Little Star Journal

“Milano–Roma–Palermo,” by Tim Parks

Ann Kjellberg — Fri, 17 May 2013 16:53:19 +0000

I’m scarcely sure what nationality I really am these days. All I know is that for the past thirty years I’ve lived and worked in northern Italy, and like most of the people around me I know little of the South, though the South is always present to us as an idea—a bad one, for the most part. The news we get of the South does not endear it to us. It is Gomorrah, it is corrupt, it soaks up our tax money, and when it isn’t corrupt it is superstitious, primitive, sentimental, saccharine. In Milan the presence around us on the streets and in the workplace of all the southerners who have escaped to come to a serious place to work only confirms our opinions. And having made the journey north, these southerners are understandably eager to convince themselves that they have done the right thing; they rarely speak affectionately of their home without that sigh that reminds you that, much as they love it, it was impossible to stay. The fact that so many politicians are southerners doesn’t help; Italian politicians rarely inspire confidence. So when a northerner travels south he does so more often than not with a slight sense of trepidation, as if entering a different zone—a different country, even. I remember once, when traveling to see Hellas Verona play in Naples, as the train drew to a standstill beside police lined up with batons, an older fan warned me, “We use our fists, they have their knives.”

But all of a sudden, I had an urge to head south.

………………………..Read more in Little Star Weekly

Tim Parks is the author of sixteen works of fiction, including the Booker-nominated Europa, and, most recently, Sex Is Forbidden. He has lived in Italy for thirty-two years. His reflections on Italy by train will appear next month in Italian Ways: On and Off the Rails from Milan to Palermo.

Little Star featured a story and essay on the reading life by Parks in our inaugural issue, and excerpts from his reflection on meditation, the body, and thinking, Teach Us To Sit Still, as well as Sex is Forbidden, here on our blog.

Excerpted from Italian Ways: On and Off the Rails from Milan to Palermo, by Tim Parks. Copyright © 2013 by Tim Parks. With the permission of the publisher, W.W. Norton & Company, Inc.

Writers: Tim Parks

“Before Arbour Hill,” by Anakana Schofield

Ann Kjellberg — Mon, 13 May 2013 14:19:22 +0000

Before Arbour Hill there were three of them. There was his mother. A semi-detached, in an unremarkable cul-de-sac, housed them, with souvenirs from a holiday in Portugal on the mantlepiece. Biscuits in the tin, sheets in the hot press, and holy water inside the front door.

They were looking for one suspect in connection with the assault. They worked alone these kinds of suspects, pouncing on their victims, executing unimaginable acts with no one watching them. Yet, they were rarely on their own when rounded up. No, they were picked up in highly populated areas, lurking near a petrol station, caught in the passing sweep of someone’s highlights. Sometimes they were sitting in the living room on the family sofa watching the football results like Dermot.

Malachi preferred Arbour Hill. The hope an accident would befall his brother, while he was on remand, without any real possibility of it happening, existed. Unlike Mountjoy. Things happened in Mountjoy. He worried about things happening and was angry for it.

The media were waiting. Malachi was surprised. He hadn’t thought this far ahead. His mam had. She handed his brother sunglasses and a hoodie to cover his head. Keep walking, she urged him. Later at home she would admit she got the idea watching a news story months earlier. That she’d been planning for this moment, that she’d been noticing these stories, Malachi didn’t like that.

Dermot ran ahead and when the journalists realized they’d lost him, they turned on his ma like crows pulling at a brown bag for the trace of crumbs. They crowded in on her with microphones and rapid questions that bounced on and off her. Public safety? Would he reoffend? Was he a danger?

His ma walked on. She whispered with her head lowered: He admitted he’s guilty, he served his time, what more do you want?

They stayed with her the way debris clings to a broom. A sophisticated, young one pursued his ma. Her voice razored, her vowels strangulated.

“How would you feel if it was your daughter?” She jutted a microphone, with the number three emblazoned below its meshy head, up to his ma’s lips repeating again:

“Your daughter, tonight, like, watching this on TV?”

His ma stops. Malachi doesn’t like it. You never stop for a journalist’s question, he thinks. He doesn’t know how he knows this, but he knows it. They have her now, he thinks.

