Perigee Blog

Issue 21 Contributors

2008-07-09T16:15:00.000-07:00

Perigee's 21st issue is due out on July 15th. The issue will include all new poetry, reviews, and interviews, plus the winning stories from our 2008 Fiction Contest.

The following writers and poets will be included in #21.

Fiction:
Jessie Aufiery, "Somewhere Along the Way" (1st Place Winner)
Brian E. Drake, "Some Places of Interest to the Anomalist" (2nd Place Winner)
Randy Susan Meyers, "Sure Has Been a Long Time Since You Killed Mama" (3rd Place Winner)
Jacqueline Bishop, "A Boy I Used To Love a Long, Long Time Ago"
Kirsten Clodfelter, "Kept"
Liam MacSheóinín, "George W. Bush Buys Coke In The Irish Riviera"
Robin Parks, "Bad Math"

Reviews:
Ancestor Worship, by Michael S. Begnal
(Reviewed by Liam Mac Sheóinín)
Copenhagen Quartet by Thomas E. Kennedy
(Reviewed by Duff Brenna)
A Garden amid Fires by Gladys Swan
(Reviewed by Thomas E. Kennedy)
Crazy Love, by Leslie What
(Reviewed by R.A. Rycraft)
Traveling Sitting Still, by Robert Judge Woerheide
(Reviewed by Duff Brenna)

Interviews:
The Tourist's Advantage, an interview with Thomas E. Kennedy by Markus Bernsen
An interview with Gladys Swan by Duff Brenna

Essays:
Writer, Writer, Man, Man Gordon Weaver, by W.D. Wetherell
Rilke in American Pop Culture, Part Two, by John Mood

Memoirs:
Supriya Bhatnagar, "Color"
Julie Layne, "Final Sale on Tires"
Mary Marwitz, "Coming of Age"
Leslie What, "Grief Stamping"

Poetry:
Howie Good, "On Being Told You Look Depressed"
Mark Grinyer, "Clouds" and "Turquoise"
Susan Landon, "The Spirit of Machu Picchu"
Kate Strong, "Stitching" and "Ariel, Dreaming"

Our thanks to all who submitted work, and we hope you will enjoy our 21st issue when it is released this coming Tuesday.

2008 Fiction Contest Winners

2008-06-15T18:46:00.000-07:00

Perigee is pleased to announce the winners of our 2008 Fiction Contest:

First Place
Jessie Aufiery, for “Somewhere Along the Way”
Guest Judge Thomas E Kennedy says: "(This story) presents a kind of dystopian world, though one that seems to approximate where we live now—or some parts of it, or somewhere close by—as hip as it is well-written."

Second Place
Brian E. Drake, for "Some Places of Interest to the Anomalist"
Kennedy says: "An anomaly itself and a brief one, though impeccably written, unerringly errant, boldly odd, apparently meaningless, rippling with little jokes along its deadpan, tongue-in-cheeky surface, original and self-defining."

Third Place
Randy Susan Meyers, for "Sure Has Been a Long Time Since You Killed Mama"
Kennedy says: "An unsentimental handling of a situation which might have, but doesn't, collapse into the terrible emotions it contains."

Honorable Mention
Kevin P. Keating, for "In the Secret Parts of Fortune"
Kennedy says: "(This story is) memorable for its Gothic mood in modern dress."

Our thanks to all who entered, and to our Guest Judge Thomas E Kennedy. His clarity and wisdom helped make a difficult process manageable, and ensured the very best of a bright bunch of submissions rose to the top.

Congratulations to the winners! You can expect to receive a letter with your contest prize included within the month.

A list of finalists will be released on our blog in the coming days.

Mathias B. Freese Finalist for Awards

2008-05-13T17:58:00.000-07:00

Perigee congratulates Mathias B. Freese for receiving an Independent Publisher Excellence Finalist Book Award for his story collection Down to a Sunless Sea, which is also a finalist for the Reader Views Literary Award as well as a finalist in the "popular fiction" category of the 2008 Arizona Book Awards, sponsored by the Arizona Book Publishing Association. For an in-depth study of Freese's brilliant book, please go to the January Perigee issue and click on REVIEWS.
Purchase Down to a Sunless Sea at Wheatmark Press

Perigee 2008 Fiction Judge Thomas E. Kennedy Wins Ellie Award

2008-05-02T09:02:00.000-07:00

Our congratulations to Thomas E. Kennedy for winning the 2008 ELLIE, the most prestigious essay award in America.

BEST ESSAYS: This category recognizes excellence in essay writing on topics ranging from the personal to the political. Whatever the subject, emphasis should be placed on the author’s eloquence, perspective, fresh thinking and unique voice.

Winner: Thomas E. Kennedy’s essay, “I Am Joe’s Prostate,” from New Letters, was selected as the best essay published in an American magazine at the 43rd Annual National Magazine Awards on May 1, 2008. The awards are sponsored by The American Society of Magazine Editors.

