Spring 2014
Edited by Bradford Morrow
Few subjects are as rich, complex, and profound as exile. This is especially true if one allows its definition to venture beyond the political, religious, or cultural, so that it embraces the deeply personal, psychological, and emotional terrains in which individuals inhabit a place of self-exile, or even exile from sanity and surety.
From Africa to China, Pakistan to the Philippines, to locales that are not to be found on any map, this issue interrogates exile as both a literal expulsion or ostracism and, as Primo Levi has it, “the prevalence of the unreal over the real.”
The following is the listed contents for the Exile issue of Conjunctions:
- H. G. Carrillo, Splaining Yourself
- Aleš Šteger, Three Berlin Essays, translated by Brian Henry
- Christie Hodgen, Customer Reviews
- Peter Straub, The Collected Short Stories of Freddie Prothero
- Laura van den Berg, Havana
- Lance Olsen, Dreamlives of Debris
- John Parras, Song of Magsaysay
- Marjorie Welish, Folding Cythera
- Paul West, Omobo
- Charles Baudelaire, Poor Belgium: The Argument, translated by Richard Sieburth
- Maxine Chernoff, Five Poems
- Brian Evenson, Cult
- Robin Hemley, Celebrating Russian Federation Day with Immanuel Kant
- Edie Meidav, Dog’s Journey
- Stephen O’Connor, The Zip
- Gillian Conoley, Preparing One’s Consciousness for the Avatar
- Can Xue, Coal, translated by Annelise Finegan Wasmoen
- Martin Riker, Samuel Johnson’s Eternal Return
- Wil Weitzel, The Gujjar at the River
- Matthew Pitt, A Damn Sight
- Arthur Sze, Water Calligraphy
- Gabriel Blackwell, The Invention of an Island
- Robyn Carter, Aftershock
Right now I have a life-threatening alligator on the lawn behind my back porch but I also have a new issue of Conjunctions so I am in a hurry to get out on my lanai and flip through the pages. If you don’t subscribe to and read Conjunctions, why not?
A Celebration of Reading 
I don’t think I’ll be subscribing….I have trouble finishing one copy of The London Review of Books before the next one arrives. But I love the installation on the cover and I’ve learned a new word – so thanks again.
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I know just what you mean. Every few years I decide I need to be more professional about my reading and I dutifully subscribe to the New York Review of Books (quite similar to the London Times review which I have occasionally sampled). The first few issues are exciting and, skipping a few articles on Australian politics or books about water management in the Sudan, I would read all the literary articles to the bitter end. Then a few weeks of only reading the first parts of articles being too uninterested to flip through the pages for the continuation text; then mostly just scanning the headlines and titles and only reading those articles that popped out to me; then checking the index for anything that interests me; then putting the paper in a pile with the honest intention of getting to read it in a few days; then throwing away the pile that has fallen over and spread out on the floor and canceling my subscription. Why do we feel such relief when we free ourselves of the reading obligation when in fact we are just admitting failure?
I have all my literary journals (Conjunctions, Poetry, Story, Tin House, Granta, etc.) shelved in my bedroom alongside my bed. Since the journals generally only present short works or excerpts, they are ideal bedtime reading.
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