Her 37th Year, An Index by Suzanne Scanlon

ScanlonCoverThe abecedarium has a long literary history, and some of its best-known examples, such as Ambrose Bierce’s Devil’s Dictionary or Gustave Flaubert’s Le Dictionnaire des idées reçues, play with the form’s implied authority for purposes of satire. Recently Matt Bell’s Cataclysm Baby used the template to convey hellish fragments of an environmental dystopia. Suzanne Scanlon, author of Promising Young Women (2012), turns to a woman’s experience in contemporary America and offers a probing and artful inventory in Her 37th Year, An Index (Noemi Press, 161 pages). Continue reading

Nominate your favorite literary fiction author for the $1,000 Dactyl Award

Dactyl Foundation offers a $1000 award to any literary fiction author, writing in English, who has published a book-length work, novel or collection of short stories. To be considered for the 2016 award, an author must be nominated by a peer, another published literary fiction author who must submit a review of one of the author’s works to Dactyl Review by December 31, 2015.

The Dactyl Foundation Literary Award is designed to encourage authors to work together to promote literary fiction.  The way the publishing and awards system is currently organized, too few people are in control of what books become known to the public. Too often the people making the decisions are more interested in the expected market performance of the work than in its literary merits. Dactyl Foundation wants to make it possible for more literary fiction writers to have a voice in deciding which works are recognized as literary. Dactyl Review does not have a staff of reviewers or judges; instead the literary fiction community is called upon to review and judge the works considered for the award.

See more:  http://dactylreview.com/2015/11/09/nominate-your-favorite-literary-fiction-author-for-the-1000-dactyl-award/

Dactyl Foundation announces support for 2016 Millbrook Literary Festival

The eighth annual  Millbrook Literary Festival in  Millbrook, NY is being planned for  Saturday, May 21, 2016, from  10:00 AM – 5:00 PM

Why do we need literary festivals? Whether we prefer printed books, ebooks, or audiobooks, reading is not something we do strictly in isolation. The Millbrook Literary Festival, in beautiful Dutchess County New York,  brings together a vibrant community of readers and writers to discuss how what we read — in history, culture, science, politics, and etc — relates to our everyday lives. Unlike any other media, books really immerse us in different perspectives, giving us the opportunity to better understand a new idea before accepting, rejecting, or adapting to it. And this helps us develop empathy as a society. Every year, the Festival brings nationally recognized authors and promotes our talented local and regional writers, with panels that are accessible and interesting to all ages. The Festival programs are designed to keep interest in literature alive all year long.

The Millbrook Literary Festival, begun in 2008, was inspired by Merritt Bookstore founder Scott Meyer. Always with a vision to engage the local community, share his love of books and encourage writers, Scott drew on a committee of authors, editors, teachers, scientists, retirees and students to launch the first festival. Now hundreds of people attend the Festival every year, filling the restaurants and local businesses with visitors from neighboring towns, New York City and from all over New England and upstate New York. Together we celebrate the good and the joy of reading and attract new people to the wonderful world of the written word.

Support for past Festivals have been provided by Millbrook Library, Merritt Bookstore, Bank of Millbrook, Fountain Press, Millbrook Rotary, Millbrook Business Association, Hudson Valley Parent and Millbrook Tribute Garden. This year the Dactyl Foundation will be helping raise money for programming and outreach by accepting your tax-deductible donations, 100% of which will go directly to pay for Festival expenses.

Like the Festival Facebook page to keep up with announcements:  https://www.facebook.com/MillbrookLitFest

Dactyl Director, VN Alexander, selected to be Public Scholar for the NY Council for the Humanities

VN ALexander will be available to give public lectures through the New York Council for the Humanities.  Qualifying non-profit organizations in New York State can apply online at nyhumanities.org

PUBLIC SCHOLAR, NOV 2015 – NOV 2017

Alexander will be lecturing on the following topics: Continue reading “Dactyl Director, VN Alexander, selected to be Public Scholar for the NY Council for the Humanities”

The Pilgrim of Love: a ludibrium by Charles Davis

“I was pleased to discover in myself an uncanny knack for interpreting the hermetic language of alchemy, as if my book learning had been but a preparation for decrypting enigmatic texts, reading meaning into that which, on the surface, seemed meaningless.”

