The Typos of Fire and Fury

p. 17: “subtlety” misspelled
p. 20: “whom he said was not remotely a billionaire,” should be “who”
“by definition, presidential,” remove comma
p. 28: “distress debt,” should be “distressed”
p. 30: “whom he believed had promised,” should be “who”
p. 31: “It was his daughter-in-law who held the real influence in the Trump circle, who delivered,” comma after “daughter-in-law”
p. 32: “Breitbart Embassy that doubled,” should be comma which
p. 45: “belied” misspelled
p. 54: “only the most hard-hearted reader would not entertain a daydream in which he or she was not part of this awesome pageant,” extra “not”
p. 56: hyphenate “midnineties”
p. 58: “conservative books products and media,” repair “books products”
“documentaries In the Face of Evil,” comma after “documentaries”
“albeit still just a small part,” “albeit still” is redundant
“build a radical free market, small-government,” comma after “radical”
“self-funding whatever Tea Party or alt-right project,” delete “self”
p. 70: “about which nothing in Kushner’s previous background would have prepared him for,” “about” and “for” inconsistent
“whomever could placate or distract him,” should be “whoever”
“within a few months, they had become a torturous duty,” delete comma
p. 71: “but rather more just someone’s presence,” cut “rather more just”
p. 76: “always aware and yet never understanding why they should be the butt,” add “always aware they were and yet…”
p. 98: “with quite some self pity,” cut “quite”
p. 99: “The New Republic,” italicize The
p. 101: repeats that FBI was trying to turn Page
p. 108: “Nearly all meetings in the Oval with the president were invariably,” cut either “nearly all” or “invariably”
“invariably” repeats
p. 127: “reverse martyrdom,” cut “reverse”?
p. 136: “denegation,” correct word?
p. 162: “Tea Party–Bannon–Breitbart,” and elsewhere, en-dash should be hyphen
“Ryan’s political abilities, and,” cut comma
“Ryan was still, and by then the only, alternative to Trump,” needs to be “Ryan was still an alternative to Trump, and by then the only one”
p. 163: “satisfy” repeats
p. 164: “he would have been able to enumerate few of the particulars of Obamacare—other than expressing glee at the silly Obama pledge,” cut “expressing glee at”
p. 182: “hone in on,” should be “home”
p. 186: “needed” should be “needs”
p. 187: “seeing Powell as less a normalizing influence than another aspect,” “as less” should be “less as”
“they were allied to them,” fix
“were in de facto command whenever they wanted to exert it,” replace “to exert it” with “to be” (cut “de facto”?)
p. 191: hyphenate “decision-maker”
p. 203: “de Vil–length,” hyphen, not en-dash
p. 205: “had yet failed to happen,” insert “as”
p. 213: “they were smarter than him,” sigh
p. 214: end of para “One Monday morning,” repeats itself
p. 217: hyphenate “coconspirators”
p. 230: comma after “alternate universe”
“worth of American arms,” delete comma after “arms”
p. 232: “emperors-new-clothes,” apostrophe in “emperors”
p. 233: “a little marketing savvy and has a look,” should be “has a little marketing savvy and a look”
p. 237: delete close-peren after “title”
p. 239: “be careful who you spoke to,” whom
p. 240: Sentence beginning “Bannon observed” has two extra commas
p. 243: “prone to self-sabotaging his ability to function in the job,” cut “his ability to function in the job”
p. 245: “defensive tweets and statements, and,” cut comma
p. 248: “regard” repeats
“cheapness and lack of generosity,” redundant
“the failure of people whose embrace he sought to, in return, embrace him,” cut “in return”
p. 249: “with certain satisfaction,” insert “a”
p. 252: “Trump, not unusually for a family-run company,” Trump is not a company
p. 253: comma after “urging”
pp. 253-254: last para, “case” repeats
p. 255: “Manafort and Kusher need to show,” should be “needed”
“a year later, pratically nobody,” cut comma
pp. 255-256: “repeated denials about there having been no discussion,” “no” should be “any”
“the Russians connected to the Kremlin,” cut “the” in “the Russians”
“his public position was not only endangering himself,” should be “endangering not only himself”
“distress debt,” should be “distressed debt”
p. 257: “far more details,” “far” should be “many”
p. 261: “demanding to know who she worked for,” whom
p. 271: “laid at the president’s feet … now put at Spicer’s feet,” repetition
p. 272: “understood that in her official role,” comma after “that”
“comm staff,” should be “comms” (consistency)
p. 276: “with a quite a cackle,” cut “a”
p. 279: “Don Junior,” ff, should be “Jr.” (consistency)
p. 280: “trace a money trail through Paul Manafort,” etc., repeats p. 278
p. 307: “figure of ever increasing incredulity,” misuse of “incredulity”
p. 310: “whacky,” wacky pref.

