Public Republic

Book review: Evidence that We Are Descended from Chairs By Andrew Merton Accents Publishing, 2012 Reviewed byJourney McAndrews Chickens and crows. Galaxies and gallows. Age and alchemy. Sometimes a collection of poetry comes along that is so evocative and sincere in its exploration, so enthralling and authentic in its pathos, that each line leaves readers […]

By Marianne Schnall Blue Mountain Arts, 2010 Reviewed by Lauren Kearney, Bulgaria Daring to be Ourselves is a profoundly empowering book filled with quotes written by some of the most influential women of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, such as Jane Fonda, Cameron Diaz, Maya Angelou, Gloria Steinem, Melissa Etheridge, Natalie Portman and many more. […]

Girish Shambu This article originally appeared on Girish Shambu’s Blog on January 24, 2012. Photo: Jia Zhangke – “Still Life” (2006) One of the most intriguing aspects of the Movie Mutations project is that it brought together a number of film critics of a certain generation who were geographically dispersed across multiple continents and yet […]

Prof. Dr. Milena Kirova Translated by: Ralitsa Muharska Photo: Fran Tapia Ads are among the most visible acquisitions of public life in Bulgaria after 1989. They are “like air and water” to the “democratic” Bulgarian: they mostly go unnoticed, but are experienced as an indispensable part of our social habitus. Ads are always-present – all […]

The two short stories by Zdravka Evtimova: “She Understood” and “The Miracle Maker” (published in the anthology of short stories “Drastic Measures (Short Story Collection)” in the UK in January 2012) inspired the following critical notes on the works of the Bulgarian writer: Again, the idea is a study of where the human mind goes […]

Jasmina Tacheva Photo: Pioneer Library System Tim O’Brien (born October 1, 1946 in Minnesota) is an American novelist who often writes about his experiences in the Vietnam War and the impact the war had on the American servicemen who fought there. His short fiction has appeared in The New Yorker, Esquire, Harper’s, The Atlantic, Playboy, […]

Robert Barton The inaugural story published by Best Fiction is Carts by Zdravka Evtimova. Ms. Evtimova lives in Pernik, Bulgaria, and works as a literary translator from English, French and German. Her short stories have appeared in American journals such as Antioch Review, Massachusetts Review, the anthology New Sudden Fiction, as well as in various […]

Peter Cowlam Photo: Wonderlane ‘I owe the discovery of Uqbar to the conjunction of a mirror and an encyclopedia.’ Jorge Luis Borges Berkeley, who was Bishop of Cloyne in 1734, denied the existence of matter in a reply to Locke (1632–1704), whose conception of the universe was Newtonian and mechanistic, a place where material bodies […]

Shae Davidson A quote from Stanley Kunitz tucked away in Stick Tight Man expresses the roots of Jim Lally’s approach to writing: “gratitude for the gift of life.” Lally’s depiction of rural life in the twenty-first century celebrates lived experience by embracing the cycles of change and growth—and the attendant patterns of gain and loss. […]

Georgia Jones-Davis Sus-toss, explains poet Katerina Stoykova-Klemer in her remarkable and engaging chapbook, “The Most,” is Hopi for the “disease that cause different parts of you to live in different places.” Ms, Klemer would know. She is a young woman who has emigrated from Bulgaria to the United States, straddling multiple worlds at once. “Sus-toss […]

Debra Fox It is Barry George’s palpable regard for the cast of characters who inhabit the urban landscape in his haiku collection, Wrecking Ball and Other Urban Haiku, that makes it so powerful. Whether he is describing a conductor, a window washer, an accused teen, or a homeless man, George suggests they are all deserving […]

Barry George Brian Russell’s Meeting Dad is a memoir of his efforts to reconcile with his natural father. The story unfolds with a sense of urgency and anticipation. Russell is a fourteen-year-old living in Buffalo; Bob Jaycox is a salesman now living in San Juan, Puerto Rico, with his second wife and family. In the […]

Peter Cowlam Photo: MAMJODH Borges – always a free thinker – at no time espoused Christian theology, but did regard one of Christianity’s foremost theological poets as having authored ‘the apex’ of all literature – namely Dante Alighieri (1265–1321), whose Commedia continues to be studied, and is regularly translated, by other writers. Dante composed his […]

Sheri Wright Jude Lally speaks with an honesty we could all live by, an honesty that threads us together regardless of our experiences, shared or not. Through his words, we are given a view of what it is to navigate through doorways sometimes difficult for our passing, yet do it over and over again even […]

Barry George Photo: victoriapeckham In the poems throughout Seed Across Snow, Kathleen Driskell’s careful attention to details creates the feeling of a heightened attentiveness to life. Nowhere is this more evident than in two of her poems about motherhood, “Why I Mother You the Way I Do” and “Seed.” In these two compelling poems, Driskell […]

By Ellie Ivanova Ponti Photo: Geoff604 No, this is not related to Julia Child, whose culinary mystique I seem to have missed, being a transplant from a different culture on American soil. It’s about books on cooking in general, the writing of/on cooking and on the pleasure of food. Well, the concept of food is […]

By Ellie Ivanova Ponti I love browsing through fashion advice books, but it’s always out of curiosity. I like to see a different interpretation of what women should look like – and how that changes through time. I never follow the advice contained in those books because I forget the specifics. And they are so […]

Drew Logan Photo: badosa Dylan is older than me and he deserves my respect. The fact that he is older than me is not a real good reason to respect someone; the fact that he is older than me and is still being wonderfully creative is a real good reason to respect someone. “It’s All […]

Drew Logan This is a new book of poetry by Jeanie Thompson, a painter of lush images with words from Alabama. She is the managing director of the Alabama Writers Forum and I was thinking about moving to Alabama until I found out she also teaches at Spalding University in Louisville, Kentucky. I live in […]

Ellie Ivanova Ponti A friend of mine recommended the 1960 classic Never on Sunday (directed by Jules Dassin, starring Melina Mercouri) as the film that introduced foreign cinema to the larger American audience. In fact, it won several Academy Awards nominations and was a huge success. It also caused uproar in Hollywood with the fact […]