So says the unnamed narrator of Charles Davis’ The Pilgrim of Love: a ludibrium, an obsessively researched and elaborately plotted parody of an historical romance. (Parody, as I understand the term, is best written by an author who actually loves his target, but who can put some ironic distance between himself and his subject.) The story is set in the abbey of the legendary Mont Michel in 1621, when the absence of roadway access meant visiting pilgrims had to make their way around quicksand between dangerously unpredictable tides. The landscape always plays an important and often symbolic role in Davis’ novels. The pilgrims must interpret the patterns in the sand to avoid sinking in the lise.

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The latest literary fiction on Dactyl Review

talkativeThe Talkative Corpse by Ann Sterzinger

Review by Frank Marcopolos

Lurking in the shadows of the seedy underbelly of the American heartland are the kinds of people you’re probably scared of. The kinds of people you, perhaps, don’t think of often. The kinds of people who just scrape by, praying for lottery-ticket miracles, and Heavenly rewards, and three consecutive days of tranquility and security. People like John Jaggo.

John Jaggo, of course, is long dead. He did, however, come up with an ingenious way to preserve his thoughts about his rough daily life circa 2011-2012—an electronic diary, unearthed by future geologists-cum-psychologists, which becomes the narrative of The Talkative Corpse (CreateSpace, 192 pages) an intriguing novel by Ann Sterzinger.

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Continue reading “The latest literary fiction on Dactyl Review”

Millbrook Literary Festival

Save the Date: May 30th 2015
10AM – 5PM Millbrook, NY
“The Millbrook Literary Festival [is] the best possible way to spend a summer day–walking, talking, listening, and thinking about books. It’s great fun…” -Valerie Martin, local author, winner Orange Prize for fiction

Dactyl Foundation is proud to be a sponsor for this year’s festival which will present over 50 timely, thought-provoking, and thoroughly entertaining authors and illustrators participating in panel discussions, readings, and signings throughout the day at the Millbrook Free Library on Franklin Street in Millbrook New York, 80 miles north of NYC, accessible by Metro-North Harlem Valley line. More info. Continue reading “Millbrook Literary Festival”

Dennis Must wins Dactyl Foundation Literary Award

March 23, 2015

We had many outstanding nominations for 2014 (and several late entries, hence the delay in announcing the award), and we are happy to congratulate Dennis Must for his fine work, Hush Now, Don’t Explain (Coffeetown Press in 2014), for which he will receive a $1000 prize.

In his review, Jack Remick called Hush Now, Don’t Explain, “a unique American novel, written in the language of the heartland before Jesus became a pawn in the political battle for the American soul. It is written in a subdued, subtle, understated lyrical style. It is as rich and diverse as America herself. It is at once a romance complete with trains, whorehouses, steel mills, and the death of the drive-in-movie theater.”

Here is Must:

These colossal land ships (trains) with spoked iron wheels taller than three of us…these were the engines of our dreams…Not like in the Pillar of Fire Tabernacle, where Christ hung on a cross and a single candle flickered under this feet…Everything inside the round house was glistening black, oil-oozing soot, except the hope curling out from under the bellies of those locomotives and their stacks, rising right up to the clerestory windows, then out to the sky and heaven. (109)

Thanks to Jack Remick for contributing the review. For more information about the Dactyl Award click here.

The Scapegoat by Sofia Nikolaidou

As I begin to write this on January 20, 2015, the news from Buenos Aires isn’t good. Albert Nisman, the federal prosecutor assigned to finally uncover the truth about the 1994 bombing of the Argentina Israelite Mutual Association, a Jewish community center, was found dead in his apartment. Nisman was about to reveal a high-level government conspiracy to cover up Iran’s role in the bombing, which killed 85 people. Argentina has long struggled with corruption and politicization of its government institutions, making it almost impossible for the nation to confront its demons—from sheltering Nazis to the 1970s/1980s rounding up and killing of leftists, communists, intellectuals, and Jews who became known as the desaparecidos opposed to the ruling right-wing Junto. The powerful are usually protected.
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