Baron Samedi and Other Vital Illusions (Gwen Davies)
NWR’S Winter edition is led by surfer Tom Anderson's essay on Havana, ‘Castro’s Capitol’. Here he gets to grips with Cuba’s Byzantine currencies of peso and CUC:
Two worlds exist alongside each other without interacting. It’s an air-lock separating you from the real Cuban psyche. Parallel, unrelated, if it’s one thing, it can’t be the other: Schroedinger’s Cat for communist economists. Stevie Davies, author of the novel
Into Suez, examines our historical attitudes to the Middle East in a review-essay, ‘Lying Turks and the Pure Tongue of Eden’, which surveys recent books on Wales, Islam and Jewish culture. Among these she encounters the racism of ‘red caps and dirty faces’ and Protestant Zionist ‘conversionist antics’. She summarises, ‘Wales took its moody paradoxes to the ends of the earth: the paradox of being at once imperial and colonised.’
Neglected writer Oliver Onions (1873-1961), author of
The Dead of Night, The Ghost Stories of Oliver Onions, is offered a new readership (and future entry into the Library of Wales?) by Jim Perrin in ‘The Eerie Fiction of Oliver Onions’, half of a double feature. Here, Perrin claims,
[The creativity of] Yorkshire-born, electively Welsh, Onions, a long-time resident of Aberdyfi, is rooted in a… fictional tradition from which he learned the invaluable arts of suggestion, psychological acuity, nuanced characterisation. With him, we move on from the simplistic ghouls and spectral assertions of 1890s genre fiction – a fault… in which [Henry] James and [Arthur] Machen are both culpable – to something entirely more sophisticated.
read more...
• Pulp Kitchen Michael Nath on Atheism and Character
read more...• Castro's Capitol Tom Anderson in Havana
read more...• Storms Jay Griffiths braves the elements at Dafydd ap Gwilym's Grave
• Along the Unthank Road Jim Perrin on The Eerie Fiction of Oliver Onions
• Lying Turks and the Pure Tongue of Eden Stevie Davies on Wales and the Middle East
• Rich Text Alan Harris on melding performance and artform
• According to Adrian by Niall Griffiths
A fiction response to Oliver Onions
The Dead of Night read more...
• Obituariesby Zillah Bethell
• EmmelineNovel extract by Maria Styles
• If I Answer, We’ll Crash
Jen Colemnan
• For the tiny insect casting a long shadow across the page of a Burton Watson translation of Ch’i-Chi
Christien Gholson
• Tagged Turnstone, St Ives
John Kinsella
• Like a Breaking of Waters
John White
• The Death of Doc Emmett Brown in Back to the Future
Jonathan Edwards
• Letters from Zen
DE Oprava
• The Welsh Dragon
Maitreyabandhu
• Portraits
Amy McCauley
• Walking in Moonlight
Ruth Bidgood
You can now get a taste of some of the excellent pieces in this issue online:
- Blog: NWR Editor\'s pick of early spring 2013 titles from Wales
- Blog: Finns are Very Polite People
- Blog: Ruckus in Welsh Subsidised Publishing
- Blog: Support our publishing industry: buy one literary mag or book produced in Wales this Christmas
- Blog: A Reader’s Christmas Holiday, Best Served Melancholy
- Blog: Waterland
- Blog: Aaltitude
- Blog: How to Pronounce Jyväskylä
- Blog: Pictures, Tongues, Cities
- Blog: Stopping to Drink, Stopping Drinking
- Blog: Forests, Rocks, Lakes
- Blog: Paul Griffiths responds to Michael Nath\'s piece on atheism in NWR 98
- Blog: The Ifanca Helene James Short Story Competition
- Blog: Second Annual Flash Fiction Day, Swansea
- Blog: Poets who Translate, Richard Gwyn in Istanbul
- Blog: Aberaeron author Cynan Jones is £30,000 short story prize nominee
- Creative: Walking in Moonlight
- Creative: The Death of Doc Emmett Brown in [i:Back to the Future]
- Creative: Portraits
- Creative: Quotidian Joe vs The Quantum Letterbox
- Creative: Emmeline
- Creative: Obituaries
- Creative: For the tiny insect casting a long shadow across the page of a Burton Watson translation of Ch’i-Chi
- Creative: Like a Breaking of Waters
- Creative: Tagged Turnstone, St Ives
- Creative: If I Answer, We’ll Crash
- Creative: According to Adrian
- Editorial: Baron Samedi and Other Vital Illusions
- Essay: Storms
- Essay: Along the Unthank Road
- Essay: Castro’s Capitol
- Essay: On Atheism and Character
- Essay: Lying Turks and the Pure Tongue of Eden
- Interview: Tom Anderson
- Interview: Niall Griffths
- Interview: Stevie Davies
- Opinion: Rich Text
- Review: You, Me and the Birds
- Review: Loudness
- Review: Camelion
- Review: Bistro
- Review: The Mind-Body Problem
- Review: Ras Olaf Harri Selwyn
- Review: Beasts of the Southern Wild, Film Review
- Review: Scars