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.

The brief, energetic and quirky tales in MARS are set in the future, 3500-3700, on the planet Mars. Regret infuses the stories as human participation in Earth’s climate change cannot be undone and has caused the need for planetary evacuation.  (Cover image by Greg MacDonald.)

from Stargazers:

Star Gazers…point the telescope…. That one is Earth.

What happened to the people? Their Children say.

Some stayed and some came here.

Why did they leave?

Because they ruined their planet.

What did they do to it?

They drilled into it and took stuff out—oil, coal. They burned the oil and coal and made the air kind of like the air on Venus. Everything got too warm. And then it was too late.

What are the people who stayed doing?

Those people are dead now. That was a long time ago. Star Gazers shake their heads. But who knows. Maybe some lived and had children and fixed things. 

Do you think they can see us through their protecto-dome?

A witty, wide-reaching, entertaining and straight-out strange collection of poems that are as described:  for the recently deceased, but as a considered class with practical issues, rather than specific individuals.

A portion of “Caveat of Being the Recently Deceased”:

however, there will be storms,/ roiling like churning stomachs;/ ensuing pangs of now-ness./

Teeth will become/

lost with keys and memory;/ you might lunch with bums;/ surely you /

will lunge with lungs….

As If They Were a Basket, a poem elaborated by nature and by science

This slim chapbook presents a rather lyrical poem by the author then purports to (and quixotically does) draw parallels and commentary on it, line by line, from naturalistic memoirs, diaries and scientific observations by writers in those fields, all properly annotated, each of the three aspects running concurrently and developing its own but companionable sense.

The volume starts off by way of introduction with the following quote by scientist D’Arcy Wentworth Thompson: “We begin by describing the shape of an object in the simple words of common speech; we end by defining it in the precise language of mathematics; and the one method tends to follow the other in strict scientific order and historical continuity.” It continues with a museum photograph of the skeleton of the Irish Elk which is, in fact, neither Irish nor an elk. 44 pages. Limited Edition.

Jane Unrue’s Atlassed has many of the characteristics of a short story sequence, but its carefully composed language recalls the prose poetry of Fred Wah or perhaps Lyn Hejinian. In a sense, Unrue reproduces the peripatetic urban roaming of Paterson or Leaves of Grass—except that the stomping grounds of her metropolitan flaneur is not the city, but the human body itself. The book is composed of a series of prose vignettes, some that are more or less narrative, and others that are more like stylistic improvisations, or prose poems that read like grab-bags of linguistic synergy. The result is both a mapping and an erotics of the body, as indicated by the evocative chapter headings (eg. “Brow and Chin Variations,” or “Topmost Portion of the Forehead, a Common Omission”). These headings supply in large part the “unity” of this book, which attempts to nominally fasten these evocative if not necessarily transparent prose pieces to a conceptual map of the body which though present, hovers just beyond our comprehension.” (Gunnar Benediktsson)

A novel, 96 pages. A young American scholar working in an Maltese monastery library makes an astonishing find: two previously unknown writings by Samuel Taylor Coleridge, the disordered stanzas of a narrative poem set on the island and fragmentary autobiographical material which echoes the poem’s shocking theme. What actually happened to Coleridge in Malta in 1805? Do these pages reveal a never suspected truth?

By the same author: Dr. Polidori’s Sketchbook, Dr. Jesus and Mr Dead, A Death By the Sea, A Spurious Dead in a Foreign Country.

“Three years ago my husband gave me two-thirds of an exceptionally beautiful and sacred mountain. I disputed whether he owned it in the first place, but I accepted through treaty his offer of the majority portion.”

This gift is only the first volley in the border dispute between two countries a husband and wife have each imagined for themselves. End of the Fire Cult alternates between tales of her Marmoral and his Belgrave. When a third country threatens to invade both Marmoral and Belgrave, the couple must decide how to defend themselves. End of the Fire Cult examines culture and change, while also telling the story of the waning days of a modern marriage.

I wrote this imaginary journal to explain a genuine interest in Escher’s work and to think as profoundly as I am able about the grand metaphysical notions that spellbind even the most cynical practitioner of the arts in our time: truth and semblance, the finite and the infinite, the temporal and the timeless, natural law and the dictates of unconscious life, dreaming and the creative imagination. (Those of us for whom to write is to consider ideas, playfully more often than not, seem never to tire of these oppositions.) And so Escher’s journal is also mine.

—Norman Lock, from the Afterword

Jody McAuliffe’s poetic and darkly funny first novel achieves a vivid realization of the age of Romanticism, when suicide was an option of beauty. Heinrich von Kleist, an electrifyingly modern writer, desperate for recognition from the artistic power broker of the time—his moralistic rival Goethe—is driven finally to a notorious act of violence: murder suicide. The seven chapter titles bear the names of his potential suicide partners: if you love him, you must die with him. The story moves between Kleist and his sister Ulrike, between an eighteenth century madness and an eighteenth century reasonableness, between extreme ambition and intense family pressure to succeed. Ulrike, in an effort to fill the hole in her life made by her brother’s death, reads his autobiographical manuscript, The Story of My Soul, and journeys to the center of his obsessive desire for immortality. McAuliffe completely enters the mindset of an artist/suicide in prose so tight it feels coiled. Reading the novel is like experiencing a dream – seemingly rooted in the reality of its characters, but unsettling in its insistence on picking at the scabs of our greatest anxieties.