Tag: books

DIARIES & MEMOIRS: COUNTRIES A-Z, Exclusive to COTW, Letters to the editors, Popular & established authors, South Korea

Letter from Jo Eun Young to Matthew, COTW editor

!Epic Tomorrows

Dear Matthew,

I hope you have been doing well.

After returning from Europe, I took about a week to recover from jet lag and regain my energy.

For this journey, I printed fifty copies of our leaflet, and I was able to leave forty-eight of them at bookshops along the way.

My first stop was the conference in Siena, where I shared the leaflet with professors and several students in Korean Studies. They were genuinely interested, especially in the translations, and I promised to send them the original Korean poems after returning home.

After Siena, I visited Florence and Rome. The experience was quite different from my visit to Lisbon in 2019.

In Lisbon, I felt warmly welcomed. Perhaps it was because Fernando Pessoa is celebrated throughout the city, with bookstores and shops proudly displaying books and souvenirs inspired by him. It felt like a city that embraces its poets.

Florence and Rome, however, felt different. After returning home, I found myself reflecting on why.

First, Florence and Rome are much more tourism-oriented cities than Lisbon. Perhaps people naturally saw me as a tourist rather than as a writer.

Second, I wondered whether my limited English, together with being an Asian visitor, made communication more difficult.

Third, many of the bookshops I visited also operated as cafés, restaurants, or bars, which may have made it less practical for them to introduce or display independent literary projects.

Because the leaflet was written in English, one bookseller—who I believe was probably a staff member rather than the owner—suggested that I should instead visit bookshops specializing in English-language books.

In Florence, every bookshop kindly accepted my leaflet. In Rome, one bookshop politely declined. It appeared to be one of the busiest bookstores in the neighborhood, and the staff explained that any decision to display printed materials had to be discussed and approved at a staff meeting.

I cannot say that I was enthusiastically welcomed everywhere, but I also realize that this expectation was my own. If even one person becomes interested and a genuine connection begins, I will consider this journey worthwhile.

Most importantly, this small adventure was meaningful because I was able to share a leaflet that we created together—you, the illustrator Han So-jin, and I. Thanks to this project, I wandered far beyond the usual tourist destinations and explored the small streets and independent bookshops of Florence and Rome.

Back in Korea, I am currently teaching as a professor while also working with a local cultural foundation on a project interviewing independent neighborhood bookshops. Looking back, from March through August, I have been on a continuous journey through local bookshops in both Korea and Europe.

Thank you, Matthew, for accompanying me on this journey through your work and encouragement.

Now many projects are waiting for me again.

I hope to spend this summer working, reading, writing, and loving.

With my sincere gratitude,

JO EUN YOUNG

P.S.

I’ve been documenting this journey on my Instagram (@bella_joeun), if you’re interested.

Ecology of the absurd, Featured blogs, sites & lit works, FLASH!, Popular & established authors, USA

Butterfly Farm

!Epic Tomorrows

By Nina Hart: This story originally appeared in the book of short stories, Somewhere in a Town You Never Knew Existed Somewhere

It had been years since she’d been to the butterfly farm. She had to stop going because the butterflies were too beautiful. She would sit and weep as their soft wings skimmed overhead and grazed her tiny ears. Their grand wings veering wide in flight and showing her prints like African batik.
       She didn’t like being the one who always cried, sitting on the bench and looking down and over to the side. She was trying to hide the tears that rolled out like curling butterfly tongues. The butterflies didn’t know she was crying for them. They were too busy landing on velvety flowers and sucking sweet liquids out of squeaky golden stems.
       The last day she spent at the butterfly farm was the day she cried the most. She was sitting on a bench and she was talking to them. She told them they were “sweet and gentle” in a very loud voice, which surprised even her. Suddenly a slow-moving man wearing dirty beige cover-alls and holding a heavy glass jar began to walk toward her. He came and took her four favorite butterflies. She didn’t know how he knew. He stuffed them with his rough hands through the top of the jar and quickly screwed on the lid, their tiny wings wilting. Dogs barked and birds screeched and the sky turned grey with sadness. Some big bowl of hunger grew up in her and puffed her size up to the clouds. Swollen hands moving like giant wings. Her love was that big. She took the man’s bulbous arm and threw it behind his back and arrested him and took him back to the pork farm and the butterflies now sit on his shoulder and eat from dog bowls for all the rest of their days.
FLASH!, Many feminisms, Popular & established authors, USA

Bonanza keep digging

!Epic Tomorrows

By Nina Hart: This story originally appeared in the book of short stories, Somewhere in a Town You Never Knew Existed Somewhere

