Issue 16 submissions now open
For issue 15 we asked submitting authors and poets to include proof they had recently supported a literary magazine. The outcome was more wonderful than we had any right to expect: an engaged bunch of writers sending in some of the strongest writing we’ve ever received.
As editor, I was torn about doing the same thing again. On the one hand we don’t want to put arbitrary barriers in-between potential contributors and the magazine, but on the other it did make the process fun again; the response from writers and others was heartening, it was great to see the magazines people are reading, and we received hardly any scattershot submissions, which made the job of reading more enjoyable for our team.
And so for issue 16, alongside submissions of short stories and poetry, we are also asking for a photo of a literary magazine (any literary magazine) bought recently. Here’s some inspiration from last time.
There’s an FAQ from the issue 15 call here. Do let us know if you have any other questions or comments, as we’re still figuring this out too, and head here to send us in your work. Our deadline this time is April 5th.
— Euan
Review: ‘Salinger’s Letters’ by Nils Schou
There has been a glut of recent books – I am thinking of Karl Ove Knausgaard’s My Struggle, or Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan series, or Ben Lerner’s 10:04 – that dramatise the process of writing. Salinger’s Letters, the new novel by the Danish writer Nils Schou, does almost the opposite: it is a kind of anti-metafiction that actively doesn’t dramatise the process of writing. The protagonist, Dan, is himself a professional writer, but he constantly avoids discussing his own work, even though his involvement with a writers’ collective called the Factory is an important part of the novel’s plot. We only really learn two things about his writing: first that ‘I write about depression as little as possible’ and second that he likes to include his fellow writers in his novels ‘as secondary characters, disguised of course and under different names.’ If these things are true, they do not apply to Salinger’s Letters, which is largely about depression, and, rather than disguising the identity of real people ‘under different names’, features cameos from a whole range of very famous people – Elvis Presley, Marilyn Monroe, Andy Warhol, Woody Allen, and of course J.D. Salinger – as well as from a range of people who are apparently famous in Denmark like Lise Ringheim and Henning Moritzen. (I googled them to check: they are real people, Danish actors, both dead now.) So if Dan is trying to reflect meta-fictively on his writing process, he is not doing it very perceptively.
In the novel writing is not a creative process; rather, it is a process of relatively simple reproduction. Dan becomes a writer by mistake: he tells the story of his depression one evening at a party, and is lucky enough to be recorded, transcribed and sold to agents by an astoundingly efficient young girl named Puk, who happens to overhear him. She then invites him to join the Factory with two other writers; together they churn out all kinds of copy with various ease, and are met with an easy, fabulous success: ‘No one can touch [their colleague Boris] when it comes to media coverage, rave reviews, literary prizes, early membership of the Danish Academy, etc.’ That is, no one except Puk, who is also all of these things (somehow the possibility of Puk and Boris both being the most successful literary geniuses in Denmark at once is upheld). Despite their genius, ‘Basically all four of us were producers of fiction.’ The next page, we read the same thing: ‘The Factory’s core product was fiction.’ The point seems to be that the writers have genius and are derivative. The writing itself is in some way incidental. As if the Andy Warhol comparisons had not been made clear enough, the author reminds us that, ‘Puk was Andy Warhol, a machine pumping out literary products in the assembly line.’ And again: ‘Warhol knew that our Factory in Gothersgade had been modeled on his own Factory in New York.’
Warhol is just one of a line of famous people in the book who act as literary or artistic models. Dan has a brilliant idea, for example: ‘I stole it from Nora as soon as I heard it, who had stolen it from Bergson, who had probably stolen it from someone else.’ Production is a process of imitation; being a producer is much the same as being a fan. The novel portrays chains of influence that stretch indefinitely into the past, the most important of which is headed by Salinger, Dan’s own model. Dan and Salinger strike up a correspondence over their shared interest in Kierkegaard and depression. They do so as a continuation of Salinger’s correspondence on the same subject with Dan’s mentor Schroder. We are told that ‘depression was the leitmotif of their correspondence’, and, on the next page, that ‘Kierkegaard was depressed. He called it melancholy. Depression is a leitmotif in all his writing.’ This repetition of the word ‘leitmotif’ is important: it represents an almost genetic process of inheritance and imitation. The core of Salinger’s writing is depression, which he borrowed from Kierkegaard; the core of Kierkegaard’s writing is depression too, and so on. Kierkegaard is himself described as a super-fan, desperate to imitate someone else: ‘who was a greater fan than Kierkegaard? He wallowed in names […] He sat at Hegel’s feet in Berlin, he dreamt of knowing everyone who was anyone in Copenhagen and was beside himself with rage when he wasn’t invited to the right parties.’