Kennedy’s essay was one of six finalists that included work from The Atlantic, ELLE, Entertainment Weekly, Harper’s Magazine, and The New Yorker. Among the authors were Stephen King and Walter Kern, but Kennedy won.

Latest news from THE WASHINGTON POST: New Letters snagged the essay award for "I Am Joe's Prostate" by Thomas E. Kennedy. " 'I Am Joe's Prostate' steals its title from the 1950s Reader's Digest series, but Reader's Digest was never like this," the judges wrote. "Wince-inducing, outrageously honest and wickedly funny, Thomas E. Kennedy's account of his prostate-cancer scare is essay writing at its most original. Laugh the whole way through, then ponder the subtext of medical testing gone haywire."

Deadline: May 1st, 12:00 am CST

2008-04-29T16:05:00.000-07:00

Perigee's 2008 Fiction Contest closes in just over 24 hours, at midnight when April becomes May. Be sure to get your stories submitted before this deadline for a chance at $600 in cash prizes, publication in our summer issue, and a Pushcart nomination.

Thomas E Kennedy has generously offered to serve as our guest judge for this competition. You can learn more about him at his website, and you can read some of his recent fiction from our 18th issue.

Contest guidelines are available here, where you can also submit instantly.

Jack Marshall Wins US and Canadian Competition

2008-04-28T13:36:00.000-07:00

Results of the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation's annual United States and Canadian competition have been announced. Among the award winners is Perigee's April 2008 Featured Poet Jack Marshall.

Jack Marshall has published twelve books of poetry, of which Sesame, 1993, was awarded the PEN Center West Award, a Pushcart Prize, and was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. Two other books, Arriving on the Playing Fields of Paradise, 1984, and Gorgeous Chaos; New & Selected Poems, 1965-2001, each won a Bay Area Book Reviewers Award. A collection of new poems, The Steel Veil, will be published by Coffee House Press in Fall, 2008. He has also published a memoir, From Baghdad to Brooklyn; Growing Up in a Jewish-Arabic Family in Midcentury America, from Coffee House Press, 2005, which was voted a finalist for the PEN Center Award in Creative Non-Fiction. He lives in the San Francisco Bay Area.

5th Anniversary Issue

2008-04-06T18:16:00.001-07:00

On April 15th Perigee is celebrating its 5th anniversary with an amazing 20th issue containing all new poetry, prose, and visual art. We are also featuring the 2007 Poetry Contest winners, and our recent Pushcart nominees. On top of all that, we've got new features and reviews, and we're wrapping up submissions to our 2008 Fiction Contest.

It will be a great issue, and one which we hope you will enjoy as much as our recent installments. Perigee is up to wondrous things these days, but it is only because of you, our readers, our writers.

Let us continue to celebrate.

Issue 20 Contents:

FICTION–
Cummins, Walter “Randy Andy and Mary Ella”
Drake, Brian E “Don Juan Eats Pastries in the Afternoon”
Drew, Cynthia “A Light in the Water”
Griswold, John “Goodbye, Young Man”
Jersild, Karen “Perfectly Aligned”
Kennedy, Thomas E. “Dancing with Mary Ella”
Marsh, A.R. “Charlie’s First Time”
McCall, Margo “Cabin Fever”
Memmott, David “The Dream Machine.” An Excerpt from Primetime.
Valentine, Neil A “Little Green Stream”

POETRY–
Acharya, Anirban “Drone”
Ahmed, Shurooq Amin "The Other Wife" (3rd place)
Barbere, Danny P “Taking Flowers”
Beach, Sandy “My Pillow: An Alba”
Beach, Sandy “Stillness”
Burchell, Graham “Day of the Dead”
Chaney, Gayla "Stranded Motorist" (2nd place)
Crisafi, Rosemarie “Everything Looks Different in a Carnival Mirror”
Crisafi, Rosemarie “Crows”
Eason, Haines “Four Walls”
Golberg, E. Laura “Lace”
Hilliard, Shanoa “8 Track Tapes and Vinyl Thoughts”
Holmes, Katherine L “Icarus October”
Millner, Jesse “Beyond Death”
Wallisky, Karen "Displacement" (1st Place)

VISUAL ART–
Maxwell, Thomas “Adrift in the Visage”
Wing, Steve “Patina 4”
Wing, Steve “Archangle 2”

MEMOIR–
Shaw, Kevin “The Play’s the Thing, or How I Learned to Act Like a Man in Little League”

NON-FICTION–
Brenna, Duff: Review of Prime Time, by David Memmott
Brenna, Duff: Review of The Other Chekhov, by Okla Elliott and Kyle Minor
Fellows, Sue “Sue’s Column”
Gover, Robert : Review of You Will Die: The Burden of Modern Taboos, Book 1, by Robert R Arthur
Johnson, Greg “Oiling the Tinman’s Jaws: An Interview with David Memmott"
Mood, John “Rilke in American Pop Culture, Part One”
Storie, Jensea "Our Poetry Contest Judge Joseph Millar"

Stay tuned ... big things are in store.

