Contributor Update: Katie Flynn

The warmest of wishes to Katie M. Flynn, a previous s[r] contributor, on the recent publication of her short story collection, Island Rule! The book was published with Scout Press, and is available for purchase now wherever books are sold.

We were delighted to her that an expanded version of the story “Bury the Bird,” which was published in Superstition Review Issue 17, appears in her collection as “Disaster Kids.”

In twelve interconnected stories, Katie M. Flynn weaves the myth and pathos of contemporary America, bringing her imaginative foresight to a world in which people, places, and even animals are not always what they seem. From the seismic wealth gaps of California to the potential jeopardy of a Minnesota mortuary-turned-playground, Island Rule is about the mysterious ways we’re connected without suspecting it, about growth following decay, and about how we are shaped by and shape the world we live in – a world where humans behave like animals, and animals make their presence known. Pygmy rabbits, whales, rats, and birds change the course of the lives of libidinous college students, self-righteous joggers, and fighting sisters.

Island Rule has already received glowing reviews:

“This short-story collection mixes the mundane and the bizarre with an authority stemming from its concrete sense of place . . . the overall effect is appealingly weird, as if the uncanny valley took literary form. A compelling exercise in worldbuilding and genre blending that toggles among the recent past, present, and near future.”

Kirkus Reviews

“A wonderfully eerie collection, Island Rule haunts and delights. Flynn’s writing is taut and teeming, making a world of bone mounds and monsters as alarmingly real as teenage angst and midlife crises . . .  Island Rule revels in exploring darkness at the edges of our world, and what happens when we invite it in.”

Erika Swyler, author of The Light from Other Stars

“Flynn has been compared to the likes of Jennifer Egan and Karen Russell, but her voice is unmistakably original.”

Nob Hill Gazette

Katie M. Flynn is a writer, editor, and educator based in San Francisco. Her short fiction has appeared in the San Francisco ChronicleTin House, and Tor.com, among other publications. She has been awarded Colorado Review’s Nelligan Prize for Short Fiction, a fellowship from the San Francisco Writers Grotto, and the Steinbeck Fellowship in Creative Writing. Katie holds an MFA from the University of San Francisco and an MA in Geography from UCLA. Her first novel, The Companions, was published in March 2020, and her interconnected collection of short stories, Island Rule, came out March 2024 with Scout Press/Gallery Books.  You can find out more about Katie at katiemflynn.com.

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Contributor Update: Ute Behrend

Past Contributor Ute Behrend will be exhibiting her photographic work, “Flowers you gave to me,” with Beck & Eggeling International Fine Art from May 17th to July 13th 2024.

The exhibition, following the theme of “The bouquet of flowers, the ephemeral splendor,” is curated by artist Hartmut Neumann, who focuses on the bouquet of flowers—as an artistic installation that precedes photography—as a central theme.

In an ambivalent way, I make fun of the fact that women dream of men they are in love with standing outside the door with flowers, because they are also in love with THEM. The flowers are in the foreground. The men are out of focus. The bouquets are very select. 

With these pictures I am creating a collection of men “who are in love with me.” The bouquets are preserved through the photo. And with them, the memory of the moment of falling in love.

Ute Behrend

You can view her photographs, “Ballons,” “Horses Near the Lake,” and “Girl with Sheep” in Issue 17.

Ute Behrend is a German artist, publisher and visual editor. She is co-founder of BUMMBUMM BOOKS publishing and a member of the DGPH. She is also a member of the presidium of the German Photographic Academy (DFA). Behrend’s photographs and video installations have been exhibited internationally and are part of numerous public collections. She published her first book “Girls some Boys and Other Cookies” with Scalo Publishers in Zurich in 1996, and has since written 7 other books, including most recently “Cows and Cars.” Her work has received many awards, including the Julia Margaret Cameron Award, the German Photo Book Prize, and the Merck Prize. You can find out more about Ute Behrend on her website.

Contributor Update: Ayşe Papatya Bucak

We at Superstition Review are pleased to highlight past contributor Ayşe Papatya Bucak’s upcoming speaking event at the Calvin Center for Faith and Writing’s “2024 Festival of Faith & Writing.”

The biennial conference is running April 11-13th, in-person at Calvin University in Grand Rapids, Michigan. It is “a three-day celebration of literature and belief” bringing together over 2,000 people of different faiths.

You can register for the conference here.

Ayşe’s interview with Superstition Review about her book, The Trojan War Museum and Other Stories can be read in Issue 25.

