Statement of Record
As a reader who has grown increasingly interested in a particular species of postwar fiction from the German-speaking countries—which traffics in introspection, anomie, and melancholy—to hear Wolfgang Hilbig referenced as part of a general literary/philosophical/intellectual cohort which included Ingeborg Bachmann, Thomas Bernhard, and W.G...
We at StatORec are proud to welcome Jordan A. Rothacker to our editorial team in the position of Books Editor. Rothacker brings with him over twenty years in magazine editorial experience and a deep commitment to honoring the word in all its forms and expressions. Along with a background in journalism, in 2016 Rothacker completed a PhD in Comparative Literature with a dissertation...
Theatrix is chock-full of trap doors, of trompe-l’oeils and mirrors. The ground is not solid; the air is not safe; the coast is not clear; the rug will be pulled out from under your feet. You feel it in your bones. Svoboda’s lines are elegant but she is equally eloquent in moving the “parts that can’t speak, or parts speaking inaudibly,” the innermost parts of our messy and...
One of the aspects of the Rum community that Anastasiadou wants to highlight in the text is the community’s fear of and exclusion from mainstream Turkish society. This is rooted deep into Turkish history. Although at its founding the new Republic of Turkey was ostensibly a secular nation, it was explicitly built with a Turkish and Muslim identity at its core. This left non-Muslim minorities such...
“If you do the crime, you do the time,” the old adage warns. For me, though, crime time was the best part of the week. On Sunday nights during my youth, the PBS television channel aired the Masterpiece Mystery program: detective shows like Poirot and Miss Marple. Mysteries were the only entertainment interest shared...
Klara and the Sun, Kazuo Ishiguro’s first novel since his Nobel Prize (2017) explores the nature of human love and the ethics of Artificial Intelligence. The narrator is Klara, a human-like android known as an Artificial Friend or “AF,” explicitly designed to be a companion for a human child. Klara’s unique perspective draws us into her world: a near...
Context Collapse is a long, mock-academic, critical essay poem. Beginning in ancient Greece and continuing beyond the present, it examines how the increasingly wide gulf between poets and their audiences are mediated by new communications technologies and changes in publishing economies, and how this, in turn, significantly impacts poetic form.
Context Collapse is a long, mock-academic, critical essay poem. Beginning in ancient Greece and continuing beyond the present, it examines how the increasingly wide gulf between poets and their audiences are mediated by new communications technologies and changes in publishing economies, and how this, in turn, significantly impacts poetic form.
We meet the small press editor/protagonist of Jon Roemer’s new novel Five Windows doing what he does throughout much of the novel, gazing out his window at a...
Think the word “lonely.” See the little girl moping in the corner of the schoolyard or the homeless man hunched over a grate. When one reads that some well-known person was lonely, isn’t there always a small twinge of surprise? One thinks, it must mean ‘lonely’ on the inside. To be really alone in the world is to be young, innocent—or to be so much...
Can we “be” as a statement? Exist as an exploration? Represent a philosophy with our own bones? Norwegian author Edy Poppy’s curious interplay of life and writing unravel in her novel Anatomy. Monotony.
How would you live, if you knew your actions—even the most intimate ones—could be...
I never really considered my twenties until now. But here I am.
How can it be that I’m now old enough to be left for a younger woman? To have to attend a funeral on my birthday? To embrace apathy by fixating on work, which mercifully leaves little time for self-reflection at the end of the day (supplemented with weed at night to ensure dreams don’t...
Statement of Record