2008 Fiction Contest Closing Soon!

2008-04-06T15:19:00.001-07:00

Our 2008 Fiction Contest is closing soon! If you are planning to submit, you only have until the end of April to do so. Why bother? How about a Pushcart nomination, $600 in cash prizes, and publication in this summer's issue of Perigee.

We are honored to have Thomas E Kennedy serve as this year's guest judge.

Click here to read full guidelines and submit through our easy online process.

Thomas E Kennedy is Ellie Finalist

2008-03-21T11:17:00.000-07:00

2008 Perigee Fiction Contest guest judge Thomas E. Kennedy is one of six finalists for a National Magazine Award in the essay category selected by THE AMERICAN SOCIETY OF MAGAZINE EDITORS, for his essay, "I Am Joe's Prostate," which appeared in NEW LETTERS.

Magazine Industry Toasts Best and Brightest on May 1 at Jazz at Lincoln Center

NEW YORK, NY (March 19, 2008)—Marlene Kahan, Executive Director, American Society of Magazine Editors (ASME), today announced the finalists for the 43rd annual National Magazine Awards, the magazine industry's highest honor. Named after the Alexander Calder Stabile "Elephant," the 2008 "Ellies" represent a record-setting 1,964 entries from 333 print and online magazines. Twenty-five winners will be announced at a gala event on May 1, at New York City's Jazz at Lincoln Center, Frederick P. Rose Hall.

ESSAYS
This category recognizes excellence in essay writing on topics ranging from the personal to the political. Whatever the subject, emphasis should be placed on the author's eloquence, perspective, fresh thinking and unique voice.

The Atlantic: James Bennet, editor, for The Autumn of the Multitaskers, by Walter Kirn, November.

ELLE: Roberta Myers, vice president and editor-in-chief, for My Year of Living Dangerously, by Katrina Onstad, August.

Entertainment Weekly: Rick Tetzeli, managing editor, for J.K. Rowling's Ministry of Magic, by Stephen King, August 17.

Harper's Magazine: Roger D. Hodge, editor, for Chemo World, by Sallie Tisdale, June.

New Letters: Robert Stewart, editor-in-chief, for I Am Joe's Prostate, by Thomas E. Kennedy, Volume 73 Number 4, Summer 2007.

The New Yorker: David Remnick, editor, for Parallel Play, by Tim Page, August 20.

Perigee Authors Nominated for Pushcart Prizes

2008-02-24T12:40:00.000-08:00

Dear Perigee Editors:

I am pleased to announce that our Board of Contributing Editors for the PUSHCART PRIZE: BEST OF THE SMALL PRESSES (33rd Edition), has nominated the works listed below for inclusion in PPXXXIII to be published in November. If any of these titles is picked for reprint in PPXXXIII, you will hear from us by early May. Thank you for helping us gather this annual celebration of literary presses as we begin our 33rd year.

Bill Henderson, Publisher.

Authors & Works Nominated:

James Brown, "Some Kind of Animal," Vol 5, Issue II (Issue 18)
Paul Casey, "Wrong Wine," Vol 5, Issue II (Issue 18)
Kevin P Keating, "The Black Death of Gentile da Foligno," Vol 5, Issue II (Issue 18)
David R Poe, "My Stunning Wife, Studs," Vol 5, Issue II (Issue 18)

All from one issue. Congratulations to all.

2007 Poetry Contest Winners Announced!

2008-02-15T08:59:00.000-08:00

Perigee is pleased to announce the winners and honorable mentions in our recent 2007 Poetry Contest.

All those who participated have our thanks. Writing poetry is not easy. Offering up that poetry to be judged against other poems and poets deserves special recognition. That is why we are thankful for each and every submission we received in last year's competition.

Even if your name does not appear in the list below, you have our thanks for your effort, and our encouragement to continue battling the white of the blank page.

We would also like to acknowledge the generous and selfless contributions of poet Joseph Millar, who served as our guest judge for this competition. His poetic clarity and thoughtful deliberation helped make a difficult task manageable, and ensured the best poems garnered the recognition they deserve. Joe, you have our thanks.

The Winners of Perigee's 2007 Poetry Contest:
1st Place: Karen Wallisky, for "Displacement"
2nd Place: Gayla Chaney, for "Stranded Motorist"
3rd Place: Shurooq Amin Ahmed, for "The Other Wife"

Honorable Mentions:
Shurooq Amin Ahmed, for "Mud Roses"
Mimi Moriarty, for "A Poet Who Cannot Support Himself Takes a Job Pouring Cement"

The winning poems will be published in our 5th Anniversary Issue, April 15th, 2008. We congratulate each of the winners, who can expect to be contacted by Perigee with details on collecting their winnings shortly.

