In Print

Don Palumbo's review of Peter Wright's Attending Daedalus: Gene Wolfe, Artifice, and the Reader in the April issue of The Journal of Popular Culture (39.2).  From the publisher, Liverpool University Press: "This new study of the fiction of Gene Wolfe, one of the most influential contemporary American science fiction writers, offers a major reinterpretation of Gene Wolfe's four-volume The Book of the New Sun and its sequel The Urth of the New Sun.  After exposing the concealed story at the heart of Wolfe's magnum opus, Wright adopts a variety of approaches to establish that Wolfe is the designer of an intricate textual labyrinth intended to extend his thematic preoccupations with subjectivity, the unreliability of memory, the manipulation of individuals by social and political systems, and the psychological potency of myth, faith and symbolism into the reading experience."

Roger C. Schlobin's "The Z in a Tree" appears in Sport Z Magazine (Spring) 2006.  Schlobin tells the tale of "how an Emerald City [Greenville] Z club member put his race car very high up in a pine tree during the 1991 Chimney Rock Hillclimb."

Bryan Oesterreich's article "Island Treasures" appears in the May issue of Our State Magazine.  Oesterreich reports on The Adventure Museum and the Outer Banks History Center on Roanaoke island in Manteo. Oesterreich's journal essay "Sailing the Elizabeth II" was published in the April issue of Our State.  The essays recounts the experience of being in the photo pictured here -- a sailing voyage on a beautiful October day from Ocracoke to Bath as part of Bath's Tricentennial Celebration.

Will Banks's essay "The Values of Queer-Jacketing: What Happens When Student-Writers Go Gay?" appeared in the new peer-reviewed journal MEAT: A Journal of Materiality and Writing (March) 2006. According to Banks: "This essay examines how heterosexually-identified students establish credible ethoi when they are required by class assignments to enact a gay, lesbian, bisexual, or transgender subjectivity in writing."  The sources for this essay began in Banks's "Gender and the Humanities" course in which " ... students wrote 'coming out' narratives that they then analyzed based on the rhetorical tropes ... discussed in the narratives of professional LGBT writers."  In the essay,  Banks argues that "this sort of literacy work enacts a Levinasian ethics that foregrounds relationships with the Other.  More specifically, this essay evinces a 'success' story of a student who used assignments in class to work through some of his own homophobia."

Hal Snyder's review of Annals of the World: James Ussher's Classic Survey of World History by James Ussher (Master Books, 2003) appeared on the review pages of Amazon.com.  See: http://www.amazon.com/gp/cdp/member-reviews/A2N0F8LE2R82NZ/002-5734761-3620868?_encoding=UTF8

The Wisteria Review, Volume 1 debuted on March 29, 2006, at a reading featuring graduate creative writing students.  According to Leanne Smith: "The debut was timely since in the same week, the local wisteria began blooming."  The publication began as a class project for Pat Bizzaro's Spring 2005 "Literature from the Writer's Perspective" course (ENGL 6870), which focused on the development of little magazines in America.  The class consisted of students from several concentrations in the Department of English, who compiled fiction, nonfiction, and poetry into an anthology that became The Wisteria Review.  The editorial staff for Volume 1 includes: Pat Bizzaro, Resa Bizzaro, Eugene L. Tinklepaugh, and Marla Vinson (Advising Editors); Anthony James Holsten (Fiction Editor); Nadielka Bishop and Tommi Powell (Nonfiction Editors); Chris Young (Poetry Editor); and Leanne Smith (Production Editor).  The anthology includes fiction by Chris Flowers, Anthony James Holsten, Ryan Johnson, Shaquanna Johnson, Edward Mann, Carl Powers, Buddy Shay, Eugene L. Tinklepaugh; nonfiction by Nadielka Bishop, Michael J. Hasty, Tommi Powell, Deborah Shoop, and Leanne Smith; poetry by Michael e. Ashby, Laura Bokus, and Chris Young; interior illustrations by Erica Plouffe Lazure; and a cover illustration by Leanne Smith. Pat Bizzaro, Bill Hallberg, and Luke Whisnant have adopted the anthology as a textbook for their poetry and fiction classes in Fall 2006.  Contact: TheWisteriaReview@gmail.com

Peter Makuck's review-essay "The Holy Quotidian" appears in the current issue of The Laurel Review (Winter) 2005.  Makuck considered two poetry collections: Philip Terman's Book of the Unbroken Days (Mammoth Books, 2002) and Craig Challender's Dancing on Water (Pecan Grove Press, 2003).  Philip Terman is also the author of What Survives (Sow's Press, 1993), and The House of Sages (Mammoth Books, 1998). His poems and essays have appeared in many journals, including Poetry, The Kenyon Review, The New England Review, and The Gettysburg Review.  He is the recipient of The Anna Davidson Award for Poems on the Jewish Experience, the Sow's Press Chapbook Prize, and the Kenneth Patchen Award.  He teaches creative writing and literature at Clarion University of Pennsylvania.  Craig Challender teaches American Literature and Creative Writing at Longwood University in Farmville, VA, where he also directs the Longwood College Authors Series.  His first full-length collection Familiar Things (Linwood) was published in 1997.

Makuck's review of Dominic Smith's first novel The Mercury Visions of Louis Daguerre (Atria Books, 2006) appeared in the Raleigh News & Observer on April 16.  From the publisher: "When the vision came, he was in the bathtub.  So begins the madness of Louis Daguerre.  In 1847, after a decade of using poisonous mercury vapors to cure his daguerreotype images, his mind is plagued by delusions.  Believing the world will end within one year, Daguerre creates his 'Doomsday List' -- ten items he must photograph before the final day.  The list includes a portrait of Isobel Le Fournier, a woman he has always loved but not spoken to in half a century.  In this luminous debut novel, Dominic Smith reinvents the life of one of photography's founding fathers.  Louis Daguerre's story is set against the backdrop of a Paris prone to bohemian excess and social unrest. Poets and dandies debate art and style in the cafes while students and rebels fill the garrets with revolutionary talk and gun smoke.  It is here, amid this strange and beguiling setting, that Louis Daguerre sets off to capture his doomsday subjects.  Louis enlists the help of the womanizing poet Charles Baudelaire, known to the salon set as the "Prince of Clouds," and a jaded but beautiful prostitute named Pigeon.  Together they scour the Paris underworld for images worthy of Daguerre's list.  But Louis is also confronted by a chance to reunite with the only woman he's ever loved.  Half a lifetime ago, Isobel Le Fournier kissed Louis Daguerre in a wine cave outside of Orleans.  The result was a proposal, a rejection, and a misunderstanding that outlasted three kings and an emperor.  Now, in the countdown to his apocalypse, Louis wants to understand why he has carried the memory of that kiss for so long."