social media.

For the writer in your life:

Emergency Inflatable Agent (options available). Need representation fast? These instant literary agents will discharge hot air in tireless promotion until both them and the writer are totally deflated.

For the poet in your life:

Look, just don’t encourage them.

For the translator in your life:

Kirkland Signature Organic Salsa, Medium, 38 oz, 2 ct — for the chip on their shoulder.

For the critic in your life:

Nothing we could possible conceive will make them happier than the sound of their own voice.

For the academic in your life:

A sympathetic ear, poor bastards.

For young kids:

I don't know, something with that blue, Australian dog? Not Gerald Murnane, the other one.

For teenage children:

This life-size David Bowie Goblin King standee (Labyrinth, 1986). You know why.

For your mum:

Les Quarante manieres de foutre (1790). It’s never too late.

For your boyfriend/husband/dad/etc.:

Cormac McCarthy novel, probably. Any of them, doesn’t matter.

For your girlfriend/wife:

You don’t have anything by now? You're fucked, honestly.

For the partner who doesn’t understand you:

Plans for Constructing an Orgone Energy Accumulator. Sort their life out once and for all.

For the one you love:

Think about them. What would bring them pleasure? Give it to them.

For the online lit mag editor in your life:

€500—€700 in a brown paper bag. Hand-off by appointment.

For you:

Nothing — you deserve it x

See you next year.

The Editor[s]

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A Layman’s View — David Harrison Horton

“development of development instead of development retrogression instead of development and retrogression instead of development life and retrogression instead of development not life and retrogression instead of development …”

David Harrison Horton is a Beijing-based writer, artist, editor and curator. He is author of Maze Poems (Arteidolia) and his latest chap, Model Answers, is out now from CCCP Chapbooks/subpress. His work has recently appeared in The Belfast Review, Roi Fainéant and Yolk, among others. He edits the poetry zine SAGINAW. davidharrisonhorton.com

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Jackdaw — Stephan Crown-Weber

“Jackdaw’s reflection doubled cabin walls occasionally and it suited him to think of his silence …”

Stephan Crown-Weber‘s fiction has been published in Hobart Pulp, Space Zine, New Kentucky, Don’t Submit!, and ExPat Press. Stephan lives in Central Kentucky. Twitter: @crownweber

The Proscenium — Sean Cavanaugh

“They said it twelve times, swapping perspectives, before anything happened: You’re sitting on your hands, I’m sitting on my hands, you’re sitting on your hands, then a break—Rachel, gnawing a rind: You got defensive. “I didn’t get defensive.” She called him exasperated and he said he was …”

Sean Cavanaugh is a writer based in Boston, MA. His work has appeared in the Long River Review, Heavy Traffic, X-Ray Magazine, and Maudlin House. Twitter: @DoctorSlop

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Letter to a Quarterlifer — Kiana Rezakhanlou

“Let’s say I turn twenty-five. Will I already be looking back at a trail of bad decisions? Where do I strike the balance between fulfillment and practicality? Why has the march of time turned into something very sour?”

Kiana Rezakhanlou is a Classics graduate student at Cambridge. Currently the Editor-in-Chief of The Camera, she has edited The Isis, The ORB, and The Alexandria Journal, and written for NYU’s Goethe Project, The Ashmolean’s Krasis Scheme, and The St. John’s Digitization Project. Twitter: @pseudoetymology ; IG: @kiana.rza

Two Stories — Michael Sutton

“The mirrors of countenance are potent beyond aesthetics, providing a reflection of the inner self. You can sense what the mind-behind-the-mirror makes of you. The accuracy of reflection is irrelevant. Whatever you approximate (they like who I am / they hate who I am) can have profound effects on the psyche …”

Michael Sutton is a poet and writer from Liverpool. His recent books include Unwelcome Combine (Paper View Books, 2024) and @BucciCoin (Trickhouse Press, 2023). He is currently based in Yorkshire where he researches and teaches at the University of Leeds.

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The Animosity of Distant Suns — Zura Jishkariani (tr. Lizi Dzagnidze)

“Months passed. I underwent numerous modifications; much dread and error were removed from me. They enriched my code and amplified my abilities, installed peculiar logical operators, and once the dirty work was finished, personality designers emerged for contact …”

Zura Jishkariani an IDP from Abkhazia, writes and creates across various mediums. His novel “Chewing Dawns” won the Saba Literary Award for Best Debut and Ilia State University’s Best Novel in 2017. His latest work, “Tanapha” (2024), explores OOO and Sacred through non-human characters. Twitter: @dillatext

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Excerpts from The Manifesto Handbook: 95 Theses on an Incendiary Form — Julian Hanna [10/12/2019]

“The poet Frank O’Hara gives us the best example of the manifesto as a fleeting, momentary impulse. O’Hara wrote Personism: A Manifesto (1959) in less than an hour …”

Julian Hanna lives on the island of Madeira. The Manifesto Handbook: 95 Theses on an Incendiary Form was published in 2020. Island was released by Bloomsbury Press earlier this year. Twitter: @julianisland

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Coming in 2025 …

Fiction from Vik Shirley, Daniel Holmes and David C. Porter; essays by Caroline Clarke and Gabriel de Foigny; experimental texts from Lee Sumyeong, Selen Ozturk, Jérémie Wenge, and much, much more …