News from the Division of Languages and Literature

Phuc Tran’s first book, Sigh, Gone: A Misfit’s Memoir of Great Books, Punk Rock, and the Fight to Fit In, was published by Flatiron Books in April 2020. It is, in Tran’s words, “a memoir about growing up in a rural Pennsylvania town as a nerdy, Asian punk rocker who would eventually become a Latin-teaching tattooer.”

Conjunctions, the celebrated literary magazine published by Bard College, has been awarded a 2020 Whiting Literary Magazine Prize. Since 2018, a total of 13 literary magazines have won this prize for excellence in publishing, advocacy for writers, and a unique contribution to the strength of the overall literary community. Conjunctions has propelled literature forward for four decades by publishing groundbreaking fiction, poetry, plays, and creative nonfiction that marry visionary imagination with formally innovative execution. Each issue illuminates a complex theme—such as exile, desire, the body, or climate change—in a book-length format that gives space to long-form work and a multitude of perspectives. From its home in Bard College, Conjunctions and its founding editor, Bradford Morrow, have earned recognition for uplifting both new writers and contemporary masters who challenge convention.

“Every issue of Conjunctions is a feat of curatorial invention, continuing the Modernist project of dense, economical writing, formal innovation, and an openness to history and the world,” the Whiting judges commented. “Its longevity is a testament to its cultural staying power. Organized around a unifying idea, each issue stitches together work by storytellers and scholars to create a fluid and expansive survey of our most pressing human concerns.”

“The 2020 Whiting Literary Magazine Prize could not have come at a more significant time for Conjunctions, which will be celebrating its fortieth anniversary in the coming year,” said Bradford Morrow, Editor of Conjunctions and professor of literature at Bard. “The pandemic has inflicted unprecedented challenges on all of us, including literary journals and writers, and thanks to the Whiting Foundation, Conjunctions will be able to continue publishing both our print and online journals without interruption. This grant will enable us to broaden and deepen our ongoing search for innovative poetry, fiction, essays, and multi-genre works by those who write fearlessly, and greatly strengthen our outreach to those who, as we at Conjunctions like to say, read dangerously.”

Morrow gave special thanks to those who supported Conjunctions’ Whiting application. “I want to take the opportunity also to express my gratitude to our former managing editor, Nicole Nyhan, for all her hard work on the application to the Whiting Foundation,” he said. “And to the three writers who shall remain unnamed, my thanks for graciously writing letters of support on our behalf.”

The Whiting Literary Magazine Prizes were launched in 2018 to acknowledge, reward, and encourage the publications that are actively nurturing the writers who tell us, through their art, what is important. The purpose of the prizes is first and foremost to recognize excellence, and also to help outstanding magazines reach new audiences, find new sources of revenue, and travel the path to sustainability and growth. The matching grants in years two and three are intended to give these publications enough runway to make serious progress toward achieving these goals. For more information about the Whiting Foundation, visit whiting.org.

Edited by Bradford Morrow and published twice yearly by Bard College, Conjunctions publishes innovative fiction, poetry, and creative nonfiction by emerging voices and contemporary masters. For nearly four decades, Conjunctions has challenged accepted forms and styles, with equal emphasis on groundbreaking experimentation and rigorous execution. The Washington Post says, “Conjunctions offers a showplace for some of the most exciting and demanding writers now at work.” Named a “Top Literary Magazine 2019” by Reedsy, the journal was a finalist for both the 2018 and 2019 ASME Award for Fiction and the 2018 CLMP Firecracker Award for General Excellence. In addition, contributions to recent issues have been selected for The Best American Essays (2018, 2019), The Pushcart Prize XLIV: Best of the Small Presses, Best American Experimental Writing 2020, Best Small Fictions 2019, and The Year’s Best Dark Fantasy & Horror: 2019.

For more information on the latest issue, please visit conjunctions.com/print/archive/conjunctions74. To order a copy, go to annandaleonline.org/conjunctions, call the Conjunctions office at 845-758-7054, e-mail [email protected], or write to Conjunctions, Bard College, PO Box 5000, Annandale-on-Hudson, NY 12504-5000. Visit the Conjunctions website at conjunctions.com.

[Note to editors: To obtain review copies, please call Mark Primoff at 845-758-7412 or e-mail [email protected].]
 

“At a national level, we’ve been acting for so many years as if what we were doing would never have consequences, in our political lives, in our attitude toward the environment, race, everything, and now it’s exploding all simultaneously, and that is sort of Sophoclean,” Professor Mendelsohn tells the Quarantine Tapes podcast with Paul Holdengraber. “This is what tragedy is interested in. It’s interested the return of everything that you thought you could evade, and, for that reason, I think, so to speak, we’re in a very Greek moment, or one that the Greeks would have understood.”

“I think the whole idea of the special relationship of the Anglo-Saxon peoples was a romantic conceit, cooked up by Churchill, in order to get the Americans to join in the war, without which Germany could not have been defeated,” says Buruma. “I think there is very little of that kind of sentiment left. The war has been over for a long time and Britain’s power has dwindled so much that it’s of low-grade interest to whomever is in power in the U.S.”

On the occasion of Blueprint’s translation into English, Wilk and Enzensberger talk about “how to write Nazi characters who aren’t clichés; about reviving the legacy of overlooked women artists and architects; about why fiction can be truer than reality—and about how our current political debates and challenges are not so far from those of 100 years ago.” Wilk, whose first novel, Oval, was published in 2019, is a contributing editor at e-flux Journal and a 2020 fellow in the Transformations of the Human program at the Berggruen Institute. Enzensberger, a freelance journalist who lives in Berlin, is the founder of the award-winning BLOCK Magazin.

Borderlines contributing editor Simon Conrad speaks with Professor Holt about her book Fictitious Capital: Silk, Cotton, and the Rise of the Arabic Novel, which reads early Arabic novels of late 19th- and 20th-century Beirut and Cairo as fictions of global finance in the Eastern Mediterranean. 

“Born and bred in the Bronx, this talented scholar/author (an assistant professor of literature at Bard College) deftly and vividly examines the realities and myths of the Bronx’s extremes: civic neglect, crime, and urban decay, even ruin, versus cultural innovation and an outstanding artistic legacy,” writes Mark Favermann.

“Our profoundly serious problems – racism, income inequality, to name just two – will be hard to fix, but it turns out to be horrifyingly easy to worsen them,” writes Prose in The Guardian. “Americans need to rethink the idea – and the fear – of harming and being harmed by neighbors with differently colored skins and differently colored signs in their yards. Republicans and Democrats alike, it’s our civic duty – our moral duty – to resist the violence and the terrifying vision of our country, an image on which their Republicans are basing their hopes for re-election: a nation that needs an iron hand to protect us from one another.”