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Comedy About the End of the World is a farce about a farce, within which is a further farce. It is a farce in the way that our reality is a farce, although, as its hero says: "it is no time for farces. Reality demands serious dramas." Reality demands, as the writer precisely ascertains, that we ask ourselves about the end of the world, that we ask ourselves whether we need to plant and fence off our own vegetable garden or continue to plant only grass - and sell it on... On the edge of town in a house with a neglected garden, in an almost Beckett-like setting, this is exactly what four people are asking themselves; all of them are marked by their own imaginary theatrical reality, but all of them are also easily recognisable from our direct reality. The tenant Joe Orton, a playwright manqué, the owner Elvira, an actress manqué, the new tenant Majerhold, an undercover environmental scientist, and Konjevic, a man with various false identities, cannot agree about the purpose of the garden or about saving the world, and thus the author's anything but optimistic dramatic forecast of how to solve current social problems on the threshold of the end of the world makes it clear that, as so often before and in spite of apocalyptic warnings, in the battle between principled innovators and unscrupulous profiteers, the latter will triumph. Moreover, in response to a dramatic text with skilfully honed dialogue, bursting with aphorisms and intelligent word games, we are led to ask what is actually real both in the play and in general, who is genuine and who is undercover and, above all, whether the end of the world is an approaching reality or merely a behind-the-scenes battle between different interest groups - a battle in which revolutionary scientists and exploitative profiteers alike are operating underground. In a fresh, unobtrusive way Comedy About the End of the World thus deals with the most burning global-local issues and vividly portrays the spirit of the times at both home and abroad; in doing so, it hints that all the world's a stage and so we may never know the answer to the question from the title of Orton's unwritten drama: "Why have all the fucking values gone to pot?"

When Ensign John Yorktown reports aboard a destroyer in the Far East, he finds himself confronted by an unpopular war as well as the morass of 1960s society. Forced to conform, he makes life-altering decisions that impact the lives of the crew, the future of his ship, and the woman he loves. Having just graduated from the University of Texas, Ensign John Yorktown quickly learns that NROTC has not prepared him for either liberty call or the ethical questions raised by the Vietnam conflict. Boats, his mentor, is determined that John be transformed into a true China sailor as they journey from the bars of Thieves Ally in Japan, duel North Vietnamese shore batteries, and anchor in the port of Hong Kong where he meets the exotic bar hostess Firefly. China Sailor is told with the humor and pathos of wartime sailors.

"In CITIES, Elizabeth Thorpe compresses entire novels into short-short stories. With the subtlest descriptions of how someone lifts her hair off her neck, sees a plate, or looks up at sails, Thorpe creates emotional landscapes: real people. This is a book to be savored, and read over and over again, but as John L'Heureux notes, 'no matter how many times we read it, we're not quite through it yet.' Yet while the characters are under constant pressure, they find respite in the natural world-moments of calm in the sky, the sea, the clouds, the woods, 'the wind in the trees like a freight train.' As another character finds: 'For a moment, she is buoyed.'-Jordan Hartt, author of LEAP

"Outside a tight circle, very few people knew of the dangerous missions flown by American pilots during World War II to bomb the war factories of Austria and Hungary. In these missions, the pilots also flew over the beautiful mountains and vineyards of Slovenia, where the inhabitants lived on their quiet farms and practiced the same traditions that they had maintained for centuries. Farewell, Silver Bird is the story of what happened when the young man piloting one such plane unexpectedly arrives and literally drops from the sky into this setting. This sudden appearance triggers discovery, passion, magic, humanity, and more than anything, a deeply personal and fascinating unweaving of a tapestry of secrets and of all the elements that contribute to a sense of self, identity, and history."--Page 4 of cover.

