Contributors
H. V. Chao’s fiction has appeared in The Kenyon Review, West Branch, Epiphany, The Antigonish Review, The Nashwaak Review, The Coachella Review, Brèves, and Le Visage Vert. He is at work on a short story collection called Guises.
Berit Ellingsen is a Korean-Norwegian writer whose stories have appeared in Unstuck, SmokeLong Quarterly, elimae, Metazen, and other literary journals. Her short story collection, Beneath the Liquid Skin, was published by firthFORTH Books in 2012. She was also nominated for the Pushcart Prize and the British Science Fiction Award in 2012. Berit’s novel, The Empty City (Jnana Press, 2011) has been translated into French by François Bon (Une Ville Vide, Publie, 2013).
Surrealist, Oulipian, satrap of the College of Pataphysics, Jean Ferry (1906-1974) was primarily a screenwriter in his day, best known for his collaborations with Clouzot, Buñuel, Malle, and Franju. He was also the greatest specialist of his day in the works of Proust’s neighbor, Raymond Roussel. His stories have appeared in Weird Fiction Review and The Coffin Factory, and are forthcoming in Anomalous and Tin House. “Letter to a Stranger,” first published in Le Mécanicien (Gallimard, 1953 ; Finitude, 2011) and here translated by Edward Gauvin, will soon be published in The Conductor and Other Tales (Wakefield, 2013).
Kinton Ford says: “If I tried writing something of any length with Doug Nufer’s Never Again (his undisputed champion, 192-page novel) constraint, an extensive dictionary for culling, cutting, pasting from would probably be my most important resource against repetition. Which makes me realize how interestingly this amazing, spiraling, self-blocking mode pressures the type/token distinction. Pronouns are still okay, yielding (as they usually do) innocuous coreference. But only once; then your last feeble shift is synonomy, among primal proper nouns. Every such word (verbs also, adjectives, adverbs, articles, arguably), indeed all words (we, not being completely inflexible, permit ourselves plurals), desperately, instantaneously soulful represent their sole instantiation. Homonyms help, decoratively anyhow, yet that’s fine, since decoration now means Platonic truth itself, descending downwards, wholly absorbed by—thus into—a trajectory constantly darkening.
“Just so, when kidnappers’ glued notes demanding ransom come, you feel utter hopelessness strangely, somehow brightly, foreshadowed, legible spatially within those verbal collages’ interstices, each paper-stuck cutout its own fragile hostage, knowing much too well time’s inevitable, implacable, accelerating diminishment, limiting language and world together, both (sighing gerundively) mourning one another.”
Two-time winner of the John Dryden Translation prize, Edward Gauvin (edwardgauvin.com) has received fellowships and residencies from the NEA, the Fulbright program, PEN England and PEN America, the Centre National du Livre, the Villa Gillet, and the Lannan Foundation. His volume of Georges-Olivier Châteaureynaud’s selected stories, A Life on Paper (Small Beer, 2010), won the Science Fiction & Fantasy Translation Award. Other publications have appeared in The New York Times, Conjunctions, The Southern Review, and PEN America. He writes a bimonthly column on the Francophone fantastic at Weird Fiction Review
Ariel Trope lives in the United States of America.