<div>New writings on our fear of&mdash;and fascination with&mdash;the &ldquo;other&rdquo; from Joyce Carol Oates, Peter Straub, Kelly Link, Jeffrey Ford, and more. Alien is a powerful and flexible word. Aliens are &ldquo;other.&rdquo; Aliens are the stuff of science fiction and fantasy. Aliens are traditional literary figures that cause us to see ourselves anew. Indeed, when we witness our &ldquo;normal&rdquo; lives through these strangers&rsquo; eyes, we become the unfamiliar ones. Conjunctions:67, Other Aliens collects works of speculative and literary science fiction: innovative short stories, poetry, interviews, letters, and essays that explore the vast precincts of unfamiliarity, keen difference, weirdness, and not belonging. This provocative issue includes contributions from an all-star lineup, including Leena Krohn, Jeffrey Ford, Julia Elliott, John Crowley, Laura Sims, Valerie Martin, Lavie Tidhar, Samuel R. Delany, Matthew Baker, Paul Park, James Tiptree Jr., Michael Parrish Lee, Peter Straub, Kelly Link, Madeline Bourque Kearin, Jean Muno, Jonathan Thirkield, John Clute and John Crowley, Joyce Carol Oates, S. P. Tenhoff, Brian Evenson, Jessica Reed, E. G. Willy, and James Morrow.</div>

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Other Aliens

<div>A &ldquo;striking, beautifully rendered&rdquo; novel of love gone wrong, by the author of National Book Award finalist The Bird Artist (The Washington Post Book World). Devotion is an unconventional love story that begins with the recounting of an unlikely crime. Shortly after his marriage to Maggie Field, David Kozol and his father-in-law, William, came to blows on a London sidewalk. William stumbled backward into the path of a taxi, and eleven months later he is still convalescing&mdash;and begrudgingly accepting David&rsquo;s assistance. Estranged from Maggie and desperate to get her back, David has taken over William&rsquo;s job as caretaker of a large rural estate on the Bay of Fundy in Nova Scotia. There, he tends to the main house, his father-in-law, and the resident flock of cranky, impertinent swans. The love between him and Maggie had been instantaneous and intense, and her absence is a constant reminder of how real and enduring it is. But sometimes small things lead to big damages, and strenuous effort is required for even the chance of recovery. &ldquo;Rarely has such a short novel touched on so many important truths or probed such operatic depths.&rdquo; &mdash;St. Louis Post-Dispatch &ldquo;Any novel by Howard Norman is cause for celebration. . . . He demonstrates with marveling deliberation that devotion is its own romantic adventure.&rdquo; &mdash;Lorrie Moore &ldquo;Perhaps his best novel yet.&rdquo; &mdash;The Atlanta Journal-Constitution</div>

Devotion

<div>&ldquo;Some books celebrate the human condition; others commiserate with us. This memoir does both.&rdquo; &mdash;Helen Oyeyemi, NPR This spellbinding memoir by the National Book Award&ndash;nominated author of The Bird Artist begins with a portrait, both harrowing and hilarious, of a midwestern boy&rsquo;s summer working in a bookmobile, under the shadow of his grifter father and the erotic tutelage of his brother&rsquo;s girlfriend. Howard Norman&rsquo;s life story continues in places as far-flung as the Arctic, where he spends part of a decade as a translator of Inuit tales&mdash;including the story of a soapstone carver turned into a goose whose migration-time lament is &ldquo;I hate to leave this beautiful place&rdquo;&mdash;and in his beloved Point Reyes, California, as a student of birds. Years later, Norman and his wife lend their Washington, DC, home to a poet and her young son, and a subsequent murder-suicide in the house has a profound effect on them. In this &ldquo;unexpectedly arresting&rdquo; memoir, life&rsquo;s unpredictable strangeness is fashioned into a creative and redemptive story (The New York Times Book Review). &ldquo;Norman uses the tight focus of geography to describe five unsettling periods of his life, each separated by time and subtle shifts in his narrative voice. . . . The originality of his telling here is as surprising as ever.&rdquo; &mdash;The Washington Post &ldquo;These stories almost seem like tall tales themselves, but Norman renders them with a journalistic attention to detail. Amidst these bizarre experiences, he finds solace through the places he&rsquo;s lived and their quirky inhabitants, human and avian.&rdquo; &mdash;The New Yorker</div>