TEXTURE PRESSApril 2016A tragically misguided journey to the illusory concept of homeIn ancient Greece the fate of man was determined by the gods. In today's globalized world gods have been replaced by powerful individuals, mostly invisible, all-powerful and rarely well-meaning. Our "enchanted Odysseus", a man who after a surfing accident in Bali loses his memory and identity, is sent on a long journey home (back to himself as he was) through a series of tasks he has to perform in different countries. They are communicated to him by an Australian neurologist, supposedly his benefactor, who assures him that the tasks, including murder, are a part of his therapy. But nothing is what it seems. Our hero, who tells his story through a series of emails he sends to different people, either real or invented, largely to keep a record of his journey the details of which he keeps forgetting, presents a figure of contemporary everyman, lost in a world that has also lost its memory, and with it the meaning of existence. The dreamlike narrative enfolds the reader and drags him along by the force of incredible adventures, ruminations, and unexpected turnarounds all the way to the ending that doesn't resolve the mystery but only deepens it. Where in this world is Ithaca? Does it exist?

Van Hartmann's Riptide pulls us in with its generosity of sensory details and musical language; it keeps us there with its reasonable heart. Elegiac in tone, tempered by flashes of wry humor, these poems reveal dangers "twisting in the sudden light," confess the "smallness within us," consider "what is possible and what is not." The speaker looks back to look forward and offers us what he's found there, the burden of "memory torn / from Eden that weighs on my heart like gold." -John Hoppenthaler, author of Domestic GardenThe poems in Van Hartmann's Riptide do what all good art should do: acknowledge and embrace the ambiguity of the human condition. We are shown a world in which the "tongues of lovers" sit uneasily, yet quite naturally next to the "machine gun's tight staccato roll." They span a lifetime of personal milestones and cultural atrocities - a child witnessing domestic abuse to a man witnessing his parent's decline; the Killing Fields of Cambodia to the Iraqi desert and the horrors of state-sanctioned torture. Mediating on love and desire, violence and mortality, they draw us into the natural world to show us both beauty (a batch of succulent fiddleheads plucked from the forest and offered to a lover) as well as disorder (an atom bomb test that blooms like a chrysanthemum against a childhood sky). Throughout, Hartmann resists sentimentality and the easy epiphany, giving us a clear-eyed and elegant poetics that offers nature as our brightest lodestar: "I looked for the bird - / a point, at least, / by which to measure /where and who I am." This is a beautiful book and Van Hartmann is a sure new voice in nature writing.-Sheila Squillante, author of Beautiful Nerve and Editor-in-Chief of The Fourth River literary journal

From the Tower of Fomhoire on Ireland's River Lee to the Caribbean island of Montserrat, Edmond Bryant searches for a mysterious woman known only to him as Ann Pennington.

Evald Flisar's latest novel: smart, quick-witted, and inimitably tragic-comic.

A collection of short fiction by Joel Allegretti, Peter Baroth, Marilu Beas, Annie Bien, Peter Byrne, Lisa J. Cihlar, James Claffey, Lydia Cortes, Daniela Elza, Shinelle L. Espaillat, Evald Flisar, Christine Hamm, Rose Hunter, Shalom Mensu Ikhena, Franklin Lafayette King, Lynn Levin, Paul Lisicky, Bobbi Lurie, Michael McGilloway, Tara L. Masih, Jen Michalski, Susan Smith Nash, Liz Tynes Netto, Debi Orton, Lisa Prince, Charles Rammelkamp, Don Riggs, John Wolfgang Roberts, Thaddeus Rutkowski, Scott Stein, and Elizabeth Thorpe.

Root and Shoot offers fifty two of Nathan Leslie's best new flash and short fiction pieces. Featuring stories published in Boulevard, Shenandoah, Gargoyle, Red Rock Review, JMWW, Hobart and Cimarron Review, among many others, Root and Shoot pokes its warm muzzle into the fictional loam. There is a bit of everything for everyone in this eclectic collection: crab islands, subway surfers, make out clubs, lizard-outfit-wearers, toll road operators, obsessive children, the indigent and homeless, the rankled and weary, the neurotic and fearful, the resentful and lonely, and those who defy description. Seven years in the making, Root and Shoot is a comprehensive tour-de-force by an author stretching his wings.