I was first drawn to the novel Lolita, at the age of sixteen or seventeen, not f or its literary merit, nor even for its salacious reputation. Quite simply, I had read somewhere that its author was, like me, a grapheme-color synesthete: someone who perceives letters and numbers as being inherently colored. I had possessed [...]
I sit on my hotel bed and say some kind of prayer, an eight word utterance I’ve imagined seemingly out of nowhere in the last few days in order to keep at bay the worst I can imagine. I say it when my body seems to fail me with a grand fatigue and deep depression [...]
Rusty Morrison’s second collection of poems, the true keeps calm biding its story, is one of the most exciting collections of poems I’ve recently come across. On entering the collection one feels submerged in an immense, ineffable loss. The poet takes the loss on like a master, utilizing the structure of the telegram to send [...]
Right now, our representatives and senators and president are engaged in talks over the debt ceiling, the national budget, and how to end the pernicious recession that has lingered over a sizeable chunk of this writer’ s adult life. People are out of work, and the economy is in the toilet. Is this the way [...]
In the great applauseless, 3 a.m., early gray of suburban Maryland, there’s just the steady drone of the streetlights outside my hotel window. I’m only an hour ahead in time zone but I feel miles and hours away from home and Emily, who has stayed behind because she can’t fly because the baby will be [...]
This isn’t timely, nor is it apropos of something else. It’s just a fascinating conversation between two of cinema’s greatest artists, Jean-Luc Godard and Woody Allen. I happened upon it after a friend shared a 1970s or 80s commercial for Schick aftershave directed by Godard (yes, really — tres chic, tres Schick), which led me to [...]
I’m no preacher nor am I a teetotaler, but I know that the fourth step of Alcoholics Anonymous states that after “we’ve admitted to being powerless over alcohol”, and after we came to believe in a Power greater than ourselves, and had made a decision to turn our lives over to It, however we knew [...]
Poetry is a genre of writing whose audience is generally limited to its practitioners. That is, the largest population of readers for most practicing poets is other practicing poets. Poets like to get together and bitch about this, bemoaning a lack of education about poetry in elementary and high schools, or the over-intellectualization of poetry, [...]
“I’m afraid of dying.” She moves over to me and rubs my bald head, bald from the intensive, 21-day experimental treatment I’ve undergone to try and choke my deathless cancer. “I don’t know when I got to be so afraid again, but here I am.” “Things have changed, right? I mean, things have changed. Our [...]
Unreliability Across Oceans: Miroslav Penkov’s debut story collection, East of the West Generally speaking, unreliable narrators tend to stump student readers, naïve and experienced alike. While bookworms notice implicit characterization, ponder subtle themes, and discern the meaning of motifs, they often believe they can trust a story’s narrator. In the two times that I have taught [...]
[capti on id=”attachment_2694″ align=”alignright” width=”300″ caption=”By fox_kiyo via flickr”][/caption] When we published the summer issue of Contrary two days ago, we had less than $2 in the bank. We’ve been scraping by since the recession hit, but this marked the first time we had published an issue without knowing how we’d pay for it. Scary, [...]
“Either foreswear fucking others or the affair is over,” said Drenka Balich to her lover, Mickey Sabbath, at the start of Philip Roth’s 1995 book, Sabbath’s Theater. That book began a streak of award-winning novels for the author, earning him every major literary prize in the world of literary prizes. In the p ast 50 ye [...]
The Summer Contrary is published and we have an early deadline for Autumn. The details: “Vaucluse” by Laura Elizabeth Woollett is one of the finest pieces of very short fiction we’ve ever received. Laura Elizabeth Woollett is an undergraduate student and writer from Melbourne, Australia. Set your sidereal drive on her now and watch her star [...]
Burning is learning. That’s what our guide at Varanasi’s burning ghats told me and my sister as we stood along the Ganges River, inhaling the smoke and dreams of the formerly alive. I was twenty-eight years old. I thought that life would get easier as I got older. That love would be as natural as [...]