Read more this week in Little Star Weekly

Anakana Schofield is the author of the novel Malarky, which recently won Canada’s First Novel Award. She lives in Vancouver, British Columbia.

Read some of Malarky on littlestarjournal.com. Hear Anakana Schofield read a bit of Malarky.

Photo by Tim Fraser for the National Post

Writers: Anakana Schofield

Not Fair: Artist Andrea Bowers Writes to the Organizers of the Frieze Art Fair

Ann Kjellberg — Fri, 10 May 2013 12:30:48 +0000

The artist Andrea Bowers this week sent this letter to the organizers of the Frieze Art Fair, which opens today on Randall’s Island in New York City.

Bowers’ great cardboard monuments to American workers are on view at the Fair, in the booths of the Susan Velmeitter and Kaufmann Repetto Galleries, and are featured in the Little Star Weekly Gallery this week.

Her works on display focus on labor issues and are accompanied by a letter calling on the Fair’s organizers to negotiate with the union. She has attempted personally to broker negotiations between the union and the organizers. Other recent projects by Bowers have addressed immigration, women’s rights, and environmental depredation. She is represented by Susan Velmeitter: Los Angeles Projects.

Said an activist involved in the protest: “It has been amazing to work with Andrea and the activists at Occupy Arts and Labor. It seems like in this dispute labor, artists, and activists have organized around a common concern organically—no formal meetings, no to-do lists, just talking and working and being respectful of one another. It is typically very difficult getting so many groups to work cooperatively. I am starting to think that maybe it is because the leadership is all women . . .”

For news about the state of negotiations, visit:

Arts and Labor: A Working Group from Occupy Wall Street

“City Hall Don’t Frieze Out New Yorkers”: Elected Officials and Labor Leaders Call Upon City Hall to Change Parks Permitting Because of Rogue Art Show” (Teamster.org, April 17, 2013)

Union Members Protest Frieze Labor Policy, Andrea Bowers Joins the Fray, by Zoë Lescaze (GalleristNY, May 9, 2013)

Teamsters Shift Course, Frieze Sponsor Deutsche Bank Now a Target, by Hrag Vartanian (Hyperallergic, May 8, 2013)

Twitter: #FriezeRatFair, @OWSArtsandLabor

Writers: Andrea Bowers

“Karel,” from “3 Kinds of Exile,” a new play by John Guare

Ann Kjellberg — Mon, 06 May 2013 20:50:51 +0000

THE ACTOR appears and talks directly to us:

This is a story that a friend of mine told to me a few years ago. I was sitting in his house in England. I was going through some personal troubles and a solution to them stymied me. I brought my bag of woes to him.

He listened and then said “Let me tell you something that might have relevance to you.” He poured a drink. The afternoon light came in. And this is what he told me.

My friend was in his late twenties in the early 1950s. At that time, my friend found himself covered with a rash that was extraordinarily uncomfortable. It had begun as a small itch as if a gnat had bitten and left its teeth. The itch grew. He thought it must have come from wool in his underpants, his undershirt. He switched to cotton. The itching continued. The itching now a bright red rash spread down his legs and up his chest. At first he felt his body was blushing. He looked down and watched the crimson spread. In some weird variation on Kafka, was he turning into a tomato? He felt like an Easter egg someone had dipped into fuchsia. He felt like a tropical flower out of Gaugin. He felt his body was the red of anger. But anger over what? He had graduated successfully from Oxford. He worked successfully, even happily, for an international manufacturing company. Yes, he was happy. He was healthy. He was successful. The rash now reached the bottom of his feet.

“this has no title,” by James Kelman

Ann Kjellberg — Sat, 27 Apr 2013 12:09:58 +0000

Then the man coming along the aisle, a big heavy fellow, he sat down next to me. I knew he would. I had made the space. He noticed I had and nearly smiled, just how he looked around the eyes like it was almost a smile and hoped I would notice it. A recognition of the other’s humanity. There would be this between us. Otherwise he would not have smiled, not as an outer expression; but I was very conscious of his large body, a plumpness, thinking of plumpness. He was a plump man.

Had this been a revolutionary situation.

