31. The Missouri Review : Volume 27, Number 1, 2004 (184 pages, read April 19 – June 14)
Published by the University of Missouri

Another ancient literary review. This one I actually purchased myself, when it was current, but then waited eight years to read it. It was worth the wait, I guess, as I loved it. I’m now reading a 1997 issue, from the same editor, Speer Morgan. In both issues every short stories has been an absolute joy, wonderful storytelling with many touches of brilliance, and most seem to have led to future publications.

As with the previous ones, please don’t feel compelled to read the notes below, as they are more for me, then for public consumption.

Essays
[[Timothy Bascom]] - A Vocabulary for My Senses - About growing up a child of missionaries in a rural mission in Ethiopia. Later incorporated into his book [Chameleon Days: An American Boyhood in Ethiopia. I was so taken by this that I looked up the book, but was discouraged by the likely religious tilt.

Charles Martin Kearney - Maps and Dreaming - A mesmerizing story of traveling overland through Turkey, Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan and India with a stranger with of whom Kearney pretends to be the husband. The relationship develops in strange, touching, and possibly purely platonic ways. Kearney currently has a blog for the Huffington Post. This story is apparently incorporated in a 2009 book titled The Logic of Maps and Dreaming, but there are no entries on LibraryThing.

[[Danielle Ofri]] - Living Will - A doctor pondering a patients attempted suicide. Apparently to be incorporated in an upcoming book, titled Tools of the Trade

Fiction
[[Valerie Laken]] - Family Planning - Deceptively complex story about lesbian couple going to Russia to adopt a baby, while hiding their relationship. Laken now has a novel and collection of short stories where this story is included and gets highlighted in the reviews

[[Linda Bamber]] - Dog Story - A two page story about a woman, in third-person, pondering her failed relationship with her ex-husband. This excerpt begins with an interview on a radio show she happens to be listening to:

But then the interviewer asked a little boy…why the tooth fairy didn’t just use bricks to build her house, like everyone else, and the boy said immediately, Because nobody doesn’t have bricks for teeth. And the question I want to ask you, she writes, is why does that make me think of you? Why does that make me think of trying to reason with you?

[[Nic Pizzolatto]] - 1987, The Races – A divorced father takes his son to the Oaklawn Racetrack in Hot Spring, Arkansas…

Mary Jean Babic - Why People Say Two Thousand - opens “My mother and husband died nineteen days apart, and the next time I put on shoes it was four months later.”

Armand ML Inezian - Bringing Ararat - A young Armenian is left behind with his younger sister in Israel, while the rest of the family moves to the United States. Sent money to join the family, he hesitates, feeling more at home in Israel than anywhere else he has lived.

[[Brock Clarke]] - Concerning Lizzie Borden, Her Axe, My Wife – opens “On Friday my wife, Catrine, kicked me out of the house. ON the following Thursday she called me at my room in the Budget Inn and said, “I want you to come with to the Lizzie Borden House and Bed and Breakfast in Fall River, Massachusetts.” A methodical husband can’t deal with his wife’s fatal illness. So she takes somewhere where there are no answers. This touching story was just so much fun, really just wonderful. I also liked this excerpt:

I knew where this was headed, or should have. Because this is what I did and do, at Kodak and elsewhere: research. For instance, Catrine is from Montreal, and when I met her ten years ago and fell in love, I did heavy research on the city: its history, customs, civic institutions and festivals, restaurants, average high temperature and snowfall, biggest employers and its general feeling about the Quebec question and whether or not to separate from the rest of Canada. I walked around citing obscure facts about Catrine’s hometown, facts she didn’t care about and was unimpressed by, and one day when I was telling her about the origin of Montreal bagels and how they were different from what Americans know bagels to be, she said, “Eric, why are you doing this?”

“Because I love you. Because I wanted to know everything about you.”

“That’s sweet,” she said. “But cut it out.”

Foreward
[[Speer Morgan]] - Kali and the Bee Woman

Interview
[[Steve Gehrke ]]- An Interview with [[Albert Goldbarth]] - I’ve been down on Goldbarth after reading a collection by him, but this interview was fascinating.

Poetry
[[Luisa Igloria]]
- Field Planted with Winter Grass
- The Return
- Trill and Mordent
- Mandorla
[[Jude Nutter]]
- Horses - includes this line: “Before you die look/ into the eyes of a horse at least once/ and discover how each is an immense, empty room/ lit by a single candle “
- The Rest of Us
- To The Reader
- The Last Supper
[[Jeffrey Skinner]] – Loved Skinners stuff. I posted Lucky Day in the Club Read Poetry thread here
- My Father’s Brain
- Lucky Day
- The Three Temptations of My Father
- The Adirondacks
- Black Olives
[[Elton Glaser]]
- Blizzard Near Emporia, 1893
- Between Matins and the Late Alarm
- Plain Talk in a Beaver Hat
- Regression Analysis
- Black Olives

Reviews
Lanis Knight reviewed [Happy Baby] by Stephen Elliott
Shaen Pogue reviewed [Waterborne] by Linda Gregerson
Evelyn Somers reviewed [The God of Old] by James Kugel – timely, since I’m reading a book by Kugel now
Nathan Oats reviewed [The Namesake] by Jhumpa Lahiri – didn’t make me like the book any better
[[Steve Street]] reviewed [Life of Pi] by Yann Martel – interesting
Colin Flemming reviewed [Picasso’s War: The Destruction of Guernica, and the Masterpiece That Changed the World] by Russell Martin
Speer Morgan reviewed The Bontë Myth by Lucasta Miller
Charlie Green reviewed [Love] by Toni Morrison -mixed
Sarah Fay McCarthy reviewed [Vernon God Little] by D. B. C. Pierre – and did not make me want to read it
Ewa Hryniewicz-Yarbrough Reviewed [House of Day, House of Night] by Olga Tokarczuk – this did make me want to read it
[[Michael Kardos]] reviewed [Harry Belten and the Mendelssohn Violin Concerto] by Barry Targan – originally published in 1975. The review is titled Mr Lost Classic

2012
http://www.librarything.com/topic/138560#3481001