Hugh Blanton's review of Fight for Your Long Day

Hugh Blanton's thoughts on Fight for Your Long Day arrive after his consideration of Auggie's Revenge.

Yung Pueblo's Nicomachean Ethics

 

~~ from Aristotle's The Way Forward 

Corona\Samizdat returns November 2026

Rick Harsch's Corona\Samizdat will have books for sale again by November. We've been told to refrain from ordering titles before then.

Where When It Rains by John F. Duffy

 

Where When It Rains by John F. Duffy

#fridayreads: 9/11 edition

Fight for Your Long Day is more of a War on Terror than 9/11 novel, but I'm sure that the good folks at interlibrary loan would want you to access a copy. If purchases are more to your pleasure, then shipped paperback copies of Auggie's Revenge and Fight for Your Long Day remain available at reasonable prices. There are also affordable copies of Auggie's Revenge at Apple Books, on eBay, and for Kindle as well as at Bookshop and Smashwords.

What do you teach?

"Upon my return to the US, he / asks my occupation. Teacher. / What do you teach? / Poetry. / I hate poetry, the office says, / I only like writing / where you can make an argument."

~~ from "He, Too" in Customs by Solmaz Sharif

The Brother from Another Planet

"and we the privileged few / from metal folding chairs in the dark / peep-a-show the world presents The Brother from Another Planet / you tell the white boy made it / the audacity / to think that / black people were universal slaves / when we are fucked on earth / thats all / just fucked up on earth"

~~ from "Princess Cruises" in Big Bank Take Little Bank by Paul Beatty

every drawn curtain

"To recall Ethel Rosenberg's green polka-dotted dress / To call your father and say, I'd forgotten how nice everyone in these red states can be / To hear him say, Yes, long as you don't move in next door / To recall every drawn curtain in the apartments you have lived"

~~ from "The Master's House" in Customs by Solmaz Sharif

broken but unhealed

"white boys steady leanin in / truly believin this is the best movie theyve ever seen / but none of em asked josh gibson to slo-dance / across the color line that / falls in an iowa field / broken but unhealed"

~~ from "Daryl Strawberry Asleep In A Field of Dreams" in Big Bank Take Little Bank by Paul Beatty

East West Literary Forum

Nina Kossman's East West Literary Forum is one of the most intriguing translation journals publishing award-winning writers from Russia, Ukraine, Chechnya, and beyond. Polina Zherebstovna's "Zaina" is a Chechnyan short story is a recent publication that held my attention. It was first published by a Russian-language house in Switzerland, and its author began writing what became an acclaimed diary of the war in Chechnya when she was only nine years old.