Aftershocks: Seven Stories by Grete Weil translated by John Barrett

This week, the ForeWord Book club features a story from Greta Weil’s Aftershocks (Verba Mundi/David R. Godine, 978-1-56792-282-0). In “Little Sonja Rosenkranz,” Marthe is reminded of her time as part of the French Resistance when she sees the name of a long forgotten acquaintance on the television screen. After several decades, she renews her efforts to find the woman who may have murdered a young Jewish girl who was entrusted to her care. This a haunting story of what it's like to participate in something larger than yourself, and to have that end. Or not.

From the publisher's Web site:
Grete Weil's novels The Bride Price and Last Trolley from Beethovenstraat have proved her experience in the Holocaust to be unique and highly personal. She was one of the very few German writers who lost family and friends to the camps and decided to return to Germany after the war to rebuild their lives. In this collection of her best short fiction, the author looks beyond the loss of her loved ones and the effect of the era on her fellow Germans to its effects on those who had fled to apparent safety in California, New York, Paris, or even the forests of the Yucatan. Weil compares them to survivors of an atom-bomb blast, who live beyond the initial explosion and consider the worst to be over, only to later sicken and die. The fugitives' lives are damaged, even physically destroyed, by the aftershock – by their inability to shed the culture of the country from which they have fled, their intense memories of happier times, and by the constant intrusion of the ghosts of both victims and persecutors. The author's acerbic but rigorously honest gaze spares no one, not even herself, as she once again challenges readers to take stock, to ask how to avoid any future infusion of victim's blood into what eventually will be called history.

Peter Conners, editor at BOA Editions, introduces Martha Ronk's debut short story collection.

In one of my early editorial correspondences with Martha Ronk, she said of Glass Grapes and Other Stories (978-1-934414-13-4): "The main thrust behind the book was to create pieces in which objects rather than psychology had the major impact on characters and decisions. I wanted the physical world to throw about its very substantial weight." Interestingly enough, in a Ronk story, as we find in the title story "Glass Grapes," those physical objects usually land their "substantial weight" directly on top of a character's psyche. As a result, the character has all their insecurities, petty angers, real fears, hidden joys, and many obsessions squeezed out for readers to behold. And Ronk's characters are nothing if not obsessive. In fact, I would go so far as to say that no contemporary American writer is as skilled at laying bare the inner-workings of an obsessive mind as Martha Ronk. Part of the reason for her success is that her language is so precise and her sentences so deft that the reader has no choice but to follow along until Ronk decides to release them. The result is a trip through the psyche of an acutely aware and fiercely intelligent mind.     
 
Martha Ronk is an extremely distinguished American poet and fiction writer. Her work has garnered critical accolades and numerous awards including, most recently, a 2005 PEN USA Award in Poetry, a 2006 National Poetry Series Award, and a 2007 NEA Fellowship. Ronk is one of the rare writers with equally impressive facility in both poetry and fiction. Due to this facility, her fiction moves with grace, beauty, syntactical rigor, and the same attention to language as our most accomplished poetry. BOA Editions is proud to be the publisher of Martha Ronk's debut short story collection, Glass Grapes and Other Stories. We are pleased to present this sample story from the collection for your reading pleasure.

Raphael Kadushin, Senior Acquisitions Editor for The University of Wisconsin Press, introduces a story he wrote for the anthology, Big Trips: More Good Gay Writing.The story, called “At Home with James Herriot,” is available in its entirety at the Book Club for the next week. Don’t miss it; it’s hilarious.

This is a story I wrote for my anthology Big Trips: More Good Gay Travel Writing published by Terrace Books, an imprint of the University of Wisconsin Press. The story is clearly (I hope) fiction, with maybe just a little seam of autobiography (it’s actually the slightly altered chapter from a novel-in-progress). And the fact that it’s fiction is true to the anthology itself, which deliberately blends different genres (fiction, creative nonfiction, plays, etc). Why? In putting together a collection of strong travel writing I didn’t want to limit the pieces and I wanted to avoid the generic consumer travel piece (the 10 best brewpubs in London and 36 hours in Seville sort of piece). Instead I was looking for strong essays and stories that reclaimed classic, impressionistic travel writing, the kind that convey the flavor and sensibility of a place, explore the reasons we travel, and consider how we define home. So I asked some of the finest sometimes inadvertent travel writers writing today (Edmund White, Dale Peck, Andrew Holleran, Michael Klein, Douglas Martin, Bruce Benderson, Brian Bouldrey, Martin Sherman, etc) and collected a real range of beautiful, narrative pieces that span the world (Prague, Vienna and Provincetown to Paris, Cario, Morocco, London, San Francisco, Florida, Rome, Mexico, Greece, Spain, the Dordogne, and Sicily). So there is something in Big Trips for everyone who loves to travel (and probably can’t afford to now) and anyone who likes a good well-told story.

More Good Gay Travel Writing
Edited by Raphael Kadushin
Publication Date: November 18, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-299-22860-6 Cloth, $24.95, 312 pages
Terrace Books: A trade imprint of the University of Wisconsin Press
http://www.wisc.edu/wisconsinpress/books/4291.htm

For more information or interview requests, please contact the Publicity Department, at Ph (608) 263-0734; Fax (608) 263-1132; or publicity@uwpress.wisc.edu.  We would appreciate receiving a copy of any notice that may appear. Please send tear sheets, noting name and location of publication and date of issue, to the Publicity Department at the University of Wisconsin Press.

"'Whenever I think back to that dreadful experience, I feel as if an ice-cold dead man's hand is stroking my back, while at the same time my brain is giving up the third dimension between the buffers of freight trains being switched.'"

So exclaims the narrator in this story by Otto Willi Gail, The Missing Clock Hands: An Implausible Happening, translated by Mike Mitchell and originally published in Germany in 1929.

Science fiction began to appear in Germany around the turn of the century in what were called "novels of the future," or "utopian-technical novels." A major early figure was Kurd Lasswitz, a mathematician, philosopher, and poet whose short story "The Universal Library" -- about a system wherein everything that is written can be stored in a finite number of volumes using a small number of signs --  inspired Argentine Jorge Luis  Borges to write "The Library of Babel." (And who knows what Google that inspired.)

For the most part however, German-language science fiction was untranslated and therefore unknown. Franz Rottensteiner, editor of the critical science fiction magazine Quaber Merkur, here brings together for the first time an historical sampling indicating the development of the genre. Spanning 137 years, this anthology, translated by Mike Mitchell, provides a fascinating glimpse into the past and present minds of the future.

The Black Mirror & Other Stories: An Anthology of Science Fiction from Germany and Australia
Edited by Franz Rottensteiner
Translated by Mike Mitchell
Wesleyan University Press, 978-0-8195-6831-1