Ayşe Papatya Bucak is the author of The Trojan War Museum and Other Stories, which was shortlisted for the 2020 PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize for Debut Short Story Collection. Two of the stories in the book were also selected for the O. Henry and Pushcart Prize anthologies. Her writing has been published in a variety of journals, including One StoryGuernicaBombCreative NonfictionWitnessKenyon ReviewPrairie SchoonerThe PinchThe Iowa Review, and Brevity. Bucak was born in Istanbul, Turkey to an American mother and a Turkish father, but spent most of her childhood in Havertown, Pennsylvania just outside of Philadelphia. She holds a BA from Princeton University and an MFA from Arizona State University. She is an associate professor at Florida Atlantic University in Boca Raton, Florida, and a contributing editor for the journal Copper Nickel. You can find out more about Ayşe on her website.

Contributor Update: Claire Polders

Congratulations to previous contributor Claire Polders! DIAGRAM recently published three of her micro-memoirs. You can read them here.

They’re about murder as a protective force, the significant sound of lines slapping against masts, and childhood shame.

Her nonfiction piece, “Seven is the Hour of Water” can be read in Issue 31, and her short story, “Fistfuls,” can be read in Issue 17. She has also contributed an Author Talk which you can listen to on our blog.

Note from the author:

“Other authors might be interested to know that being persistent can pay off. I submitted my first flash fiction to DIAGRAM in 2015. It got rejected. I’ve sent them ten other pieces since. They were either rejected or withdrawn by me (and published elsewhere). But this year the editors and I agreed that DIAGRAM was the perfect home for these essays. I thank the editors for publishing my work and thank you all for reading!”

If you want to follow Claire’s adventures, she has launched a newsletter featuring travel-related personal essays which you can sign up for here.

Claire Polders grew up in the Netherlands and now roams the world. She’s the author of four novels in Dutch, one novel for younger readers (A Whale in Paris, Simon & Schuster), and many short stories and essays. Recurrent themes in her writing are identity, feminism, social justice, traveling, and death. She works on a memoir about elder abuse, a speculative novel, and a short prose collection. You can find out more about Claire on her website and social media: f x i g in

Contributor Update: Cameron Barnett

Congratulations to past Superstition Review contributor, Cameron Barnett, on the upcoming publication of his second poetry collection, Murmur. The collection is available now from Autumn House Press!

The second book by NAACP Image Award finalist Cameron Barnett, Murmur considers the question of how we become who we are. The answers Barnett offers in these poems are neither safe nor easy, as he traces a Black man’s lineage through time and space in contemporary America, navigating personal experiences, political hypocrisies, pop culture, social history, astronomy, and language. Barnett synthesizes unexpected connections and contradictions, exploring the Tulsa Race Massacre of 1921 and the death of Terence Crutcher in 2016 and searching both the stars of Andromeda and a plantation in South Carolina. A diagnosis from the poet’s infancy haunts the poet as he wonders, “like too many Black men,” if “a heart is not enough to keep me alive.”

The collection includes two poems first published by s[r]. “Muck,” and the titular “Murmur,” can be read in Issue 22.

Murmur is already receiving attention and praise:

Cameron Barnett’s Murmur is in fact a glorious shout. These poems shake up histories, both intimate and political. They stir and disturb the ways we look at love, at race, at our people and ourselves. A bold, beautiful, and brilliant collection!

Deesha Philyaw, author of The Secret Lives of Church Ladies

“‘Murmur’ plays jazz on the spinal cord.”

Monica Prince, poet and author of Roadmap: a Choreopoem

“With poems spanning histories, both personal and collective, and poems that center Blackness as a site of joy, promise, pain, and possibilities, these poems compel us toward knowledge we are deeply implicated in.”

M. Soledad Caballero, author of I Was a Bell

Cameron Barnett is a poet and teacher from Pittsburgh. He is the author of The Drowning Boy’s Guide to Water, the winner of the Autumn House Press Rising Writer Prize and a finalist for an NAACP Image Award. He is a graduate of Duquesne University and earned an MFA in creative writing from the University of Pittsburgh. Other honors include a 2019 Carol R. Brown Creative Achievement Award for Emerging Artist and serving as the ’22-’24 Emerging Black Writer in Residence at Chatham University. Cameron teaches at his middle school alma mater, Falk Laboratory School. His work explores the complexity of race, place, and relationships for Black people in America. His work can be found on his website and social media: x i.

