CONGRATS to Clancy McGilligan, winner of the 2019 Novella Prize! His book, HISTORY OF AN EXECUTIONER, was chosen by Daisy Hernández.
Thanks to everyone who submitted manuscripts (nearly 180 this year) and all of the CW students, faculty, and friends of the press who were our first readers!
The winner of the 2018 Novella Prize, selected
by final judge TaraShea Nesbit,Temper CA is our 13th novella, joining
ranks w/ Garth Greenwell’s
Mitko, Patricia Grace King’s Day of All Saints, Tote Hughes’ Fountain
and many others.
About Temper CA
Joy Temper grew up wandering the woods of Temper, CA, a Gold Rush town her family helped establish in the 1840s. Upon returning to her childhood home for her grandfather’s funeral, she discovers that the stories she's long traded on about her hippie upbringing have little to do with reality. Her struggles to face who she once was, and what she now desires, force her to confront family secrets and long-suppressed memories in a novella both familial and romantic, contemporary and historical.
"Paul Skenazy's fiction misbehaves. It swerves, it revisits ground and digs deeper, it confounds expectations. He has the gift of creating characters who are sympathetic not in spite of their prickliness but because of it, and of depicting human bonds that are all the tenser for being so strong."
—Jonathan Franzen, author of Freedom and Purity
NEW POETRY
"Scorpio comes on fast, like a speeding star sent out from a galaxy that is both very far away and deeply here on earth, close with real things. In these poems, Bohinc relentlessly describes in pulsing and various tones a reality where loneliness is impossible and the mistakes of our age can be corrected with an instinctual elixir, where the pressures of society can be alleviated with a sweet internal and holy rage. This book is the essence of poetry: it’s necessary, everchanging, and ferocious." ––Dorothea Lasky
“'Because I go to so many / bullshit meetings all day long,' writes Katy Bohinc, 'I want / a literary song.' This is a book of love songs and songs of despair. It takes place in bad times like these. True to the title, many of Scorpio's best poems are also its scariest." ––Ariana Reines
NEW POETRY IN TRANSLATION
Forthcoming September 3, 2019
Odious Horizons: Some Versions of Horace
by Martin Corless-Smith
Odious Horizons ransacks and revives Horace for our contemporary world. Part translations, part re-visionings, these radical (yet often formal) lyrics offer the stoical, joyful praise for a simple life away from the insidious and toxic world of political power and material obsession. What was Roman is now American and British, and the terrifying horizonsthat were clear to Horace, the end game of greed, the downfall of the Republic, is here even more alarming as we see rivers rise and hear the drums of civil war once more.
"Odious Horizons fast-forwards Horace’s Odes, written in 23 BC, into percussive poems of today. As Horace addressed the Tiber, Maecenas or the grass of Mars, Martin Corless-Smith addresses the president, the brown Potomac, the lake of time, and Worcestershire...In luscious crossfire, with brilliant wordplay, Corless-Smith smacks down ode, the address to a particular subject meant to be sung…with masterful, acute control and unexpected ludic shifts amidst motifs of friendship, love, chronos and kairos, war and peace, and an abiding ethical insight…Odious Horizons is consummate poetry for our time." ––Norma Cole