With Thanks,

The Editors

Harry Griswold Pens New Collection of Poems

2008-02-11T18:27:00.000-08:00

Buy book from publisher

Harry Griswold’s Camera Obscura is a quiet collection filled with humorous and sometimes savage ironies and the quirks that only the best poets reveal: wisdom, insight, artistic integrity, an ability to stir:

“…cockles and swirls, damp indentations,
rising shafts of lubricous energy,
some grassy places
people still run their bare feet through.”

These poems are gripping. They do what brilliant poems should do — make you close your eyes and smile with understanding and gratitude.
- Duff Brenna, author of Waking in Wisconsin, poetry collection published by Borealis Press, 1984

Harry Griswold is the kind of poet you would like to sit down with. He’s weaving stories and he knows just how much to show, how much to tell. You won’t find a false step or easy theatrics. Camera Obscura is the work of an experienced, astute man, very worthwhile taking in. We need more wisdom in our poetry and Griswold delivers.
—Eloise Klein Healy, author of The Islands Project: Poems For Sappho (Red Hen Press, 2007)

Harry Griswold’s poetry is filled with a multiplicity of voices, characters, and experiences, all offered with a quiet lyricism. There is a tenderness in his way of seeing the events of the world and the people who inhabit it. Whether his character is a young woman who reveals her sense of violation or a child overhearing his mother talking about someone else’s breast cancer, Harry Griswold’s poetry reveals a concern for the world in which we live, and he renders that concern with an observant eye and honest voice.
—Steve McDonald, author of Where There Was No Pattern (Finishing Line Press, 2007)

Perigee 2008 Fiction Judge Wins Eric Hoffer Award

2008-01-30T09:40:00.000-08:00

Thomas E. Kennedy follows his Eric Hoffer Best Novel Award for Greene's Summer (2006) with the first runner-up Eric Hoffer Best Novel Award for Danish Fall (2007.) Kennedy also received the New Letters Best Essay Award for "I Am Joe's Prostate." The first place award was shared with Margaret K McCarty-Ozemet for her essay "Bovine Dreams," which will be published in the April issue of Perigee. Our congratulations!

Congratulations for a Well-Deserved Award

2008-01-30T08:25:00.000-08:00

Press Release Jan. 28, 2008
Submitted by: Shirley Roe, Managing Editor
Allbooks Review www.allbookreviews.com
2008 Allbooks Review Editor's Choice Award Winners announced!
SHORT STORY COLLECTION BY MATHIAS B. FREESE:

Down to a Sunless Sea

The editors at Perigee are proud to announce that the story collection by Mathias B. Freese reviewed in the January issue has won the 2008 Allbooks Review Editor's Choice Award. This is Freese's second Allbooks Award. His first was for his novel, The i Tetralogy, a powerful and uncompromising study of the Nazi death camps during the Holocaust.

Perigee's 19th Issue, Contributors

2008-01-06T13:57:00.001-08:00

The 19th issue of Perigee is set to be released on January 15th, and we are very excited by what is shaping up to be a fine issue indeed. The new issue contains all new poetry, fiction, non-fiction, interviews, book reviews, and visual art—some of the finest we've received.

Everyone who submitted work for our winter issue has our thanks. We would especially like to congratulate the writers, poets, and artists whose work will be appearing in our 19th issue (in whatever order they land here):

Alan Elyshevitz, "Angels"
Anthony Frame, "World News" and "Promenade Park"
Barbara F Lefcowitz, "My I-Pod"
Carolyn Harris Zukowski, "The Procrastinating Adulteress"
Joanne Lowery, "Sailors"
Kenneth Salzmann, "Small, Round Words"
Lucas Smalldon, "Composed in a Quandary on Poetry"
Mark Neely, "Cardinal" and "Saturday Morning, Alden Road"
Ray Succre, "Give Me Your House"
Michelle Panik O'Neill, "Fly the Coop"
Paul Silverman, "The Nepco Man"
Sandi Sonnenfeld, "Between Takes"
Tom Sheehan, "Apple, for Whom I Have Scoured the Universe"
Walter Cummins, "Bird With Strings"
Liam MacSheoinin, "Zeta Reticuli, Here I Come"
Lance Olsen, "Calendar of Regrets: An Excerpt"
Okla Elliott, "The Queen of Limbo"
Gordon Weaver, "That Face in My Bathroom Mirror"

With additional work from:
Alice Maud Guldbrandsen
Christopher Woods
Duff Brenna
Jensea Storie
Lance Newman
Sue Fellows
Robert Judge Woerheide

Including book reviews of:
Cast Upon the Day, and A Passion in the Desert, by Thomas E Kennedy
Anxious Pleasures: A Novel After Kafka, by Lance Olsen
Long Gone, by Richard Willis
Down to a Sunless Sea, by Mathias B Freese

Our 19th issue will be released Tuesday, January 15th. We hope you will read it, subscribe, and submit your own work.