We are offered this characterisation of Kierkegaard as Hegel fanboy when Dan meets Salinger for the first time; this is how Salinger describes his own hero. Dan seems to agree; he is thinking similar things about Salinger himself. Soon after, however, it is revealed that this Salinger, the one with whom Dan has just spoken, was an imposter, a phony actor hired by unscrupulous collectors to trick Dan out of the precious Salinger letters. The whole revelation is curiously underplayed: ‘When they realised I wasn’t going to sell the letters they had resorted to Plan B: The person I had interviewed was a fake. He wasn’t Salinger but a Salinger lookalike, an out of work actor who had presented himself as Salinger. The most sensible thing for me to do was to return to Denmark and keep very quiet.’ Which is basically what happens, although Dan’s wife reveals that she has pulled a similar trick and switched out the real letters for some copies. (She is essentially forgotten by the novel afterwards.) The message seems to be that the difference between this Salinger imitation and the ‘real’ Salinger is slight, at best. The process is later repeated with Puk, Dan’s colleague and patron: ‘The question was actually implied in the answer. There was no discrepancy between the Puk one met and the Puk behind the façade. There is no real Puk.’ Imitation, duplication, repetition: these are all easy, effortless almost, for Puk, for Dan, for Salinger and for the Salinger actor, and, by extension, for everyone else involved in creative production.
The process of repetition is performed throughout the novel by Schou’s habit of repeating himself several times in quick succession. For example, over the course of the two pages of a meet-cute scene with Dan and his future wife, she reminds him how annoying he is: ‘“You sound just as annoying as you look.”’ (60) ‘“God, you’re annoying. Are you always wagging your finger at somebody?”’ (60) ‘“Are you always so annoying in that particular infuriating way?”’ (61). Or Dan recalls his introduction to Amanda, a personification of his depression, who talks to him sometimes, and, near the end of the novel, tries to seduce him: ‘one night on an acid trip the depression had become a person, a woman, Amanda. That conversation completely changed the course of my life.’ And on the next page: ‘I later concluded that chance encounter was the turning point of my life’. Such repetition is one of those mimetic stylistic traits that comes desperately close to artistic failure, like writing a boring novel about being bored. Indeed, it is only with good faith that what could be seen as sloppy writing can be seen as deliberately sloppy writing with an aesthetic point. Salinger’s Letters earns this good faith by mining the leitmotif of repetition so deeply and in so many different contexts, but it does not make every specific incidence of deliberately repetitive prose any more pleasant to read.
Given that Schou has written a novel about depression, it is of course entirely possible that being pleasant is not his primary aim. While all this repetition and imitation may seem like a kind of stasis, a postmodern prison, Dan in facts perceives it as a kind of escape. His advice to those suffering from depression is to ‘Make it concrete, give it names, faces. Depression isn’t just depression. Visualize it. A depression is always people, faces.’ Dan creates Amanda as a coping mechanism, but the implication of the novel seems to be that he creates everyone else too. In this sense fiction is a way out, a way of making sense of depression, of confining and containing it. But it is ultimately futile: Puk writes (significantly) an article about fandom that Dan perceives to be aimed at himself: ‘Puk’s point was that idol worship is a kind of suicide in disguise. Instead of physically killing yourself you get rid of yourself by moving entirely into someone else’s universe.’ Writing itself is a kind of fandom, or prostrate imitation, or self-abnegating repetition. In that sense it is a logical thing for a depressed person to do, a joyless factory-produced suicide. Like Knausgaard’s My Struggle, Schou’s Salinger’s Letters ends with another kind of suicide: the writer ends his literary life, renounces creation, and embraces whatever is left. The novel ends with the Factory closing and the four colleagues, now for the first time friends, entering a life of emotional sympathy. It is a suicide caused not by exhaustion (as in Knausgaard) but by optimism. The result is warmth and emotional connection. Nils Schou, though, continues to write. The novel reaffirms itself as anti-metafictive: it offers a metafictive commentary on writing that it completely ignores.