Overused words/terms: joie de guerre, curiously, precipice

 

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Little Star #7 arriving, with Alison Hall

Our latest issue of Little Star, the print magazine, is thundering in our direction, and time remains to order it at it’s larcenous pre-publication price here. The issue includes excellent work by Michael Kimball, Aaron Their, April Bernard, Les Murray, Robert Wrigley, Rowan Ricardo Phillips, Cynan Jones, Tadeusz Dabrowski, Gro Dahle, Susan Wheeler, Anthony Madrid, Robert Wrigley, Derek Walcott, Josefine Klougart, Maria Stepanova (translated by Sasha Dugdale), Friedrich Hölderlin (translated by Bruce Lawder), Michael Palmer, Nina Bogin, Barry Gifford, Mary Jo Salter, Rosanna Warren, Serhiy Zhadan, more.

Our beautiful cover features a painting, on Venetian plaster on a wood panel, by Alison Hall. Hall has for years been paying annual visits to Assisi and Padua to study Giotto’s patterns, and looking at her work indeed feels like entering a quiet place. The black in her blue and black paintings refers to the floor tiles of the Scrovegni Chapel and the blue to its ceilings, giving a name, “soffrito,” to one of these series. Her work will be shown at Galerie Gisela Clement in Bonn, Germany, starting March 23, alongside a project with Selected Art Models opening on April 21 in Cologne. And a book of her work will be appear with TOTAH in the spring, with essays by Alexander Nagel and Alex Bacon. Read this essay on her show at TOTAH last fall by poet John Yau, from whom we have stolen the details about Giotto, and floors and ceilings (we didn’t even know that when we picked the painting!).

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Blueblack Cold XIII (2015)
Graphite, Oil, and Venetian Plaster on Panel
13.75 x 11 inches
photo: Christoph Jaschke (Galerie Gisela Clement).

 

 

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Good-bye, and Hello!

Dear Friends of Little Star,

It has been the greatest delight and adventure to edit our app version, Little Star Weekly, for you. We have loved this little form, and the opportunity it has offered to whisper in your ear each week a small secret of literature.

iPhone

We also believed very strongly in the mission of 29th Street Publishers, the digital wizards who were gallant enough to bring the Weekly into being: They strove to develop new forms of digital publishing that would support creators and independent editorial voices, lest purveyance of the written word pass entirely to the digital monopolies and their algorithms, hungering for user data, toward whom the medium naturally bends. Please as you go forward in your reading life think about how artists are making a living, and what sort of art we will have if they can’t do so on their own terms, and support the vehicles who support the writers you appreciate.

This week 29th Street closes its doors, and this chapter of Little Star Weekly closes with them.  Soon its next chapter will reopen here at littlestarjournal.com, not quite weekly, but often, and still dedicated to bringing you moments of immersion into literature as it unfolds around us.  Weekly readers, please send us your email address so we can keep you posted. If you are a current subscriber to the Weekly and want information about what to do next, please let us know.

Meanwhile we plan to make our Weekly archive available as e-book anthologies, with their wonderful covers selected by our revolving crew of artists and curators, which you will be able to find here at littlestarjournal.com. Annual subscribers to the Weekly are entitled to some freebies here. Let us know if you would like us to drop you a line when these are available. Please also subscribe to our new print issue or pick up one of our past print issues, here.

