United States
Devan Brettkelly is a creative copywriter based in Portland, Maine. She holds an MFA in fiction from Saint Mary's College, and a B.A. in English from Scripps College. She is an editorial copywriter at Gap Online. She has interned at Zyzzyva literary journal, as well as 826 Valencia.
Devan Brettkelly All Together Now Margot and I ran up and down the hall, slipping sock-footed on the hardwood floors while Aunt Phoebe sat at the piano, playing ragtime. Mom scooped Margot up, put her down so that Margot's feet were on top of hers. They danced around like that, like they were in...
Yesterday was sunny, so I went to check out Hillcrest, because I knew Thomas Gushul photographed the Hillcrest mine disaster. Google maps took me to a random location in Hillcrest, so I drove around until I saw a sign for Hillcrest Mine Disaster Memorial.
In her novel Angel of Oblivion (289 page; Archipelago Books), Maja Haderlap depicts a dilapidated, Slovenian-speaking valley in Austria following World War II. During the war, the Nazis identified this area in the south of the country as one riddled with partisans. Many were hunted down and killed, while others were taken away to the camps.
Sjon's latest novel, Moonstone: The Boy Who Never Was (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux Books, 145 pages), set in Reykjavik in 1918, is the story of sixteen-year-old Máni Steinn (a.k.a. Moonstone). The boy's guardian is "the old lady"-his grandmother's sister who took him in after his mother died when he was just six.
In Anne Raeff's story collection, The Jungle Around Us (140 pages, University of Georgia Press), nine stories span decades, covering numerous lives and multiple "jungles"; urban, Amazonian, and metaphorical, to name a few. In these "jungles," Raeff's characters face a Russian nesting-doll of isolation.
The V Formation is a novelette which explores second-person narration, complex familial relationships, and grief. It questions what standards society sets for families, parents in particular, and what happens when your kin does not conform to these standards. As you grow older, how are you limited or how do you have authority in creating your family?
Marcy Dermansky's newest novel, The Red Car (206 pages, Liveright/Norton), moves much like the car it features: fast and unpredictable. It covers three stages and sixteen years of narrator Leah Kaplan's life, beginning with her as a college freshman, then leading to her bumbling entry into adulthood, and finishing with her early thirties, when she's a writer living in Queens with a possessive husband whom she does not love.