Cheers!

Meet the 2008 Fiction Contest Guest Judge!

2008-01-05T14:36:00.000-08:00

Fiction Editor Duff Brenna interviews Thomas E Kennedy, our 2008 Fiction Contest guest judge. You can read the special feature now—even before our upcoming 19th issue (January 15th). Don't miss this opportunity to familiarize yourself with this award winning writer.

And don't forget, our fiction competition is now open and accepting submissions from writers around the world. Send in your best stories for a chance to win a cash award, publication, and a Pushcart nomination!

CLICK HERE FOR THE SPECIAL INTERVIEW!

2008 Fiction Contest Now Open!

2008-01-02T16:33:00.000-08:00

Our 2008 Fiction Contest is now accepting submissions. With $600 in cash prizes, publication for the top three stories, and a pushcart nomination for the winning entry, we hope lots of storytellers will be excited about participating.

This year, we welcome the esteemed novelist, essayist, and story writer Thomas E. Kennedy as guest judge. Kennedy's 22 books have garnered wide attention. His essays, interviews, and stories (some of which have appeared in Perigee's pages), like all of his work, have consistently challenged and thrilled. He is the recipient of both the O. Henry and Pushcart awards.

For complete details and guidelines—and to upload your contest submission—click here.

Poetry Contest Closes

2007-12-31T10:16:00.000-08:00

Perigee's 2007 Poetry Contest closes this evening at midnight (central timezone, GMT -6).

We would like to thank all the poets who elected to participate in this year's iteration of our most popular contest. Judging by the submissions we've read thus far, this year's competition is stiff, and the decision ahead of us is sure to be difficult. The editors and finalist judge, Joseph Millar, will be deciding on winners over the next six weeks. Those who participated can expect to hear from us with a decision on or before February 15th, 2008. The results will be posted on this blog, and the winning entries will appear in our April anniversary issue.

The close of our Poetry Contest also means that our Fiction Contest is opening. Tonight at midnight, the storytellers among you may submit to our fiction competition. Check here over the coming days for an official announcement about the 2008 Fiction Contest finalist judge.

And Happy New Year!

Poetry Contest Closing Soon!

2007-12-20T14:16:00.000-08:00

If you've been waiting to submit your finest poems to Perigee's 2007 Poetry Contest, wait no longer. The deadline for this year's competition draws near.

Our Finalist Judge Joseph Millar will soon be reading your submissions and deciding on the winners. We're giving away $650 in cash prizes to the top four entries—with a whopping $300 going to the first place entry. We'll be publishing the winning entries (along with the names of any honorable mentions) in our 2008 anniversary issue which lands on the web in April.

December 31st is the final day for submissions. But don't wait until New Year's Eve to participate in our most popular and competitive contest.

Click here to read further details, and submit online.

Goodbye Norman Mailer: A Brief Retrospective

2007-11-10T15:09:00.000-08:00

Norman Mailer was born in Long Branch, New Jersey in 1923 and raised in Brooklyn, New York. He was educated at Harvard, where he took a degree in aeronautical engineering in 1943. He had an I.Q. of 165. While attending Harvard, Mailer became interested in writing and wrote two novels. One was set in a mental institution, where Mailer worked for a short while. The novel was entitled A Transit to Narcissus. It was called melodramatic and publishers turned it down. It wasn't brought out until 1978. Mailer was very famous by then. It helps to be famous.

Mailer was drafted into the army in 1944 and served in World War II in the Philippines with the 112^th Cavalry. He could have gone to Officers Candidate School (OCS), but instead he chose to become a rifleman. Eager for action, he went out on patrols, but eventually the climate and routine and reality of war, the overwhelming presence of death and danger got to him. He said of this time that the hot sun, the heavy pack, the "ever present fatigue and diarrhea" killed any desire he had for action. He was emotionally drained and physically depleted and by early 1945 he was in a hospital in Manila suffering from jaundice.

Mailer took part in no major battles in the army, but out of his experiences came his first bestseller, The Naked and the Dead (1948) considered to be one of the best and most important novels written about World War Two. The novel depicts his disdain and hatred for authority, its abuses of power, its lack of humanity. It has been called a deeply pessimistic novel and an antiwar book that describes the idiotic waste of human beings, who go into war with hardly a clue as to what they are about to experience. Some of them go crazy. Many of them die. Many more are wounded. No one comes back unchanged. Most of the changes are negative. War warps the human heart, according to Mailer.