—Tim
Tim Kennett is a writer who lives in London. Follow him on Twitter here.
Salinger’s Letters was published in November 2015 by Sandstone Press.
Editor updates
Keir Pratt and Matthew Landrum—Structo‘s fiction editor and poetry editor respectively—have had a busy month, and not just only with putting the finishing touches to the new issue.
This from Matthew:
I’m 26 days into Tupelo Press’ 30/30 challenge—writing a poem a day during the month of February. There’s an element of pressure to this challenge that’s stimulating. Good or bad, my new poem goes up on the blog every day. It’s wonderful and hard and sometimes terrifying.
This is my second time undertaking the challenge and it’s changed my writing. I’ve learned to rely less on inspiration and more on dogged determination. I’ve learned to commit to an idea and see it through and also to give up the idea and follow where the poem is leading. Most of all, I’ve learned to describe the real world—a month with internal drama and abstraction (what I’m naturally tempted to write on) would be hellish. I’ve written about animal death, the Chilean desert, a ferry ride, and chopping vegetables. Through this, all the things swirling inside my head, temptations and writing tendencies, have percolated through, coming out in a more manageable way.
And it’s all in support of a great cause. Through my writing, I’m raising money and awareness for a great non-profit press committed to bringing the best of diverse world literature to a wider audience. Their catalogue speaks for itself. I highly recommend Another English: Anglophone Poems from Around the World. Follow the last leg of my journey at the 30/30 blog. If you’re a writer, consider trying the challenge yourself. Now—to write today’s poem.
And this from Keir:
Last year, Structo was lucky enough to be nominated for a Stack Award in the category of Best Original Fiction. As well as hob-nobbing with other literary and magazine types, we were lucky enough to meet Amii Griffiths, radio producer and presenter extraordinaire. After using the free bar to get her well-lubricated, she foolishly agreed to allow me on her show. You can listen to the two of us, together with co-host Danny McLoughlin, discussing the latest issue, the world of literary magazines and those all-important rejection letters here. And if you get the chance, The After Afternoon show between 3pm and 6pm is available daily on Sino Radio. Be sure not to miss Literary Friday!
Introducing Structo 15
Structo issue 15 features 11 short stories, 17 poems, a feature essay and set of interviews about book cover design, and a wide-ranging interview with the ex-poet laureate of North Korea Jang Jin-sung.
This is a special one. The short stories and poems in this issue are among the best we’ve ever published, partially the result of a call for submissions which brought in a very engaged set of contributors (nine of whom came along to read at our Oxford launch at the weekend).
You can order your copy here. I hope you enjoy it as much as we do.
— Euan
Review: ‘Farabeuf, or The Chronicle of an Instant’ by Salvador Elizondo, translated by John Incledon
The New French Extremity bludgeoned cinema audiences of the late 1990s to mid 2000s with a new twist on the horror genre that had to be seen to be believed. Only once, though, because who could rewatch Irréversible (2002), knowing what ordeal is in store for the two lovers? Or Martyrs (2008), where young women are tortured by a cult to induce a ‘transfiguration’ that may grant them a glimpse of life after death. The cult leader even tries to convince one victim she is being tortured for good reason by showing her photographs of women who have died having achieved this look of transcendence. These films’ unflinching gaze and attempts to find meaning in appalling suffering, or to understand why people do such things, is why I think these films were so controversial, and are still so powerful.