I Hate to Leave This Beautiful Place

<div>This haunting story of love and the aftermath of a murder is &ldquo;a complex literary novel and a page-turner that&rsquo;s impossible to put down&rdquo; (Minneapolis Star-Tribune). Sam Lattimore met Elizabeth Church in an art gallery in 1970s Halifax. But their brief, erotically charged marriage was extinguished with Elizabeth&rsquo;s murder. Since that traumatic loss, Sam&rsquo;s life has grown complicated. In a moment of desperate confusion, he sells his life story to a Norwegian filmmaker named Istvakson, known for the stylized violence of his films. Soon he comes to regret his decision, leading to an increasingly intense game of cat and mouse between the two men. Furthermore, Sam has begun &ldquo;seeing&rdquo; Elizabeth&mdash;not only seeing but holding conversations with her, almost every evening, and what at first seems simply hallucination born of terrible grief reveals itself, evening by evening, as something else entirely. Next Life Might Be Kinder is a &ldquo;riveting&rdquo; novel (The Washington Post) by a two-time National Book Award nominee, the acclaimed author of The Bird Artist and What Is Left the Daughter&mdash;and features &ldquo;an opening sentence worthy of the Noir Hall of Fame&rdquo; (The New York Times). </div>

Next Life Might Be Kinder

<div>Exploring the myriad ways in which we go about preserving what might otherwise be forfeited. Whether trained specialists or lay people who care about something, preservationists come from every stratum of life. The archivist, the linguist, the local town historian. The paleontologist, the heirloom seed-saver, the family photographer, the Monuments Men. Old two-by-two Noah and taxonomist Linnaeus. The suburban girl who collects enough yard sale books to build up a library and thereby safeguards that most fragile of things: knowledge. All can be preservationists. This issue includes contributions from Diane Ackerman, Elizabeth Robinson, Peter Gizzi, Kyra Simone, Heather Altfeld, Richard Powers, Arthur Sze, Joanna Ruocco, Andrew Ervin, Julia Elliott, Jessica Reed, Peter Orner, Erin Singer, Daniel Torday, Toby Olson, Mary Jo Bang, Troy Jollimore, Maya Sonenberg, Rae Gouirand, Mauro Javier Cardenas, Nam Le, Maria Lioutaia, Bryon Landry, Rae Armantrout, Robin Hemley, Madeline Kearin, Donald Revell, S. P. Tenhoff, Debra Nystrom, Donna Stonecipher, Robert Karron, Andrew Mossin, J&rsquo;Lyn Chapman, Frederic Tuten, and Marshall Klimasewiski.</div>

Sanctuary

<div>Joyce Carol Oates, Ann Beattie, Diane Ackerman, and more explore the double-edged sword of curiosity . . . Curiosity is as central to life as breathing. And like breath itself, when it ceases, the vibrancy of life fades and disappears. Curiosity leads to discoveries both beneficent and, at times, destructive. It often occasions wonderment, but also terror. It prompts the precise scientist, but also the nosy gadfly. A double-edged sword, curiosity has forever held a crucial role in myth, literature, science, philosophy, history&mdash;nearly every field of human endeavor. While most of us know the old saying about curiosity killing the cat, we must also remember that &ldquo;satisfaction brought it back.&rdquo; Curiosity incites and compels, taketh away and giveth. In this issue, curiosity impels a personal assistant to learn hidden truths about her deceased employer&mdash;a famed playwright&mdash;and his relationship with the woman who directs an Italian arts foundation to which he donated his priceless library of first editions. A novelist, inspired by a different kind of curiosity, studies the traditional teachings of his Cherokee forebears after reading the notebook his beloved grandfather possessed when he died. Elsewhere, a young boy removes his clothes and, driven by dangerous curiosity, crawls into the gaping darkness of a sewer pipe, where he mysteriously vanishes, altering the lives of everyone who knew him. While most of the stories, poems, and memoirs here investigate the places where curiosity transports us&mdash;from forgotten burial grounds to natural history museums, from alluring lakes to postapocalyptic seaside shanties&mdash;A Cabinet of Curiosity also features a singular visit to an archetypal curiosity cabinet in Amsterdam with its treasury of specimens, of oddities in jars and on shelves, of things pinned and things afloat. Curiosity in all its guises is the wellspring of revelation. It is a prime mover behind our deeds, good or evil, simple or complicated. While the thirty-one writers gathered here individually explore many of the ways in which curiosity drives and defines us, together they propose that the realms of curiosity are, finally, inexhaustible. A Cabinet of Curiosity includes contributions from Laura van den Berg, Ann Beattie, Brandon Hobson, Eleni Sikelianos, Greg Jackson, Julianna Baggott, Jeffrey Ford, Joyce Carol Oates, William Lychack, Joanna Scott, Catherine Imbriglio, Dave King, Lauren Green, Can Xue (Translated by Karen Gernant, Chen Zeping), Nathaniel Mackey, A. D. Jameson, Quintan Ana Wikswo, Lynn Schmeidler, Samuel R. Delany, Kelsey Peterson, Sarah Blackman, Gerard Malanga, Martine Bellen, Maud Casey, Gregory Norman Bossert, Stephen O&rsquo;Connor, Matt Bell, Madeline Kearin, Bin Ramke, Diane Ackerman, Elizabeth Hand. </div>