The Naked and the Dead, after initially being turned down by Little, Brown because of its raw language (Mailer used the F word a lot, which just wasn't done in those days), was finally published by Rinehart in 1948 (after changing Fuck to Fug) and rose quickly to the top of the bestseller list. He was 25. Like Lord Byron, Mailer woke one morning to find himself famous all over town. Before the year was out he was famous from coast to coast and eventually around the world. Heady stuff. And it went to his head. He took to drink and drugs, especially marijuana, and made himself notorious for bad boy behavior in public places, shouting matches and fistfights. Drinking and the experiences of war brought out the worst potentialities in his personality. This is a common story. Nothing about it surprises us except, perhaps, that Harvard-educated geniuses can be just as wrongheaded and ill-mannered and loutish as the rest of us who drink stupidly and find ourselves firing on three cylinders when we're wired for six.

The Naked and the Dead was followed by Barbary Shore (1951), a novel dealing with paranoia about the growing power of rightwing politics, Big Brother is watching, or at least trying to watch. The novel was mostly blasted by the critics. This phenomenon often happens to anyone who is too successful, especially first-time novelists, the critics praying for a failure, so they can bring out their razors. A decade later Mailer wrote in Advertisements for Myself, in which he said about the failure of Barbary Shore:

I suppose I might have learned to take my return ticket to the minor leagues without weeping too much ... except I was plagued by an odd intuition ... that I was working my way toward saying something unforgivable ... was leading toward the violent and the orgiastic. I do not mean that I was clear about where I was going, it was rather that I had a dumb dull set of intimations that the things I was drawn to write about were taboo.

The Deer Park (1955), a novel about Hollywood, was Mailer's next effort. It reestablished him as a powerful writer, one who could cut to the heart of the human condition. Its main theme is the coupling of sex and power. At first no one wanted to publish it because its sex scenes were too suggestive, especially a passage in which a woman is manipulated into giving oral sex to a man. Mailer was told to cut that passage out, but he didn't. Rinehart refused to publish the book. Mailer sent it to several major publishing houses, but they all turned it down. Then Putnam made an offer. Putnam's thinking was that the book was so controversial by then that even if it wasn't very well-written, the controversy alone would sell lots of copies. When it was published it sold 50,000 copies and went to number 6 on the bestseller list.

Advertisements for Myself followed in 1959, a collection of essays, stories and commentary, some of which talked about sex, greed and violence in America, themes Mailer took up again in An American Dream (1965). 1968 saw the publication of Mailer's Pulitzer Prize winning The Armies of the Night, a rendition of his experiences at the 1968 Stop-the-War rallies in Washington D.C.

Mailer's second Pulitzer came with the publication of The Executioner's Song (1979), a creative non-fiction novel that portrayed the lives of Gary Gilmore and his girlfriend, Nicole, before Gilmore killed two helpless men in cold blood in Provo, Utah. After he was caught and sent to prison, Gary Gilmore and Nicole made a suicide pact, setting a date and time when they would kill themselves. Nicole came very close to succeeding by cutting her wrists, but ultimately she survived. At his own request, refusing to file any appeals, Gilmore was later executed by firing squad. Mailer wrote about it all in a language as terse and tough and brilliant in its minimalism as anything Ernest Hemingway had ever done:

She felt as if somebody had socked her right on the side of the head. She could hear his voice ringing in her brain. It spoke in a terrible anger, as if he was capable of biting his teeth clear through his tongue. He didn't want her ever to get with a guy again. Didn't want to have those thoughts in his head. "Everybody fucks Nicole," said his voice in her head. "Don't fuck those cocksuckers. It makes me want to commit murder again. If I feel like murder it doesn't necessarily matter who gets murdered—don't you know that about me?" Way inside, a part of her felt extraloving. It was that important to him (351, Little Brown, First Ed).

The Executioner's Song was followed in 1983 by a novel about ancient Egypt in the time of Ramses the Ninth. The novel deals with power—political power, physical power, sexual power and the power of reincarnation (if you can remember your past lives, which one of the characters can). Ancient Evenings is what we might call a tour de force, which means (according to Webster's Universal) a feat of strength, skill or ingenuity, often one that is merely clever or spectacular. Ancient Evenings is all of that—and more. It sums up many of the major themes that haunted Mailer's work from the very beginning: courage, cowardice, bodily functions, death, the afterlife, the meaning of love, the meaning of lust. It's a scatological book full of (obsessed with) Egyptian sexual practices—sisters and brothers, mothers and sons, fathers and daughters, grandfathers and granddaughters, homosexuality, oral sex, group sex, anal sex. The point made several times over is that it's all relative—relative, depending on the society into which you are born and raised, what its mores are, its customs and such.

Ancient Evenings has one of the greatest battle scenes I've ever read. Mailer is at the top of his game when in a flashback he brings the Egyptians under Ramses the Second and the Hittites together in a mutual glorious slaughter at the Battle of Kadesh. The descriptive powers Mailer reveals rival those of Leo Tolstoy in War and Peace describing The Battle of Borodino, when the outnumbered Russians fought Napoleon's forces to a standstill.