Again, ten thousand thanks for lending us your ears. The world is turning in hard directions, but let us together hold to art for solace, guidance, and provocation.

 

Your editor,
Ann Kjellberg

 Innuendo
—by Dennis Saleh

The little star
of the asterisk
winks in
conspiracy

More herethan meets
the eye
Then sighs

It is deeper
than water
cries a fish
in reply

Dennis Saleh has published several books of poetry and edited an anthology of contemporary American poetry.

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Ingrid Winterbach in Little Star

This week in Little Star Weekly we return to the rich, various, demanding work of South African novelist Ingrid Winterbach, published on these shores by the intrepid Open Letter Books. Her recent novel The Road of Excess, so far appearing only in South Africa, returns to many of her preoccupations: tangled relations in adult families, the dark attraction of dissolution, envy and misanthropy, the braided energies of our emotions and our intellect.  Within these themes Winterbach’s work shows startling range: she follows a band of nomads skirting the Boer War in To Hell With Cronje, she inhabits the mind of a melancholy lexicographer in The Book of Happenstance, and in The Elusive Moth, she turns the magnifying glass on the erotic and morphological adventures of a wandering entomologist. Winterbach’s work often features headstrong, independent women bridling against straightened expectations and following contradictory internal directives; her unsentimental, sometimes brutal take on sexual impulse—a source of pleasure, relief, power—and family broadens the language of fictional representation deep into women’s experience. But in The Road of Excess, the protagonists are both men: a pair of brothers who wrestle with a conflicted family legacy and an affinity for absolute experience in, respectively, art and addiction.  This week we conclude the third of three parts from The Road of Excess in Little Star Weekly.  Here is a sampling of Little Star’s Ingrid Winterbach.

From The Book of Happenstance, Little Star #2 (2011) (available as PDF)
From To Hell with Cronje
From The Elusive Moth
From The Road of Excess

9780798156264 ingrid-winterbach-2012_fotograaf-andries-gouws

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Finally! Selected Poems of Melissa Green

It’s a celebratory week for Little Star because at long last the work of our beloved contributing editor Melissa Green becomes available in a new selected poems from Boston’s adventurous Arrowsmith Press. Melissa’s Squanicook Eclogues (read the title poem here) appeared to rapturous acclaim in 1987 but her subsequent work, like its reclusive author, has been nearly hidden from view. Hence most readers now have an extraordinary opportunity to take in whole poetic career in a single gulp. We urge you to buy yourself a copy of her book, Magpiety, and offer this week in Little Star Weekly three poems from its most recent stage, “The Marsh Poems.”

Here’s a sampling of Melissa’s work from the archives of Little Star:

Melissa Green, artist
Melissa Green Remembers Walcott and Brodsky
Flight Into Egypt,” by Joseph Brodsky, translated by Melissa Green
“Phi” (poem)
“On Earth” (poem)
“In Francesco’s del Cairo’s Herodias with the Head of St. John” (poem), in our current print issue
6 Maudlin Poems, in Little Star #3 (2012)
“Taxonomy (poem), in Little Star #2 (2011)
“Akeldama: Death of the Abbess” (poem), in Little Star #1 (2010)

And elsewhere:

Color Is the Suffering of Light: A Memoir
“Daphne in Mourning” (poem)
“Animal Kingdom” (poem)
Melissa Green in Agni
from The Linen Way: A Memoir of a life among poets and alone
Ann Kjellberg on Melissa Green
Video: Tribute to Melissa Green, with Derek Walcott, Rosanna Warren, David Ferry, Fanny Howe, Frank Bidart, Robert Pinsky, more
“Walcott Introduces the author of Magpiety,” St. Lucia Star, November 1, 2015

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Three Little Star authors: James Stotts, Derek Walcott, Melissa Green, St. Lucia, November 2015

Writers:

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Tim Parks reinvents literary criticism

