Mary Thaler

It’s easy to start a press, but it’s much harder to keep one going. For Joshua Bohnsack, running Long Day Press has been wonderful, stressful, frustrating and heartbreaking, and rewarding, all at once.

The question of whether individuals controlled their own destiny was a big deal during the Viking Age. If men were at the mercy of forces beyond their control, how did women fare?

I sketched out the constellations in my notebooks and knew the name of every star / and when mom was home / and wasn’t busy / we’d lay on the driveway and look at the sky at night until the / light pollution wrapped it up and hid it away.

When I ask most Buddhist teachers about the most pressing spiritual question for me — the fate of the soul after death — they’ll tell me that the soul is an illusion.

Helium three, / fuel of the age, / dust on the moon.

You’ve been vandalized by a rummaging god. She’s become a compacted star in your cosmos, the rings through which you become, like Saturn, denser than before—heavy with shame and longing.

In this keenly-observed graphic novel, Odette has been hiding a problem: an inky black jellyfish that floats perpetually in her field of view.

It was so delightful last Thursday night to meet up with my fellow-authors, Geoffreyjen Edwards and Richard Andrews, whom I am far more used to seeing on video-calls through my flat laptop screen! We were meeting in Quebec City at the bookstore-café Mo …

What are we to make of a poem that begins “None of this happened:” except to see where the author takes us, what other tricks she has in store, what detours we must take?

An FBI raid on a grave-robbing missionary; stolen sacred objects; ancient artifacts; hundreds of human remains; fears of an atomic weapon in a remote farmhouse. And even, perhaps, the wrath of spirits.

Despite scenes of peril on the ocean, the book moves slow, full of details about everyday survival in this harsh environment. By the end, the reader has witnessed great changes reflected the microcosm of the characters’ lives.

We’re inviting submissions of short works—fiction or non-fiction, poetry, prose, or other experimental forms—that explore all the many contradictory faces of paradox.

“And what do you know about paradox?” Grolier asked his younger sister, Mailka. “The harmony of opposites? But I still don’t know what that m… means.”

A virgin will rebuild from ash the burning library at Alexandria. She will not take any prisoners. Her large eyes will be tests that you must pass. For a third time will the Argo sail, outperforming Voyager One. You will learn of how this ship is not different from your body. It will move beyond the speed of light.

Language has served as a way to bridge a perceived gap between consciousnesses who believe themselves to be separate. By another reckoning, language has served as a crutch to help us hobble through the woundedness of feeling separate.

Coming from Montréal’s bustling scene of graphic-novel creators, Cab’s main character is a painter struggling with creative block while living semi-legally with his friends in a building on the verge of being condemned.

A thrilling yet understated crime drama focused on the relationship between a police detective and a woman whose husband has died in a suspicious climbing accident, distinguished by the complexity of its characters.

The danger of cynicism is getting what you believe in:  Nothing.

Strange, the power of the past—how our spiritual ancestors become our future masters.

Never mind poetry or prose, good literature is the art of friction.

In the age of information overload, our guides are curators.

Anything freed from the marble is an angel.  Never cease chiseling…

Jordan Kurella’s novella is a modern fable that bounces back and forth between a modern day university, a music department, and the nether world of Hades, the Greek version of Hell.

A working definition of Love: we started talking and never stopped…

Birds don’t use their wings only to fly but, also, for balance―just like us.

Art for art’s sake is a dead end; art for heart’s sake is the way out.

A quietly provocative story about a cellist who leaves the musical profession and finds a job preparing dead bodies for burial.

Properly speaking, shadows are not those places where the light is blocked. In the earliest reconstructed languages, those places have no names, though the proto-word for shadow does exist. Shadows were the beings that lived in those places of blocked light. Through the corruption of time, they have lent their name to their native homes, been subsumed by them, been forgotten.

From my very childhood, I’ve always been curious, interested, in a quest to find out what actually life is. What, in fact, is death? Where do we humans come from, and where do we go after death? Or, why we humans are on earth at all, and then die?

“The Second” was written for a speculative fiction writing workshop and very last-minute in its original form. I did the plotting and world-building on the fly, and basically the original idea was “what if the protagonist were trying to save their friend from a duel?”