This obsession with the moment of death and with interpreting senseless horror is at the heart of Farabeuf, a disorientating début novel first published in Spanish in 1965. The plot, as far as you could describe this hall of mirrors as having one, centres around a horrific photograph of a public execution, thought to have been taken during the Peking Boxer Rebellion at the turn of the twentieth century. The introduction tells us that Elizondo considered the image ‘a type of zahir, referring to a short story of the same name by Jorge Luis Borges in which the narrator finds himself obsessed by an object (a coin) for no apparent reason’. This image provides the focal point in the reader’s non-chronological, non-linear orbit around the novel’s three main tableau. The first is set in Peking, 1901. Farabeuf, a physician to the French delegation, attends an execution with a young nurse. In one photograph he takes that day, the doctor seems to capture the instant of the victim’s death. Later on, back in Paris, the doctor climbs a creaky staircase while the nurse, in the hallway, tries to divine the future with a Ouija board. Another time, the doctor and nurse walk by the seaside when she spots a starfish. The nurse picks up the creature but is quickly repulsed by it and throws it into the sea.
By now you should have a pretty good sense of whether this book is for you. Farabeuf is highly experimental and unapologetically demanding. The story is fractured, disordered and complex; a puzzle for the reader to decipher. The hard shifts in perspective, character, location and time also keep you at a calculated distance from the work. You’re never allowed to forget you are reading a text:
You have asked a question: “Is it possible that we are a lie?” you say. […] You might, for example, be the characters in a literary work of the fantastic genre who have suddenly gained autonomous life. […] Perhaps we are a film, a film that lasts barely an instant. Or the image of others, not ourselves, in a mirror. Perhaps we are the thoughts of a madman. Perhaps one of us is real and the others, his hallucination. There is still another possibility. Perhaps we are a printing error that has inadvertently slipped by, that makes an otherwise clear text confusing.
For fans of Pound, Joyce or Cortázar—authors Elizondo is often compared to—Farabeuf is a rich, playful and thought-provoking work. John Incledon’s translation work should be highly commended here. Not only for helping bring such an interesting work into English, but producing a text that never loses its fiendish complexity or provocative voice. The novel itself ranges across letters, detective-style cross-examinations, playful streams of consciousness and taunting monologues by the elusive narrator:
Try to remember everything, right from the beginning. The slightest detail might be of critical importance. The most insignificant clue may help us discover an essential fact. It is vital that you take a detailed, exhaustive inventory of all the things, all the feelings, all the emotions that collectively shape what perhaps is a dream.
However, the narrator’s ironic tone conceals a serious appeal to the reader. The concerns of the novel are closely aligned with those of the French nouveau roman of the 1950s and 1960s, namely a heartfelt challenge to the conventions of literary realism. Alain Robbe-Grillet, a key nouveau roman author, wrote that
The author today proclaims his absolute need of the reader’s cooperation, an active, conscious, creative assistance. What he asks of him is no longer to receive ready-made a world completed, full, closed upon itself, but on the contrary, to participate in a creation, to invent in his turn the work—and the world—and thus to learn to invent his own life.
As Farabeuf assaults us with its mind-bending tale of body horror, bizarre sex and torture, it is also trying to teach us a new way to read, and to interpret experience.
It’s hard to say I enjoyed reading Farabeuf. In much the same way that it’s hard to say I enjoyed watching those relentless French films. Both types of experience were scalding; there is the ferocious instant of the burn itself, and then there is the quiet but needling discomfort that lasts for days.
— Dan
Dan Bradley is a writer and translator from Japanese. His work has appeared in Granta, New Welsh Review and the TLS. He lives in London.
Farabeuf, or The Chronicle of an Instant was published in March 2015 by Ox and Pigeon
The 2016 psalm translation contest
Lent is upon us once more, and with it another Structo psalm translation contest. The basics of this are as follows: take a biblical psalm and reinvent it in English. We want the material through your eyes, any way you see fit. You needn’t know any original languages and you certainly don’t need to have religious leanings.