At Little Star we consider Tim Parks one of the central writers of the age. His novels—Europa, for instance, and Destiny and Cleaver—forge new literary constructions around narrators who are, on the one hand, intelligent and controlling and, on the other, unstable, revelatory, and self-discovering. His criticism for The New York Review of Books and the London Review of Books has been vital to defining a vigorous modernist aesthetic of the present. His occasional writings for the New York Review blog have reinvigorated (with another NYRB blog regular, Charles Simic) the venerable European feuilleton tradition, with its voice of a literary wanderer, opining with deceptive lightness on the matters of the day. And his ground-breaking memoir Teach Us To Sit Still carried literary reflection on the ancient mind-body problem into startling interior territory.

We’ve been fortunate to publish lots of his work in Little Star (see below) and hope we’ll do more, but for now our attention is mobilized by his highly original, stealthily appearing new book, The Novel: A Survivor Skill.  In it he tosses aside the authorial armor once belittled by new critics as the intentional and affective fallacies—the argument that literary meanings transcend human relations between author and reader.  In The Novel Parks defiantly writes that literature absolutely proceeds from specific human beings and is received by other human beings who respond, not only with our critical intelligence but also with emotions, fears, prejudices, needs, yearnings, fantasies, intuitions, affinities. His analysis addresses many of the writers central to our time from the question of how we respond to them as a vital human relation.

We feature a dip into The Novel in Little Star Weekly this week. Its introduction, in which we imagine real-life encounters with Joyce, Dickens, Hardy, and Lawrence, appeared on The New Yorker web site last month.

And if this leaves you wanting more, here is other work by Tim Parks from Little Star, some of which we’ll open up as a weekly special as the week unfolds.

From Teach Us To Sit Still (2010):
Sitting Still I: Paradoxical Reflection
Sitting Still II: The Skeptic Meditates
About Teach Us To Sit Still

From Sex is Forbidden (novel)(2012)
In the Dasgupta Institute, Part I
In the Dasgupta Institute, Part II
In the Dasgupta Institute, Part III

From Italian Ways: On and Off the Rails from Milan (2013)
Italian Ways, Part I
Italian Ways, Part II
Italian Ways, Part III

“The Day Is Coming,” Part I (story)(2014)
“The Day Is Coming,” Part II
“The Day Is Coming,” Part III

“Brotherly Love” and “Mrs. P” (linked stories) (Little Star #6, 2015)
Read two more stories in the series in The New Yorker: “Vespa” and “Reverand

From The Novel: A Survival Skill (2015)
The Novel As Survival Skill

 

FC9780198739593 Tim_Montegani

 

 

 

 

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Welcome new Little Star Weekly curator, Jason Stopa!

Our digital version Little Star Weekly would not be itself without the weekly work of art chosen for us by our roving band of Little Star Gallerists.  We are thrilled to welcome a new one on board, painter Jason Stopa.

Jason currently has pieces in the show “The New New” at the Diane Rosenstein Gallery in Los Angeles, through November 29, and “Any Given Sunday” at the University of Arkansas Fine Arts Center, through December 8. Last Spring he has a solo exhibition at the Hionas Gallery.  He is also a writer, editor, curator, and teacher at Pratt Institute and School of Visual Arts. Read a recent interview with him here in Hyperallergic. Watch for Jason’s covers every week on Little Star Weekly.

(Past Little Star Gallery curators have included Mary Weatherford, John Zinsser, and Chris Sharpe.)

stopastopa

 

 

 

 

 

(1) Installation view, “The New New,” Diane Rosenstein Gallery
(2) Jason Stopa, Red Cup, Ice (2014)

 

 

Writers:

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One-Day Special! All our April Bernard and Anakana Schofield

In honor of their appearance at our Little Star Cabaret tonight, we’re opening up all the work we’ve run in Little Star Weekly by guests Anakana Schofield and April Bernard.

April Bernard
• “Found Sonnet: Samuel Johnson”
from Miss Filler
• “The Nockamixon Road” (Parts One, Two, and Three)
• “The Fixed Idea” (Parts One, Two, and Three)

Anakana Schofield
• from Martin John, Parts One and Two (Three to come tomorrow)
• “Before Arbour Hill”
• from Malarky

Or you can read their stories in our print issues of 2011, 2013, and 2014!