Bonanza was a scary girl, all backwards in her thinking. Five years old and she didn’t like anyone. No-one liked her either. She often wondered which came first, did she like no-one and then did no-one like her, or was it the other way around?
       “Shut up and keep digging,” cried her mother, while Bonanza was busy burying the bony remains of her ten last, best and only friends. “Shut up and keep digging,” mouthed Bonanza in a sour, mocking voice, hoping her mother didn’t hear but secretly wishing she would. Bonanza was digging and stacking, digging and stacking, and burying her little toy dolls, one on top of another, digging and stacking and burying them all in the backyard.
       “There goes Frances,” she said, one by one patting them on the soft tops of their heads. “Little Limp Suzette, Astrid, Lingafore, Penitence, Rye Bread, Amber Ocean with the Amazing Marble Brown Eyes, Lori Fred the Beast, Marmalade.” And then there was The Ancient One, who kept bobbing her loose plastic head back and forth, stacked flat on her back on top of Marmalade, in the ruddy brown dirt. “Stay still,” said Bonanza through stinging tears.
       These were the days of no return. Her mother was right. If she couldn’t be a friendly, polite girl, then she would be liked by no-one. And so it was that her mother, with resounding voice, descended heavily down the porch stairs, thick ankled, to the backyard to supervise Bonanza’s burial of the word F-r-i-e-n-d-s-h-i-p.
       All the summer light grew dim, darker, until Bonanza was just a small speck of dust beating away at the backyard air, then, her self, buried. Fell in with the rest of them. Fell right flat on top of The Ancient One.
Ecology of the absurd, FLASH!, Popular & established authors, USA

Chipper Dale

!Epic Tomorrows

By Nina Hart: This story originally appeared in the book of short stories, Somewhere in a Town You Never Knew Existed Somewhere

Charles Chipper Dale stood dressed in the full regalia of an eight-year-old on his front lawn in Xenia, Ohio. The air was hot, and black, and sweet. Charlie jumped nervously from one foot to the other, nostrils flaring like a hunting dog’s. “The tornado will hit without warning!” prophesized Chipper to his audience of six children, one dirty sparrow, and a beat-up red Tonka Truck. “We will all be dead, taken up into the wormlike mass, cold faces pressed against one another in the brutal raging wind!” The children all sighed and began to shake and cry. “I have to go home and get my Snoopy Roo-Roo.” cried Ellen, who looked like a ringing bell in her oversized green dress. “Well the clouds will suck you up like a milkshake into the sky if you do, Ellen! I forbid you to go anywhere, Ellen.” said Charlie. “Where are the parents? Where are the parents?” asked Jake Lacky, who had a wide chest just like his pot-smoking dad. “My teacher said I’m a latchkey kid. What’s a latchkey kid?” No one knew. In the distance the raw smell of rain drew closer. The children could taste the mist as it slipped on their lips like hard candy. They could feel a rumble in the earth under their hot tennis shoes. “What do we do, Charlie?” asked Rainbow, one of Jake Lacky’s three siblings, latchkey kid and daughter of the pot smoker. “Look to the wind.” said Charles Chipper Dale, fingers twitching, eyes veering off into the far distance. “It’s here, it’s coming, and it won’t be long. We won’t wait for the sirens to go off. We’re children. We can feel things. Let’s head on down to the root cellar, one at a time. Single file.” “I love you all so much,” whispered Rainbow, as she held her brother Jake’s hand and followed him down the stone staircase. Cars and their drivers drove past the children on the street. Faces and heads and necks propelled forward on their way back to work after lunch break. All of them ignoring the twisting sky in the distance and the staunch smell of darkness. The tornado would hit without warning. The latchkey kids would be safe in Charlie Dale’s root cellar, listening to the roaring sounds of the King of Winds. All of them holding hands and Rainbow mouthing I love you I love you and I love you all into the dark green landscape.

DIARIES & MEMOIRS: COUNTRIES A-Z, England, Exclusive to COTW

How to ruin a man’s orgasm

!Epic Tomorrows

By Eric Black

The physical techniques are well-known. There is a whole weird subculture online devoted to them. But I refer to the psychological and societal techniques. First, the man should be born into a liberal Western family, which retains just enough unconscious traditional expectation of high male performance as to confuse the young male mind, growing, as it would be, in a free-thinking family which claimed to be indifferent to gender roles. Second, the man should grow to be bisexual, but not to be too comfortable in his bisexuality. Third, his parents should divorce at a young age, with the father leaving the family and maintaining only brief fortnightly contact. Fourth, the man, as a teenager, should over-use alcohol, cannabis, and porn, should go to the wrong university, should leave early and not get a degree, should enter into homo-erotic friendships where neither side admitted the homo-eroticism and where the other guy would dominate the friendship, making it difficult for the man to socialize in a wide and balanced way; and should break up with his first girlfriend, painfully, after a couple of years. Fifth, the man should develop serious mental health problems in his early 20s, feeling like a failure, should make friends with people who later killed themselves, and should have all his prospects for making a living destroyed by peer pressure, the expectations of the university-uneducated and a persistent nagging low self-esteem. Sixth, the man should go through his 2os with no sexual contact with anyone, forcing his sexuality to become auto-erotic, exhausting his orgasms to the point of no return, almost breaking them. Seventh, the man should finally find a long-term partner, but whom he is ultimately not suited to and does not have regular sex with, ending in a protracted and tortuous break-up.

And yet, all this may not be quite enough to totally ruin a mans orgasm, because the man may marry a kind and understanding person, of whatever gender, who may help him to explore his sexuality, who may help him to recover his hardness, as well as his softness, who may support his critique of this abusive society, who may stay with him till the end.