Ancient Evenings became another smorgasbord of critic frenzy, ripped to shreds by nearly everyone. But read it for yourself and make your own judgments. If you are in the right mood, you won't find it too long, too convoluted, too self-indulgent, too absurd, too perverse. The totality of the book is a warp and weft of genius Mailer-style. If you are ever caught by its rhythms, its history, its outsized characters, you might find yourself saying, "My god what a brilliant mind this man has! I've never experienced anything like this. I'll never forget it." Yes, but on the other hand it is a tortuously mind-blowing magnum opus that you probably wouldn't want to read again!

More books followed. By my count Mailer has written 35 so far, most successful, some not. His latest is a novel called The Castle in the Forest (2007), which is volume one of a proposed two-volume work about Adolph Hitler. The Castle in the Forest was given "mixed" reviews. I've read it and I understand why the reviews are not all raves. The book is, well, breathtaking in its inventiveness, its knowledge, its humor, its darkness, the cogency of its style. The problem may be the premise that there are devils and angels vying with one another for the souls of men. Little Hitler has his own devil that keeps tabs on him as he grows up. The characters, especially little Hitler, his father, Alois, his mother Klara are beautifully and convincingly drawn. The story does what a good story should do—it carries us along and we try not to pay much attention to the supernatural elements with their medieval evocations.

It is amazing and gratifying that someone Mailer's age could have written with such verbal skill and energy. Reading between the lines it's fairly clear what Mailer is after—the devils and angels become metaphors for those energies which move us towards what is better or worse in ourselves and in this world. What Mailer has in The Castle in the Forest is an extended study on the nature of good and evil. What we learn is unsettling, bewildering, ultimately (despite infusions of humor) depressing. Warning: this is no book for those who want the pabulum generally found on the bestseller lists.

Before his death on November 10, 2007 Norman Mailer had written hundreds of articles, reviews and given interviews, directed movies, acted in a few, ran for mayor of New York, and written screenplays. He co-founded the Village Voice. He was president of PEN for two years. He was married six times and had nine children. Tis a full life. We had hoped he would live to be a hundred and would be blessed in the same way Joseph Conrad was blessed by sitting down to write one day and, pen in hand, dying quietly at his desk. Sadly, that didn't happen. Mailer died of acute renal failure at Mount Sinai Hospital. He was 84.

Some Mailer Quotes:

"People drink to restore their egos."

"I care about reviews. They affect your wallet in the most direct fashion."

"We didn't win the Cold War, we were just a big bank that bankrupted a smaller bank because we had an arms race that wiped the Russians out."

"Violence is the last frontier in literature."

"I fear decrepitude."

[Novelists are] " ... a special breed of human being. Somewhere between sychologists, historians, detectives, students of style and manner. We have a capacity to do things that other people don't ... we develop over the years to try to see someone as whole."

Duff Brenna, Fiction Editor, Perigee

Issue 18 Contributors

2007-10-02T15:27:00.000-07:00

On the whole, we were extremely impressed with the work sent our way for the fall issue. The fact that so many writers sent in such good material made an already meticulous and difficult process even more challenging. It was also a thrill to read so many quality pieces and to be able to consider them for our readership.

Our 18th issue is going to be a great one. As if all new fiction (six new stories, in fact, including a stunning and masterful tale by Thomas E. Kennedy), poetry (11 in all), and a few memoirs weren't enough, we've got some amazing features coming your way.

We'll be showcasing two interviews: Alice Maud Gulbrandsen (artist and writer), and an interview with the iconic writer Norman Mailer, with Michael Lee. Both of them are great, but if you read only one, don't miss the Mailer interview.

On top of the interviews, we have reviews of The Law of Falling Bodies, novelist Duff Brenna's latest work, Local Music, by Walter Cummins, and How Like an Angel, by Jack Driscoll.

If you think this sounds like a watershed issue, you're right. It's our largest yet, and it comes on the heels of our two best and most popular issues to date.

Here are the contributors, in no particular order:

Ann Borger, "Sailing into Sunset"
Ashok Niyogi, "Parable"
Barbara Ann Wade, "Queen of Celery"
Cameron Keller Scott, "Lamentations for the Traveler," and "Lamentations for the Complete Angler"
John N. Miller, "The Dispossessed"
JS Absher, "Banking On"
Katey Schultz, "Self Portrait"
Michael Steffen, "Living Lyric," and "Premature Gods"
Robin Keehn, "An Ode to my Students Writing Memoirs"
David Poe, "My Stunning Wife, Studs"
Paul Casey, "Wrong Wine"
Thomas E. Kennedy, "The Baboon Dream"
Eric D. Anderson, "Strawberry"
Gayla Chaney, "Killing Jorge Ortega Again"
Kevin P. Keating, "The Black Death of Gentile da Foligno"
James Brown, "Some Kind of Animal"
Lawrence Lawson, "So You Wanna Be A Peace Corps Volunteer?"
Steve Heller, "Pursuing Mediocrity"
James Brown, "Some Kind of Animal"

The Law of Falling Bodies

2007-09-14T14:54:00.000-07:00

Perigee Fiction Editor Duff Brenna has just released his latest novel, The Law of Falling Bodies (Hopewell Publications).

