It’s coming soon: Conjunctions 65, Sleights of Hand: The Deception Issue.
Here is what Bradford Morrow, the editor of Conjunctions, has to say about this issue:
People of every age and stripe dissimulate, bluff, and beguile, whether in order to harm or protect. The writer, the artist, the magician, the thief—deceivers all. Animals, too, are masters of deceit. Even the orchid employs a wonderfully varied arsenal of pollinator deceptions, luring bees and wasps with a false promise of nourishment or sex. And consider Marina Tsvetaeva, who appropriated from Pushkin the observation that “a deception that elevates us is dearer than a legion of low truths,” thus complicating the subject entirely. This special issue of Conjunctions gathers a wide spectrum of essays, fiction, and poetry on the classic subject of deception, exploring a world in which truth is a most fragile, elaborate, and mercurial thing.
Look at all the good stuff in just this one issue:
- James Morrow, Tactics of the Wraith
- Laura van den Berg, Aftermath
- Bin Ramke, Five Poems
- Porochista Khakpour, Something with Everything
- Rae Armantrout, Six Poems
- Gabriel Blackwell, La tortue or The Tortoise
- Susan Daitch, Piracy, Chemistry, and Mappa Mundi
- Can Xue, Story of the Slums, translated by Karen Gernant and Chen Zeping
- Michael Martin Shea, From The Immanent Field
- Joyce Carol Oates, Walking Wounded
- Arielle Greenberg, Seven Pieces on Deception, the Whore, and Anderson, IN
- Margaret Fisher, A Monologue Addressed to the Madame’s Cicisbeo
- Edie Meidav, Romance, or, Blind in Granada
- Eleni Sikelianos, Six Poems
- Gwyneth Merner, Wounded Room
- Michael Sheehan, September
- Andrew Mossin, From A Book of Spells
- Terese Svoboda, Curtain Call
- Yannick Murphy, Caesar’s Show
- Magdalena Zyzak, Zeroes
- Paul West, The Admiral
- Paul Hoover, The Likenesses
- Aurelie Sheehan, From Once into the Night
- Peter Straub and Anthony Discenza, Beyond the Veil of Vision: Reinhold von Kreitz and the Das Beben Movement
A subscription to Conjunctions is an excellent way to keep aware of the current directions of writing and literature. Try it! I have been receiving Conjunctions for years now and I notice that I often can discuss various contemporary authors with good results even though I haven’t read their most recent work: it’s because I’m familiar with their writing by reading it in Conjunctions.
A Celebration of Reading 