People dump their bags and their coats on the spare seats to stop folk sitting down next to them. I make space for them. I like to see them there and think alongside with them. They make thoughts go in a different way. So we are in the world together… Read more in Little Star Weekly

James Kelman will appear with Little Star on Wednesday, May 1, at the St. Mark’s Bookshop. More information here

His new novel, Mo Said She Was Quirky will be published this week. Kelman was born in Glasgow in 1946. He is the author of many novels, short stories, plays, and political essays. His novel How Late It Was How Late won the Booker Prize in 1994.

Writers: James Kelman

Anakana Schofield wins Amazon.ca First Novel Award

Ann Kjellberg — Fri, 26 Apr 2013 18:38:22 +0000

Last year at AWP we stumbled past the booth of Dan Wells’s smart and original Canada independent, Biblioasis, which had been recommended to us by those clever guys over at Dalkey. Dan described his operation and then pressed into our arms, with an ardent fire in his eyes, a copy of Anakana Schofield’s freshly minted book Malarky, saying it was one book that he felt truly confident was for the ages. I was hooked in a minute. Malarky has the verbal sophistication of the great modernists, but it is fully steeped in the passions and anxieties of contemporary life. Deep in its bones it bears what I would soon recognize as Schofield’s inevitable marker: honesty. She cannot seem to lift the pen without hearing the call of some buried truth, a truth coated over with shame and insecurity, which she will carefully puzzle into the light. I posted some of Malarky on our blog, and wrote to her asking for more, and she sent the story “Before Arbour Hill,” which we published as soon as we could. By happenstance she was in New York at that moment and showed up at our salon for Padgett Powell (evidence here). Though not large of stature, she was visible in a bright red dress and a great big personality. She immediately set about righting various listing ships in our small operation, befriending all, and then vanished back to mythic Vancouver. No one who was there would soon forget her.

We are thrilled and pretty surprised that a challenging, complex, and often uncomfortable (though, indeed, hilarious) book, and its singular and utterly deserving author, should be singled out this year to win the Amazon.ca First Novel Prize. Brava, Anakana Schofield, and bravo, this time, Amazon!

Writers: Anakana Schofield

James Kelman in New York

Ann Kjellberg — Fri, 26 Apr 2013 17:40:00 +0000

One of the writers who most consistently amazes us, James Kelman, is arriving in New York next week and will be reading with Little Star at our beloved St. Mark’s Bookshop on Wednesday, May 1. Please join us! Take the opportunity not only to hear Kelman’s extraordinary prose in its native Glaswegian, but to buy a book or two and support a beloved NYC institution.

Please tell facebook you’re coming! (We sheepishly admit that he is making a couple of other appearances in New York in the coming weeks. You should come to ours! But if you can’t make it on Wednesday, have a look at the PEN World Voices Festival schedule.)

Kelman’s new book, Mo Said She Was Quirky, published by the always original Other Press, takes us into a day in the mind of a Glaswegian woman night-shift croupier. As she ponders the possible reappearance of her vagrant brother, the demands of caring for her small child, and the daily consequences of being in an interracial relationship in contemporary London, Kelman passes her thoughts through the darkening glass of her inverted day and her always-looming exhaustion. Her creation is at once a work of acute social criticism, sympathatic imagination, and writerly craft: a contemporary Molly Bloom who has to do the ironing and face down the PTA, and sees the men around her with a jaded eye.

James Kelman is the author of more than twenty books of fiction and essays. His fiction has been admired and derided for its faithful rendering of the robust colloquial Scottish of his working class upbringing. His novel A Disaffection was shortlisted for the Booker Prize and won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for Fiction in 1989. Kelman’s receipt the 1994 Booker Prize with How Late It Was, How Late aroused controversy over the candor of its language. In 1998 Kelman was awarded the Scotland on Sunday/Glenfiddich Spirit of Scotland Award. In 2008 he won Scotland’s most prestigious literary award the Saltire Society’s Book of the Year award for Kieron Smith, Boy (2008). He has been active in defending Scottish autonomy and championing the rights of the dispossessed in Scotland and around the world.

His story “this has no title,” appeared in Little Star #3 (2012) and is being reprised this week in our mobile mini-magazine, Little Star Weekly #10. A section from Mo Said She Was Quirky appeared in the very first issue of Little Star Weekly.