Past submissions have been great—you can read some of them in issues 12 (‘A Song of Loves’ by Christina Seymour, ‘The Lighthouse Keeper to His Daughter’ by Roisín O’Donnell and ‘Don’t Ask Me to Sing’ by Shawna Rodenberg) and 14 (‘A Psalm of Waiting’ by Aide Smith, ‘Trouble Woman’ by Cristina J. Baptista and ‘Redux’ by Pablo Otavalo.
The winner of this year’s contest will receive US$150 and a two-year subscription to Structo. All entries will be considered for publication in Structo issue 16. Submissions are open from Ash Wednesday (February 10th) to Easter Sunday (March 27th).
More details, and the link to send in your poems, here.
Issue 15 launch in Oxford
As we’re in the final stages of putting together issue 15, our thoughts are beginning to turn to the launch, which is happening at The Albion Beatnik bookshop in Oxford on February 20th at 6pm.
The photo above summarises the reasons why we have our winter launches at The Albion Beatnik. It’s a wonderfully cozy place to be on a winter’s evening. But on top of the cake and wine and books and good company, you can expect some short readings of fiction and poetry from issue 15 contributors Claire Booker, Jude Cook, Stephen Durkan, Claire Dyer, Paula Hunter, Stephen Hargadon, Dan Micklethwaite and Barbara Renel.
All are welcome, and as ever the launch is free to attend. Well, we say free, but if you’re anything like us, you won’t leave without accidentally buying a book or two.
More details: Facebook event page / Albion Beatnik homepage
More on apps and indie bookshops
We’re always interested when people find innovative ways to link readers to independent bookshops. Hive, an Amazon-like website for indie bookshops, is a favourite, and the recent Ooovre crowdfunding project showed what might be possible if the tech world and booksellers work together.
Continuing that train of thought, here’s an interview with Nick Brackenbury, one of the co-founders of NearSt, an app with the aim of “helping you find books nearby”.
What’s the basic idea behind NearSt?
NearSt is all about getting people back into their local shops, starting with bookshops.
We’ve built an app that lets you search for a book you want, see which shop has it on their shelves nearby in real time, and reserve it for collection in-store in just a few taps.
We believe that shopping locally should be even easier than shopping online, and our app makes that a reality. We’re starting with bookshops, before moving into lots of other product types early in 2016.
Any timeline for the Android release of the app?
We’ll be releasing a web version of NearSt that will work on Android, Desktop, as well as iPhone in early 2016 followed by a native Android app in the summer.
Why did you found the company?
We’re a team of three co-founders, and saw that local shops had so much to offer our high streets and communities, but were being badly hurt by the rise of online shopping.
When you have a choice between getting something you want in just a few clicks, or hunting through directories of local businesses and ringing them up one by one to find out who has what you want, it’s no surprise that most people go for the path of least resistance.
We founded NearSt because we saw an opportunity to make it even easier to shop locally than it is to shop online, and in turn help play a role in making our high streets great again.
After all, who wants to wait and worry about those annoying missed delivery slips and packages getting lost in the office internal-post, when there’s a shop just across the road or on your commute home that has exactly what you want…?
Devil’s advocate: why should independent bookshops survive?
First of all, because we love bookshops. However, there is also a deeper reason why these shops should survive. Bookshops are the heart of the high street and a cornerstone of a local community. If bookshops disappear it would be devastating for local areas. However, if you keep them strong, healthy and use technology to answer the rapidly changing demands of the growing number of digital shoppers, we believe not just the bookshops, but whole communities can thrive.
Do you guys come from a publishing background?
We don’t come from a publishing background, so when we began this project we decided to embark on a tour of bookshops. We spent 8 weeks biking and walking to over 120 bookshops across London, and were both surprised and inspired by the stores we visited. Instead of seeing a downbeat industry defeated by online selling (as is often reported, from all of the bookshop closings over the past few years), we saw confident booksellers who were proud and confident of what they had to offer, innovating in their shops to offer something they know online simply can’t.
This tour and our learnings from the booksellers we met on it were fundamental in shaping NearSt into the platform it is today.
What’s next for NearSt?
