Gabriel Jesiolowski articulates the vacancy within the story of grief in As Burning Leaves, a book-length poem in forty-seven segments.

Read the full review here!

Islands provide fertile territory for utopian visions. For Thomas More, Utopia itself was an island, a self-enclosed little atoll just beyond the horizon where the best of all possible worlds could be found. For J.M. Barrie, Neverland was an island, a place where dreams came true and children never grew up. Writing about California – a place, incidentally, named after an island “very close to the Terrestrial Paradise” in Garci Rodríguez de Montalvo’s The Adventures of Esplandián – Jean Baudrillard points out that the state had become, once the emancipatory convulsions of the 60s were over, utopic in a different sort of way. “Whereas the demand for happiness was once something oceanic and emancipatory, here it comes wrapped up in a fetal tranquility,” he writes; a “paradisiac and inward-looking illusion,” California had metamorphosed into, or back into, an island imprisoned in its own temperate beatitude. In the final analysis, the island of utopia – Californian or otherwise – seems always just a few steps away from something much more sinister. “A very slight modification, a change of just a few degrees,” Baudrillard says, would suffice to make paradise seem “like hell.”

PIGS takes place on an island on which all the Earth’s trash washes ashore. Four children must collect the trash (plastic, uneaten food, nuclear waste, unwanted advise, ect.) and feed it to six monstrous pigs. This cycle has seemingly been going on forever. Oh yeah, on the island there are also adults whose sole purpose seems to be just to torment the children. Everything on the island gets thrown off kilter when a child and a man wash ashore. Are they trash? Are the new residents of the island? Weird enough for ya?!

There’s a dreaminess to childhood rebellion, the moments when children viscerally understand that the adults don’t know what they are doing. Some of the most memorable moments in European arthouse films of the 20^th century capture this phenomenon for the purpose of critiquing authoritarianism and the adult world order in all its arbitrary, unjust, cruel ugliness. The aesthetics of these moments shift the viewer into a fantastical space, making powerful use of the dream, the subconscious, the whimsical, and the irrational to show the flaws in the system, the ruptures in what we take to be true simply because we’re gotten used to perceiving reality in the accepted way. In these films, explanations are provisional, and may at any moment be upended.

The island, from a distance, looks like almost anything other than what it actually is: a place where the world’s detritus washes up, a place where a handful of children oversee six pigs that live in a pen and consume an endless stream of garbage. The adults, aloof, smoke cigarettes, throw soirees, drink espresso, and traipse the rocky terrain in impractical yet glamorous shoes.

In Stoberock’s extraordinarily imaginative novel, four children live on a desert island where all the world’s waste washes ashore. They are tasked with the arduous, abject, and unrelenting work of feeding all of it to six insatiably hungry giant pigs. Moreover, a group of nameless and sadistic adults rule the island, and the children must hide from these uncaring hedonists at all costs. When a scared boy washes up in a barrel, the children wonder. Should he be fed to the pigs, too? 

Synopsis: Four children live on an island that serves as the repository for all the world’s garbage. Trash arrives, the children sort it, and then they feed it to a herd of insatiable pigs: a perfect system. But when a barrel washes ashore with a boy inside, the children must decide whether he is more of the world’s detritus, meant to be fed to the pigs, or whether he is one of them.

In the popular imagination, pigs simply exist to consume and to be consumed. We revile them because they are seen as gluttonous animals, indiscriminate in their pursuit for satiation, and because they are dirty, wallowing happily in their own filth. Johanna Stoberock’s novel Pigs uses these stereotypes—the rapacious, prosaic nature of these beasts—to amplify the grotesque impulse of want and greed inherent in both animal and man.

Six giant pigs, four kids, and a gang of adults on a magical island maintain a tenuous balance of power until two castaways show up in Johanna Stoberock’s probing literary novel, Pigs.

It’s 1923 and 19-year-old Dara falls in love with her best friend, who happens to be a girl. To avoid a bleak, terrifying future in their small town, Dara takes a job in the kitchen at Imperial State Prison Farm for men. There she meets real-life blues singer Lead Belly, who sings his way to a pardon from the Governor—but only after he makes her promise to follow his lead. Life outside, however, isn’t all sweet tea and roses. After Dara’s ordinary domestic life falls apart and she gains so much weight she can barely wash herself, she is sent on a journey to accept the secret she’s been carrying. Along the way Dara reunites with her estranged step-daughters, buys a mobile home that she dubs the “Bland Old Opry,” and—to the chagrin of some in her small Texas town—falls in love with the local seamstress, a fellow widower and devotee of Bingo, Mrs. Tanya May Rogerton. Dara must break out of her own physical and emotional prison to become the fabulous matriarch to a family of Texas misfits.

Andy Davis from Eco-fiction recently interviewed Cai Emmons author of Weather Woman. Davis asks Emmons about her inspirations and knowledge needed to write about the character in the story. Davis also asks about Emmon's writing process; you can read about that and the rest of the interview here.

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Weather Woman is best read as a story about a twenty-something who can’t make lemonade out of life’s lemons. Life is often a journey from crisis to crisis, and our attempts to smooth out the rough edges often fail. Bronwyn struggles with the mercurial nature of life, and even with her amazing power, she never really takes the reins. – JG Follansbee

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"…Jesiolowski has crafted a book of movement and landscape, in which individuals quietly but significantly consider what it is to move and transform from place to place"

Thanks, Asterix Journal! Click here for the full review!

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Oakland Public Library has complied 10 ficiton books that everyone should read this October!

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Peggy Shumaker was the Alaska State Writer Laureate for 2010-2012 and the founding editor of Boreal Books, publishers of fine art and literature from Alaska. Cairn, her recently published collection, evokes life in Alaska but frequently U-turns to the Tucson, Arizona of her childhood, making the 400 pages of Cairn a rich and diverse reading experience.

Read full.

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