A Cabinet of Curiosity

<div>National Book Award finalist Howard Norman delivers another &ldquo;provocative . . . haunting&rdquo;* novel, this time set in a Vermont village and featuring a missing child, a newly married private detective, and a highly relatable ghost. *Janet Maslin, New York Times Simon Inescort is no longer bodily present in his marriage. It&rsquo;s been several months since he keeled over the rail of a Nova Scotia&ndash;bound ferry, a massive heart attack to blame. Simon&#39;s widow, Lorca Pell, has sold their farmhouse to newlyweds Zachary and Muriel&mdash;after revealing that the deed contains a &ldquo;ghost clause,&rdquo; an actual legal clause, not unheard of in Vermont, allowing for reimbursement if a recently purchased home turns out to be haunted. In fact, Simon finds himself still at home: &ldquo;Every waking moment, I&#39;m astonished I have any consciousness . . . What am I to call myself now, a revenant?&rdquo; He spends time replaying his marriage in his own mind, as if in poignant reel-to-reel, while also engaging in occasionally intimate observation of the new homeowners. But soon the crisis of a missing child, a local eleven-year-old, threatens the tenuous domestic equilibrium, as the weight of the case falls to Zachary, a rookie private detective with the Green Mountain Agency. The Ghost Clause is a heartrending, affirming portrait of two marriages&mdash;one in its afterlife, one new and erotically charged&mdash;and of the Vermont village life that sustains and remakes them.</div>

The Ghost Clause

<div>Howard Norman, widely regarded as one of this country&#8217;s finest novelists, returns to the mesmerizing fictional terrain of his major books&#8212;The Bird Artist, The Museum Guard, and The Haunting of L&#8212;in this erotically charged and morally complex story. Seventeen-year-old Wyatt Hillyer is suddenly orphaned when his parents, within hours of each other, jump off two different bridges&#8212;the result of their separate involvements with the same compelling neighbor, a Halifax switchboard operator and aspiring actress. The suicides cause Wyatt to move to small-town Middle Economy to live with his uncle, aunt, and ravishing cousin Tilda. Setting in motion the novel&#8217;s chain of life-altering passions and the wartime perfidy at its core is the arrival of the German student Hans Mohring, carrying only a satchel. Actual historical incidents&#8212;including a German U-boat&#8217;s sinking of the Nova Scotia&#8211;Newfoundland ferry Caribou, on which Aunt Constance Hillyer might or might not be traveling&#8212;lend intense narrative power to Norman&#8217;s uncannily layered story. Wyatt&#8217;s account of the astonishing&#8212;not least to him&#8212; events leading up to his fathering of a beloved daughter spills out twenty-one years later. It&#8217;s a confession that speaks profoundly of the mysteries of human character in wartime and is directed, with both despair and hope, to an audience of one. An utterly stirring novel. This is Howard Norman at his celebrated best.</div>

What Is Left The Daughter

<div>Howard Norman spent the fall of 1977 in Churchill, Manitoba, translating into English two dozen "Noah stories" told to him by an Inuit elder. The folktales reveal what happened when the biblical Noah sailed his Ark into Hudson Bay in search of woolly mammoths and lost his way. By turns startling, tragic, and comical, these inimitable narratives tell the history of the Arctic and capture the collision of cultures precipitated by the arrival of a hapless stranger in a strange land. Norman himself was then a stranger in a strange land, but he was not alone. In Churchill he encountered Helen Tanizaki, an Anglo-Japanese woman embarked on a similar project--to translate the tales into Japanese. An extraordinary linguist and an exact and compelling friend, Tanizaki became Norman's guide through the characters, stories, and customs he was coming to know, and a remarkable intimacy sprang up between them--all the more intense because it was to be fleeting; Tanizaki was fatally ill. Through a series of overlapping panels of reality and memory, Howard Norman's In Fond Remembrance of Me recaptures with vivid immediacy a brief but life-shifting encounter and the earthy, robust stories that occasioned it.</div>

In Fond Remembrance of Me

<div>Howard Norman's The Bird Artist, the first book of his Canadian trilogy, begins in 1911. Its narrator, Fabian Vas is a bird artist: He draws and paints the birds of Witless Bay, his remote Newfoundland coastal village home. In the first paragraph of his tale Fabian reveals that he has murdered the village lighthouse keeper, Botho August. Later, he confesses who and what drove him to his crime--a measured, profoundly engrossing story of passion, betrayal, guilt, and redemption between men and women. The Bird Artist is a 1994 National Book Award Finalist for Fiction.</div>

Howard Norman
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Books By Howard Norman (7 Books)

Devotion

I Hate to Leave This Beautiful Place

Next Life Might Be Kinder

The Ghost Clause

What Is Left The Daughter

In Fond Remembrance of Me

The Bird Artist

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