Contributor Update: Sloane Crosley

Congratulations to previous contributor Sloane Crosley on her new memoir Grief Is for People. The memoir goes on sale February 27th, 2024 but you can pre-order it from her website here.

Grief Is for People is a deeply moving and surprisingly suspenseful portrait of friendship and a book about loss packed with a verve for life. Sloane Crosley is one of our most renowned observers of contemporary behavior, and now, the pathos that has been ever-present in her trademark wit is on full display. After the pain and confusion of losing her closest friend to suicide, Crosley looks for answers in friends, philosophy, and art, hoping for a framework more useful than the unavoidable stages of grief.

For most of her adult life, Sloane and Russell worked together and played together, as they navigated the corridors of office life, the literary world, and the dramatic cultural shifts in New York City. One day, while Russell is still alive, Sloane’s apartment is broken into. Along with her most prized possessions, the thief makes off with her sense of security, leaving a mystery in its place.

When Russell dies exactly one month later, his suicide propels her on a wild quest to right the unrightable, to explore what constitutes family and possession as the city itself faces the staggering toll brought on by the pandemic.

Crosley’s search for truth is frank, darkly funny, and gilded with a resounding empathy. Upending the “grief memoir,” Grief Is for People is the category-defying story of the struggle to hold on to the past without being consumed by it. A modern elegy, it rises precisely to console and challenge our notions of mourning during these grief-stricken times.

Crosley has received astounding reviews for this piece:

“[An] aching meditation on loss and friendship… Crosley elegantly links the two losses by explaining how her fevered desire to reclaim her burglarized items stood in for her inability to reclaim Russel. Her characteristically whip-smart prose takes on a newly introspective quality as she reinvigorates dusty publishing memoir tropes and captures the minutiae of a complicated friendship with humor and heart. This is a must-read.”

—Publishers Weekly

“Novelist and essayist Crosley is a tightrope writer of devastating wit and plain devastation, a balancing act no doubt requiring even more muscle in this memoir of her grief…Also a story of the shifting sands of the last two decades in book publishing and the author’s and her friend’s changing places within it, this is a searching, impassioned, cathartic, and loving elegy.”

—Booklist

Sloane Crosley is the author of The New York Times bestselling essay collections, I Was Told There’d Be Cake (a 2009 finalist for The Thurber Prize for American Humor) and How Did You Get This Number, as well as Look Alive Out There (a 2019 finalist for The Thurber Prize for American Humor) and the bestselling novels, The Clasp and Cult Classic. She served as editor of The Best American Travel Writing series and is featured in The Library of America’s 50 Funniest American Writers, The Best American Nonrequired Reading, Phillip Lopate’s The Contemporary American Essay and others. She was the inaugural columnist for The New York Times Op-Ed “Townies” series, a contributing editor at Interview Magazine, and a columnist for The Village Voice, Vanity Fair, The Independent, Black Book, Departures and The New York Observer.

Superstition Review did an interview with Crosley in issue 7, you can access that here. To learn more about her and her work, visit her website here.

Contributor Update: Lisa Ko

Congratulations to past contributor Lisa Ko, who has a new novel coming out in March! The novel is titled Memory Piece and will be available for purchase March 19th, 2024. Visit Penguin Random House for preorder information.

In the early 1980s, Giselle Chin, Jackie Ong, and Ellen Ng are three teenagers drawn together by their shared sense of alienation and desire for something different. “Allied in the weirdest parts of themselves,” they envision each other as artistic collaborators and embark on a future defined by freedom and creativity.

By the time they are adults, their dreams are murkier. As a performance artist, Giselle must navigate an elite social world she never conceived of. As a coder thrilled by the internet’s early egalitarian promise, Jackie must contend with its more sinister shift toward monetization and surveillance. And as a community activist, Ellen confronts the increasing gentrification and policing overwhelming her New York City neighborhood. Over time their friendship matures and changes, their definitions of success become complicated, and their sense of what matters evolves.

Moving from the predigital 1980s to the art and tech subcultures of the 1990s to a strikingly imagined portrait of the 2040s, Memory Piece is an innovative and audacious story of three lifelong friends as they strive to build satisfying lives in a world that turns out to be radically different from the one they were promised.

This novel has received outstanding reviews:

“A moving, strikingly evocative exploration of New York’s art, tech, and activism scenes across the decades.”

Vogue, Best books of 2024

“Lisa Ko has brought us one of those rare, sumptuous tales of art and friendship that feels both universal and inimitable.”

