MR Notes

Askold Melnyczuk’s story, “Walk With Us,” in the Massachusetts Review Casualty issue, is so skillfully turned you don’t know who the subject is until the end. At the risk of being a spoiler and softening the moment of recognition, I have to say it’s about Lynndie England, the poster girl for Abu Ghraib. But – and this is the part that makes the story so incisive – it is also about us and our capacity for denial. Melnyczuk is, of course, writing fiction; but a fiction compelled by indigestible facts, almost as if he is unable to push the story out of his mind and must get rid of it in writing. Told in her mother’s voice, the impact of the event has pushed the family to and beyond its limits, into areas of their mind previously unlit and terrifying.

Who can forget – except, perhaps, George Bush and the Have Mores – the photographs of the...

Anyone who’s been spending time lately at the major book fairs knows this already – about the only thing that's sure to pack the conference rooms these days is either a book that’s got a movie contract, with celebrities attached, or a panel about e-publishing.  And yet there’s no end to the interest, in writing at least.  Reading may be another story.

The Council of Literary Magazines and Presses currently lists 274 magazines as members, 106 presses.  Another 56 venues are combinations of the two, and 55 online presses are members as well.  Wikipedia lists around three hundred literary magazines as well.  So … is anyone out there reading all this stuff?

Writers are, presumably. But there’s another group too, their editors. 

If we judge simply by the thousand or more submissions each year at MR, the number of short stories, essays, and poems that gets written is mind-boggling. ...

From the first paragraph of David Rabe's new essay we know we are into something exact, profound, with echoes of all the great epic accounts of the human situation.

Perhaps that is an overblown response: As its subtitle tells us, the piece is about prize-fighting, boxing, "the sweet science." The temptation to cliche about the sport is ever-present. The subject has been written about ably by A.J. Liebling and Norman Mailer, though Mailer is predictably macho and always all-knowing. What Rabe gives us, no surprise, is the sorrow and the pity of it all, as well as some idea of what drives the fighters and what they are searching for in this brutal business besides, obviously, the money and glory, if it comes. He gives us the sad Floyd Patterson, Joe Frazier stripped down to his iron body and will, the hapless Jerry Quarry, blooded target for the furious Frazier, but above all he gives us "The...

The psychoanalyst Cathy Caruth begins her book The Wound and the Voice with a definition of trauma.  Like Freud before her, Caruth finds inspiration for that definition exactly where she should – in poetry.  In Torquato Tasso’s epic poem Gerusalemme liberata, she reminds us, the hero Tancredi mistakenly and unknowingly kills his beloved, the woman-warrior Clorinda, in battle.  The true horror of this event, in Caruth’s reading, is impossible for Tancredi to assimulate as it occurs; this lack of understanding is the very emblem of trauma.  But that’s not all. When Tancredi later wanders through an enchanted wood, he happens to strike out, in panic, hitting a tree with his sword – the very tree where his lover’s spirit is trapped.  In doing so, Tancredi releases her voice, and Clorinda appears to speak directly, from beyond the grave.

For Caruth, trauma is by definition an event which can be given...