Writers: James Kelman

“for the marathon dead and wounded,” James Stotts

Ann Kjellberg — Sun, 21 Apr 2013 10:28:01 +0000

mid april
passing manchester
the cherries have
no stones
washing their wings
in the river
wind
not nearly
as material as
those bald
merrimack pylons
i am the maculate
receipt
of bestial capital
and care
barely thirty
but i can already
feel the worms
between my legs
the black mold
fastened
to my bones
and in my memory
it was
the same hour
as the cherries
the finish line
burst into flower

Also by James Stotts
Poems in Little Star #1 (2010) and Little Star #2 (2011)
Poems in Little Star Weekly #3
Since, O’er Books, order here

Writers: James Stotts

Welcome Les Murray!

Ann Kjellberg — Fri, 19 Apr 2013 00:26:30 +0000

photo by Graham Carter

Les Murray is in the States on a rare visit of reading and teaching. He will appear at the Poetry Foundation on April 25, details here.

Little Star has been honored to publish lots of recent poems by Les Murray. To celebrate his visit, we reproduce the whole crop in the current issue of our app.

Here is “Daylight Cloth,” the very first poem in the first issue of Little Star.

Daylight Cloth

September morning. White is salient.

The unfocussed wet hover of dawn

has cleared the treetops. In high bush

the ski season packs up, tent by tent,

and the Cherokee rose, its new seams

hitched up rather than pruned

overlaps its live willow easel,

a daylight cloth pelted in white creams.

Minute blossoms of fruit

emerge from lichen’s brown wheeze

that has gathered in their trees.

Burnt-off paddocks have gone out

and the sky is bluer for it.

Beyond the sea coast, rebirthed

4-wheel drives tilt, below,

on the tail ends of big seas.

Les Murray lives in New South Wales, Australia. He is the author of numerous books of poetry, most recently Taller When Prone, which appeared alongside an updated edition of his 1996 memoir, Killing the Black Dog. After reading this book, it is impossible to read his work, or that of any other major poet, in the same way again. Read a portion of it on our blog here.

He has been honored by the Australian government with the Medal of the Order of Australia for his services to literature, and in 1998 he was awarded the Queen’s Gold Medal for Poetry for the British Commonwealth.

Writers: Les Murray

Different Animals, a new play by Abby Rosebrock

Ann Kjellberg — Fri, 12 Apr 2013 22:03:38 +0000

JESSICA
Obviously I’ve heard that story since I was a kid, but the way you told it, I felt like I knew him—

WILL
Peter? That’s pretty high praise—

JESSICA
Like when people kept asking if he was with Jesus, and Peter kept being like, I don’t even know that guy.

WILL
(Agreeing) He was being kind of a jerk—

JESSICA
And how Peter’s in this sort of daze, like he’s being reckless, and he doesn’t even realize what he’s doing, when he’s denying Christ—

WILL
It’s brilliant, right? The psychology’s so modern, if you think about—

JESSICA
I bet it really hurt Christ’s feelings when Peter did that.

WILL
Well. Probably not as much as the Romans did—

JESSICA
I bet Jesus was really upset about it. Like, Man, I put so much time and effort into this guy, and he just gives me nothing in return. It’s like we don’t even have a legitimate thing going on, because he won’t acknowledge we’re like… special friends.

WILL
I’m sure Jesus got over it.

A short pause.

JESSICA
You think he was married, like people say? To Mary Magdalene?

WILL
Oh yeah, they picked a china pattern and everything. With those little fishes on it—

JESSICA
Because I wonder. Was Jesus good to her? Or was he this rugged, sorta hipster-y, intellectual… a-hole… who had everything figured out and just never felt the need to make any manner of commitment to the woman he was sleeping with?

WILL
He was pretty busy, saving mankind—

JESSICA
I mean yeah, when people called her a prostitute, I’m sure he loved getting up on his soapbox and being like, That’s not cool, guys; love your neighbor. But when they were alone together, and she was like, Okay Christ, we need to define this relationship—

WILL
Jess—

JESSICA
He probably just said some mess about not believing in labels, made her split the check at dinner—

WILL
Maybe he was a feminist—

See Abby Rosebrock’s Different Animals at the Cherry Lane Theatre, April 20 through May 26

Read a bit over the next three issues of Little Star Weekly

Read her fantastic poems in Little Star #3 (2012)

See Abby Rosebrock as Molly in her new play, Different Animals, at the Cherry Lane Theatre