Public Republic

Elayne Clift Photo: orangeacid It takes a lot to shock me, but elementary school kids playing “the rape game” on a school bus? Baby T-shirts sporting “Chick Magnet” on the front? Blow jobs at Bar Mitzvahs? All this and more is documented in Diane Levin’s and Jean Kilbourne’s important new book aimed at helping parents […]

Photo: delgaudm With her novel “Glass Butterflies” Ludmila Filipova has asserted herself as a capable and experienced author ready to enter unknown and virgin territory. “Glass Butterflies” is written in modern style and contains both attractive and clear messages. It stands out among the most precious achievements of the contemporary Bulgarian prose, a phenomenon which […]

Photo: procsilas Ancient myths from both Bulgaria and the world, historical sources along with a lot fictionalized past, quoted manuscripts with lost ends, roads that cross, and characters in whose destinies events from more than a century and a half ago come together: these are only some of the ideas behind “The Parchment Maze”. The […]

Darren Jackson Photo: carlsonimkeller Although it’s been many years since I first escaped into the tormented mythology of the Meidosems, the images still hold me the way the Meidosems’ grip one of their children of the soul, dangled by the ankle “in the wind and the rain” (115)*. I had moved to the south of […]

Michael Todd Burns Photo: Cia De Foto   In Jerry’s first novel we are introduced to Philip Janov, a man whose life has been squelched by obligations not of his own making. On an oft times hilarious ride through his life we see what a contentious older brother, a wildly erratic wife, and an insanely […]

James Vincent Photo: semihundido The fortune read, ‘Accept the next proposition you hear.’  I found the familiar white rectangle outside my office around quitting time. Odd in these troubled times that someone would just leave a fortune laying around.  I wasn’t sure it applied to me.  I didn’t eat the cookie, I didn’t tip the […]

Linda Cruise Photo: =ChevalieR= Since the late 1940s, thousands of published books have been written on the subject of World War II—a seemingly infinite number of stories could be told about this one finite historical event. Most of these works are nonfiction, but a significant body of that war’s literature exists in fiction form as […]

Brian Russell Photo: m o d e In his deeply moving novel, “Body & Soul,” Frank Conroy employs the fictive technique of compression in both traditional and exciting, less traditional ways that I might dub: hyper-compression. The traditional use of compression often moves a story ahead in time or condenses what would otherwise be a […]

Maggie Creshkoff Pat Valdata is a poet and uses her words as a poet would, deftly weaving the story of a Hungarian immigrant family in the early decades of 19th century America. Their triumphs and tragedies over three generations are mirrored by events on the world stage; and their personal loves and losses are echoed […]

Jessie Janeshek Photo: hansvink I’ve been lingering over Hilda Raz’s new book because of the breadth and depth of her voice; she’s confident in her wisdom yet open to learn, objective yet welcomingly warm, serious yet light. No matter where her poetry takes us—and it takes us great distances—Raz’s speaker returns to the comfort of […]

Carol Berg Photo: lenny_montana Tomas Transtromer writes in the opening poem “Prelude” of his Selected Poems, “consciousness can own the world” and this philosophy informs much of his poetry. Transtromer’s own consciousness deeply engages his world, sometimes with dread as his consciousness reflects Nature’s cold aloofness, as in his poem “Face to Face,” and sometime […]

“I too will slice open the belly of a great heaving.” Jenny Boully

Joan Gumbs Photo: closelyobserved.com Flannery O’Connor, responding to a letter from an English Professor, once said, “The meaning of a story … cannot be captured in an interpretation.… If teachers are in the habit of approaching a story as if it were a research problem … then I think student will never learn to enjoy […]

Joan Gumbs Photo: alicepopkorn According to Ig Publisher, publishers of Our Napoleon in Rags, Kirby Gann’s novel is a “biting commentary on contemporary America.” Argumentative. Whose commentary is it? Certainly not Gann’s, who, in an interview with Bob Williams from The Compulsive Reader declared, “There’s no specific ‘message’ the novel is trying to put across […]

Linda Cruise Photo: stephmcg Read Part I Strangely, perhaps, when it comes to literary fiction, truth exists in the context of a paradox: fiction is dependent on truth—on multiple levels. If a story is to succeed as art, it must contain deeper meaning and relevance. This is to say that literary fiction permits the reader […]

Vanya Nikolaeva Deron Cohen was born and raised in San Diego, California. He graduated from the University of California in Los Angeles, with a degree in Fine Arts. Deron has been teaching painting courses, held one man shows in Seattle, and participated in group shows at the San Diego Art Department, Limbo Fine Arts, and […]

Linda Cruise Photo: blacksun In regard to storytelling, two facts remain constant: our human love affair with story and that the telling—when it is done well—begets art. What distinguishes one story from another is not its specific plot details so much as the way the writer handles the myriad of decisions that goes into the […]

Ellie Ivanova Ponti Petja Heinrich is a journalist, linguist and writer. Her first book of poetry in Bulgarian is to be presented in Sofia on December 6, 2008. She is an editor for the German-language edition of Public Republic.

Milena Kirova Photo: wonderlane During the last three decades we have been witnessing an unprecedented rise of attention to the literary specifics of the biblical text. Teaching the Bible as literature has turned into a constant presence in the undergraduate and the postgraduate schedules of most universities in Western Europe and in the United States. […]

Katerina Stoykova-Klemer Photo: RatRanch Scientific articles typically fall into one of two categories. They are either pseudo-scientific pieces that, in order to be accessible to the general reader, have been uncomplicated to the point that the scientific value has been diminished; or, they are dense with information and specific terminology, but unreadable by all but […]