Elle, Best (and most anticipated) Fiction Books of 2024

“This novel serves as an archive of our past and a vision for what’s to come, hauntingly beautiful in a way that’s both nostalgic and dystopian. In essence Memory Piece is about the power of remembering, especially when it’s painful.”

Booklist

Lisa Ko is the author of the nationally bestselling novel The Leavers, which was a finalist for the National Book Award for Fiction and the PEN/Hemingway Award, and winner of the 2016 PEN/Bellwether Prize for Socially Engaged Fiction. Ko’s short fiction has appeared in The Best American Short Stories and her essays and nonfiction have been published in The New York Times and The Believer.

Superstition Review did an interview with Ko in issue 21, you can view that here. To learn more about Ko and her work visit her website here.

Contributor Update: Barbara Crooker

We at Superstition Review would like to congratulate Barbara Crooker on the release of her new book Slow Wreckage!

The poems in this collection consider the “slow wreckage” that comes with advancing years. As well as considering the travails of an aging individual, Barbara Crooker uses a wider lens to examine the damages inflicted by society and its failings. And through it all, or despite it all, Crooker finds beauty and hope in the physical world. In Slow Wreckage, she writes with candor, irony, and ultimately, love.

This collection has received notable praise:

“Barbara Crooker ushers us seamlessly into each moment, whether it happened last spring or fifty years ago. Though on the surface, Slow Wreckage might seem to be about aging and loss, Crooker brings us back again and again to the physical pleasures of being alive, in spite of surgeries and intense pain, in spite of those ‘delicious burdens’ we must carry each day… Her expansive, honest, and clear-eyed poems are exactly the medicine we need to ‘love in these dangerous times.’,”

—James Crews, author of Unlocking the heart: writing for mindfulness, creativity, and self-compassion

“For years I have been an admirer of Barbara Crooker’s poems, her voice and intelligence, its truth and grounded vision offering such specific attention to the world. Slow Wreckage raises her poetic project to yet higher ground, interrogating irony, wit, humor, and metaphysical cast into the difficulties we all come to in age-the scope and range of this collection is remarkable. These poems take up loss and well as love, yet resonate ultimately with praise and thanks, singing authentically as all the best poetry does.”

—Christopher Buckley, author of One Sky to the Next

Barbara Crooker is the author of twelve chapbooks and nine previous full-length books of poetry. A recent collection, Some Glad Morning, was longlisted for the Julie Suk award from Jacar Press. Her previous collection, The Book of Kellls, won the Best Poetry Book of 2019 Award from Poetry by the Sea. Her other awards include: Grammy Spoken Word Finalist, the WB Yeats Society of New York Award, the Thomas Merton Poetry of the Sacred Award, and three Pennsylvania Council fellowships in literature.

Barbara has three poems featured in Issue 2 of Superstition Review. You can view more of Barbara’s work on her website here, and purchase Slow Wreckage here.

K-pop. Literary. Phenomenon. Contributor Update: Christine Ma-Kellams

Congratulations to previous contributor Christine Ma-Kellams on the upcoming publication of her novel, The Band! On April 16th, 2024, readers will be able to purchase her book from Atria Books.

“Talent is a burden for which the only relief is attention.”

(But is it paying attention or giving it?) the footnote asks. The Band is a novel that melds the literary and the self-aware. Five K-pop idols rise to unparalleled fame. One disappears. What is the difference between love and paying attention? And what do we miss regardless of how close we think we are watching? Christine Ma-Kellams’ work is humming with insight and connections. The story itself is supremely aware of its existence within a canonalbeit one that includes the Bible alongside Grand Theft Auto V. Often situating itself to other elements of culture, The Band effortlessly stands apart as one of the most unconventional reads of 2024.

Ma-Kellams’ novel has already received well-deserved praise:

“This could very well be the first great K-Pop literary phenomenon.”

Debutiful, Most Anticipated Books of 2024

“No one else could have written this book.”

—Loan LE, Senior Editor at Atria Books

Ma-Kellams’ short story, “Chazzy,” can be found in Issue 19 of Superstition Review.

Christine Ma-Kellams is a Harvard-trained cultural psychologist, Pushcart-nominated fiction writer, and first-generation American. Her work and writing have appeared in Huffpost, Chicago Tribune, Catapult, Salon, The Wall Street Journal, The Rumpus, and much more. The Band is her first novel. You can find her in person in one of California’s coastal cities or online at ChristineMa-Kellams.com.