We’re focussed on creating the best possible experience for buying books locally over the next few months in London. We’ll soon be adding several more product categories to the app, along with payment and 60-minute delivery within London later in 2016. Our ultimate ambition is to then take this to cities all around the world. We really believe shopping locally should be even easier than buying online, and this is what drives us on our mission to get people back into their local shops. Watch this space!
–
Find out more about NearSt at their website, Facebook or Twitter.
Review: Oslo, Norway by John Holten
The novel charts the relationship of a young couple in Oslo as the two come, by separate paths, to the end of their time together. In the course of the story William and Sybille are jostled against the machinations of a collection of drug dealers, sirens and extended family. Around this core Holten weaves a meta-fictional thread that draws on Norse mythologies of destruction and rebirth, a theme mirrored in the actions of the couple themselves. This thread begins to take charge of the narrative as the story goes on, and culminates in a brave representation of writers block and the authorial process.
This is what we need to talk about if we want to look at the course love takes: even the strongest love has to combine opposites and take on something approaching a contingent attitude and unite what in one lover is nothingness, a sort of inherent nihilism, but which afore the other is life itself, the world they call their own and which they share with the other. They must become the guide to a territory marked out on a shared map.
The particular curiosity, and part of the success, of the book lies in the formal decisions taken by Holten; the most successful of these being his use of pronouns as a kind of textual ‘key’ (in the geographical sense) by which readers can unlock this literary atlas. Beautifully produced, the book was spurred by his intention that it be reflective of the digressive way we interact with the written word today, whether on screen or paper. Oslo is broken into four sections, each named for a cartographic concept (Contour, Hachure, Neatline and Legend), which are further separated into thirteen chapters, the titles for the most of which are rooted in real-world Oslo locations. In this way the novel becomes a very literal atlas of the city, each section is initialled with plain line-art illustrations of streets drawn by Holten himself, through which the reader navigates the city’s volatile geography.
Maps, like novels, are no longer the same. Nor should they be. Trying to make a novel that is also a guidebook or street atlas becomes a somewhat eccentric undertaking, if not a little absurd.
Much like an atlas, however, one can progress through the landscape of the novel in a number of ways. In an interview with Alison Hugill on the website of the Berlin Art Link magazine, Holten said: “… you don’t necessarily turn the next page in contiguity with the one you’re on, but rather you jump around a bit. This was visually very interesting. In so many words, the narrative element of the book can be experienced in any order, highlighting the intransigence of cartography and the discrepancy between any map and the territory it represents.”
In a sense Oslo is a city of convergence – the streets run down from the hills surrounding it and all channel themselves into an area downtown by the low entrance to the sea, as if somehow the old fort had slowly released advancing tentacles.
Oslo, Norway, the second in Holten’s Ragnarok trilogy that began with the widely acclaimed The Readymades, cleverly gathers romance, cartography and Nordic myth in a meta-fictional retelling or interpretation of the streets of the eponymous capital. A self-aware tale of love and the fictions that are told in the process of it, the novel will be enjoyed by readers of Bolaño, Cortázar and Calvino and should be attempted by others.
— Phil
Phil Clement studied English and Creative Writing in Aberystwyth. Since he left there he has lived in a library, written short stories, and reviewed books. Currently he works as an assistant editor at Amberley Publishing. Follow Phil here.
Oslo Norway was published in April 2015 by Broken Dimanche Press.
Issue 14 now online
It’s been a few months since the print edition of issue 14 was released, and so as usual we have now released it online to read for free over at Issuu.
In case you missed the scoop on launch, this latest issue features 14 short stories, 14 poems, and two interviews—with authors David Gaffney and Ursula K. Le Guin. It’s a monster of an issue at 138 pages, and we were delighted when it was shortlisted for a Stack Award for Best Original Fiction. You can find more details, as well as bonus material from the authors at the issue page.
We are marking the occasion by putting the final box of physical magazines on sale at 40% off, so if you want one of the last 25, now’s the time! Just enter the code ’14at40′ at checkout or use this direct link.
But really, the most valuable thing you can do is tell a friend about Structo, as magazines like ours thrive by word of mouth. Share and enjoy!
Posts pre-April 2014 are here.