Enjoy! And please come and join us.

Have a look also at the conclusion this week of our Poets’ Correspondence with Rowan Ricardo Phillips and Glyn Maxwell.

 

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A Poets’ Correspondence (VI): Rowan Ricardo Phillips and Glyn Maxwell

This summer, in our digital edition Little Star Weekly, we inaugurated an ongoing series, a correspondence on poetic means in the English of here and there (England and the UK) by Rowan Ricardo Phillips and Glyn Maxwell

Read Glyn’s first installment in Little Star Weekly here  and the ensuing correspondence here in our diary.

Here is letter #6.  

Dear Glyn,

Damn. What an ending! What an exit! What’s left to say? What’s left to say now that Glyn’s gone? I feel suddenly like the ditched voice left to pick up the pieces at the very end of “Lycidas”: “Thus sang Glyn Maxwell to the Oaks and rills / While the still morn went out with Sandals gray …” You are one smooth swain, my friend.

I’m struck by how our chat reveals how that which to an ear would seem the root of our differences, our respective “accented” voices, is actually the hearth from where our devotion to poetry takes root: the sonic sanctity of a poem. I live by the syllable; I can’t help it. Poets find other poets, truly find them, in the pit of the poet’s music. So why then this continual “You’re from there, I’m from here; let’s call the whole thing off”? We’ve seen how rock, pop, the blues, ska, and hip-hop have each grown in America and Great Britain tethered to the same taproot. And before that the border ballads became American ballads. The Atlantic couldn’t shout them down. When you live with poems syllable by syllable you start to hear how our multifoliate language mocks the meager differences between the poetry of America and the poetry of Great Britain, gent lung you into a greater republic … but when we gaze across the Atlantic in search of poetry we tend to see Scylla and Charybdis. We chose the path that leave us to deal with the fewest casualties. Bearable losses. And then we wish we could remember the name of that poet from Plymouth or that poet from Providence; that poet from Essex or that poet from Austin. There’s no cure for this but to be aware of it; to pass by Scylla when going in one direction and then Charybdis when going in the other. You still lose some people on the way and seem ever the fool for the trip. But there’s a feeling far greater than discovery or confirmation in searching for your kin across the water: and that’s finding in the unfamiliar the unexpectedly familiar; the fresh woods instead of Fresh Fields and, despite disaster after disasters, new pastures.

Rowan

Read the rest of the correspondence here.

Rowan Ricardo Phillips’ second book of poems, Heaven, appears this month. Glyn Maxwell’s most recent book is Pluto, and his Collected Poems came out in 2011.

 

 

 

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Welcome Anakana Schofield!

Anakana Schofield

 

 

 

 

 

This week we are thrilled to welcome from the frosty north Vancouverian Anakana Schofield, who comes bearing her soon-to-be-published second novel, Martin John.  We are featuring it this week in Little Star Weekly (here and here) and in the second of our accidentally annual series of Little Star Cabarets, with April Bernard, who will read from a forthcoming book of poems that we also are sampling lavishly in our coming 2017 print issue. Anakana and April will be appearing with us at the atmospherically shadowy Village haunt, Caffe Vivaldi, with food and drink and chat.

Little Star Writers’ Cabaret
With April Bernard and Anakana Schofield
Caffe Vivaldi
Thursday, September 24, 6:30 PM
32 Jones Street, Greenwich Village

We first encountered Anakana Schofield when the whole staff of The Dalkey Archive urged us to meet her publisher, the erudite Dan Wells, of the stellar Canadian independent, Biblioasis.  He passed a copy of her first book Malarky to us with the gleaming eyes of a convert. We were so enraptured we published a swathe of it immediately, and then included her story “Before Arbour Hill” in Little Star #4.

As an Irish lilt and dramatic impersonation are among the book’s wonders, we encourage you to come hear her read it herself!

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