Statement of Record

CategoryCriticism

An Ongoing Confession

By William M. Brandon III

A

Les Chants de Maldoror is a work that seems to permeate each mind it touches, even if briefly. Whether role-playing or reminiscing, the contributors to The Celestial Bandit bleed confessions. Jordan Rothacker sets the stage expertly by giving a framework for the influence the Comte de Lautréamont has had on generations of creative renegades...

When Food Is Hope

By Jessica Rothacker

W

The perfect friendship of butter & grilled sourdough, the hard-to-place fruity scent of cactus candy, the joy in anticipation of pizza delivery, all gloss over a deep, universal, inevitable melancholy.

UNNATURAL HISTORY OF CONSTRUCTION

by Ryan Alexander

U

The Interim by Wolfgang Hilbig

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...

StatORec Welcomes Jordan A. Rothacker as Books Editor

S

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...

The Shape-Shifter

by Dawn Raffel

T

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...

A Recipe for Daphne

A

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...

Ishiguro’s “Klara and the Sun”

I

By Yvonne C. Garrett

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 (continued)

C

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

C

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.

On Crushing: an excerpt

O

By Cara Diaconoff

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...

Statement of Record

Follow Me