Midwest Book Review says, "Award-winning author Duff Brenna presents The Law of Falling Bodies, a novel examining the cyclical nature of wars between men, women, and countries. Fifteen-year-old Virgil Foggy is trying to eke out a living on a failing dairy farm in Minnesota. Virgil's mother is pregnant, with a potential sibling the family cannot afford to raise; Virgil's brother has joined the army and departed abroad, yet war for Virgil is a daily reality with his stepfather at home. At times grim bordering on gruesome, The Law of Falling Bodies is punctuated with stark emotional coldness, even slaughter as reflected upon the merciless killing of farm animals for food. An unforgettable reading experience."

The book is available in bookstores now, and can be ordered directly from the publisher by clicking here.

2007 Poetry Contest Now Open!

2007-08-30T09:01:00.000-07:00

Perigee is excited to announce that our annual poetry contest is now open and ready to receive your submissions. As usual, we are feeling generous. We're giving away $650 in cash prizes to the top four entries--with a whopping $300 going to the first place entry! We'll be publishing the winning entries (along with the names of any honorable mentions) in our 2008 anniversary issue. Oh, and then there's that Pushcart Nomination we're giving the winning poem.

Need more reason to submit? How about our finalist judge Joseph Millar? He'll be following in the footsteps of Judy Jordan ('04), Steve Kowit ('05), and Marvin Bell ('06).

You can submit three poems for only $10, and there is no limit to how many submissions you can make (each 3 require $10). The deadline for this contest is December 31st, 2007. We will announce the results here on February 15, 2008.

When you're ready to review the guidelines, and submit your poems, click here. We wish all of this year's participants the best of luck!

Rumors Fly

2007-08-23T16:02:00.000-07:00

The rumors are flying. Will the ever-popular Perigee Poetry Contest begin two days earlier this year? Maybe, just maybe.

We can't confirm or deny this rumor, but we can say that we are very excited about our upcoming poetry contest. Following in the footsteps of Judy Jordan ('04), Steve Kowit ('05), and Marvin Bell ('06), Joseph Millar has volunteered to be Perigee's 2007 Poetry Contest Finalist Judge!

Rumors aside, poetry is our most popular genre. And this just happens to be our most popular contest. Why open the floodgates two days earlier—on August 30th instead of September 1st? We have no idea.

But those are the rumors.

Check our site during the waning days of August, and get ready to submit your best poems, and win cash prizes and publication ... not to mention that coveted Pushcart nomination.

Kirkus Discoveries Reviews TSS

2007-08-03T08:41:00.001-07:00

Kirkus Discoveries has reviewed Traveling Sitting Still, the first collection of stories from Perigee's founding editor. Here's what Kirkus Discoveries thinks of the book:

"People struggle with fraught predicaments—or their lurid perceptions of mundane situations—in this engaging collection.

A variety of characters and conundrums fill these fleeting tales. In "Kissing Margery Clean" a middle-aged man gives a ride home to the 16-year-old daughter of the woman he loves, and encounter that suddenly escalates from mere awkwardness to rape allegations. The dark "Rabbit" follows a stoned teen make-out session in an abandoned van that turn ugly . In "Chiquita Lady," a husband loses his wife to that notorious lothario, Jesus Christ. In "Noam Chomsky for President," a germ-phobic man stuck in Los Angeles traffic is enticed out of his bubble by a free-spirited redhead sporting the titular bumper sticker. The hero in "Aggravated" takes drastic action against a cricket that's driving him crazy with its chirping. The would-be writer of "Giving Up" deliberately abandons all human contact to concentrate on his craft but doesn't escape the Fed-Ex deliveryman. Two linked stories probe a war crime—POWs forced to dig their own graves—from mirror-image viewpoints: "Ausgraben" examines the last thoughts of a World War II GI captured by the Germans, while in "Hadji," pitiless American soldiers mete out a similar fate to a captured Iraqi insurgent. "Razing the Dead" surveys an apartment complex featuring a dotty gardener with dozens of cats, a seething Vietnam vet and a graduate student with a yen for crystal meth and kinky sex, while the rather similar title story eyes a bus full of passengers, including a seductive male prostitute, a sneering punk and a philosophical wino.

Character studies with narratives that have no particular place to go, but stocked with enough vibrant detail and insight that readers won't mind going along for the ride."

www.travelingsittingstill.com