[Reader-list] Almost Island: A New Literary Magazine

[Vivek Narayanan]

Dear friends,

Please find the first issue of ALMOST ISLAND now online at: 
http://www.almostisland.com/


Almost Island  is a new literary magazine, edited by Sharmistha Mohanty, 
with Vivek Narayanan as consulting editor.  Based in India, we are 
resolutely international in scope and conception.  We are dedicated to 
distinctive, essential, innovative, exploratory writing, with special 
emphasis on the internal and the philosophical.  Each new issue will 
endeavour to publish a substantial selection of work as an introduction 
to a small number of writers.  There will also be shorter updates to the 
issue each month.  All texts are available both on screen and as pdf 
downloads.


IN THE FIRST ISSUE:

The inaugural issue of Almost Island is all PROSE, but this includes 
poems in prose, and a wide variety of styles, forms and approaches.  
Find here a range of alternatives to what your average mass-marketed 
prose machines are serving up:

[Contributors listed in alphabetical order]

Sarah Shun-Lien Bynum, from Madeleine Is Sleeping :
Excerpts from one of the most unusual novels to be shortlisted for the 
National Book Award: a darkly sexual and even perverse fable written in 
rich, distinctive and ringing language.


Cybermohalla, What Is It that Flows Between Us :
Three texts by members of Ankur / Sarai-CSDS's Cybermohalla labs.  True 
views of Delhi from the inside, intense, navigating steadily and 
intently away from categories and easy narratives of heroism and 
victimhood, and from the cliched seductions of traditional narratives 
altogether--explorations without "the weight of presentation within".


Mikhail Epstein , from Cries in the New Wilderness
Excerpts from the "cult classic" by one of Russia's quirkiest and most 
original contemporary philosophers: an ethnographic catalogue of shadowy 
religious cults that may or may not have existed, hidden in the folds of 
the former Soviet Union--purportedly taken from the files of Moscow's  
erstwhile "Institute of Atheism".


David Herd, from Mandelson! Mandelson! and The Hut
Is it actually possible to keep it real in the age of manipulative 
images, compulsive consumption and panacea-peddlers?  What is the price 
we pay for our cynicism?  In the most contemporary language, with a 
light touch but one completely free of easy sentimentalism, these poems 
and fictions ask the ancientest of questions, and make a strong case, 
despite despair, for the return of enthusiasm.  David Herd's writings 
somehow make you feel happier: a rare effect in literature.


Kent Johnson, I Once Met and 33 Rules for Poets Under 23
Two works from one of the most subversive and, in fact, serious writers: 
a warm, various and often naughty encyclopaedic embrace of poets famous 
and obscure; and unflinching advice for young poets, after the Chilean 
poet Nicanor Parra.


James Alan McPherson, Going Up to Atlanta
A relentlessly honest and searching improvisatory memoir, that explores 
uncertain recollections of racial discrimination and the rise and fall 
and rise of a family, that seeks to answer the question, "Can the 
offspring ennoble the ancestor?"  From one of America's most important 
writers of short stories and literary non-fiction, and a past winner of 
the Putlitzer Prize.


Tosa Motokiyu, The Strange Account of 'A True Account of Talking to the 
Sun at Fire Island'
A fascinating and ambiguous "critical fiction", curiously fusing 
together elements of literary criticism, memoir and detective parody, 
proposing, with disturbing, factual and convincing circumstantial 
evidence, that Frank O'Hara was not quite the author you thought he 
was.  It does make you wonder.


Srikanth Reddy, Voyager
In this long excerpt from his current project, a book length poem 
composed of sentences, Srikanth Reddy continues to consider our world 
and its total history as if through some kind of new, intensified lens, 
both passionate and estranged, both lyrical and aphoristic by turns, 
working from first principles, asking, it would seem to us, what is 
world, what is looking, what is representation, what is time, what is 
sequence?


Rodrigo Rey Rosa, The Proof and The Truth
Simple, violent, ruthless, and deeply disturbing philosophical tales, 
inevitable and irrefutable, by one of Guatemala's most respected 
writers.  Translated by Paul Bowles.


George Szirtes, 6 Prose Poems
New work from the major Hungarian-British poet and translator, winner of 
the TS Eliot prize for his luminous Reel-- varied, typically 
understated, and patient but insistently, methodically, weird.  Suddenly 
things are not so solid, or so clear.  Suddenly you no longer know where 
you are.


Eliot Weinberger, The Rhinoceros
A rare and carefully modulated elegy for  the rhinoceros, collaging 
images, hearsay, myth and history, starting with the arrival of the 
first rhinoceros in Europe 1300 years after the fall of Rome.  
Weinberger is, among many other things, well known as the translator of 
Octavio Paz and Borges; his innovative essays read like hidden, 
empirical poems.  The Rhinoceros is from his new book of "serial 
essays", An Elemental Thing.  


For questions, suggestions, comments and errata, and to join this, our 
occasional newsletter, please write to:  editor [at-sign] almostisland 
[dot] com

If you are receiving this email, you have already been added to the 
newsletter, which will appear sporadically, never more than once a 
month.  If you would not like to receive this newsletter at this email 
address, please do write to us at the address above, and we will 
promptly take you off the list.

Happy Reading!
The Almost Island Team

-- 
www.sarai.net

Vivek Narayanan
The Sarai Programme 
Centre for the Study of Developing Societies
29,Rajpur Road, 
Civil Lines
Delhi 110 054.