The Lands Betweenby Faruk Ulay is a unique and intelligent book reminiscent of Invisible Cities by Calvino and Beckett’s late prose.  It collects 33 short observations by this artist, writer and Turkish émigré living in the Los Angeles area, that examines the world with bafflement, desire, rapture and despair—a cosmography of delight and dismay that, for all its strangeness in these short tales, bears on our own world to a disturbing degree.

Faruk Ulay was born in Istanbul, Turkey in 1957.  He moved to the United States in 1982 and lives in Pasadena, California. He is the author of fourteen books–eight collections of short fiction, two novels, and several volumes of non-fiction work. His independent publishing project Locus Novusfocuses on interdisciplinary experiments that incorporate both visual and the textual elements, the results presented as artist’s books.

Sample:

This place is not a desert. It is the Land of Uncertain

Things. Even the rocks and earth are uncertain here. One

sleeps and awakens in an endless twilight. The days are

a woven wall of mist. The roads zigzag, but the sharpest

curves can be taken without touching the brake pedal.

Outside the doors of the houses, starched tablecloths lean

against the wall. Tasteless meals are eaten at ironing boards.

The wine is the shade of water….

Find a river. Lean into it. Let it scratch and soften your

skin. Did you ever think that blood flows through your

veins to scratch its itch? You will capture this sense the

scratching awakens as the river rubs past you. If you treat

life gently, you’ll notice that it too rubs your temperaments

in this way. I know. You are as far away from living, as

you are from the river. First, find the river. You will then

capture life. The water guards its beauty with its flow.

Fictional essays on the poetics of living, art & love … a collection of prose-poems which the author herself says “are not as useful as ribs but like them do protect life and when removed from the body hrow certain murmurings of the mind.” And not only murmurings, but whoops, shouts, lamentations and celebrations are what these endlessly inventive pieces are. Into the increasingly rich field of the prose-poem the stirrings of the heart in its many-sidedness and anxiety are picked over and fondled.

In Kristina Marie Darling’s Melancholia (An Essay), a “lock of tangled hair,” a necklace’s “broken clasp,” and a “shattered jewelry box” appear as artifacts of the heroine’s loss. This stunning essay-in-poems reads as both a love story and a collection of memorable objects, the significance of each being revealed to the reader in elliptical, adeptly controlled prose narratives. Also filled with fragmented forms—including footnotes to absent texts, incomplete letters, and partial glossaries—Darling’s new collection asks whether memory can be confined to the margins, in the end suggesting the unmatched intensity of mourning, melancholia, and personal transformation.