The Lowestoft Chronicle, Issue 56 Now Available

In Paris, an imprudent menu selection withers a tourist’s hopes of escaping the oppressive heat, and a married couple waylay their wedding anniversary celebrations while stuck on a grounded flight en route to the French capital. In Latin America, an expat battling sickness goes on a backcountry trek in search of the man who hijacked her cell phone, and miscommunication over money has unhappy consequences for the team leader on a promising archaeological dig in Oman.

We proudly present the work of James Gallant, David Havird, Mark Jacobs, Julie Allyn Johnson, Susanna Kittredge, George Moore, Tim Morris, Daniel Robinson, Brian Sacca, Diana Senechal, Stuart Watson, and Chila Woychik.

(The Lowestoft Chronicle is the only literary magazine I read. The level of the writing is always superb, the variety in the content means there's always something of interest, and the artwork, an example of which is above, is excellent. I recommend it highly, and you can read the new issue online here.)

Other Places - Nicholas Litchfield, ed.

OTHER PLACES is the latest anthology of stories, poems, non-fiction, and interviews taken from the Lowestoft Chronicle, the excellent on-line literary magazine founded and edited by Nicholas Litchfield. The overall theme of the magazine is travel, but that's a pretty broad subject area, as the wide variety of pieces in this handsome trade paperback proves.

As I've mentioned before, I'm not a poetry guy, but I enjoyed the poems in this volume, especially the one by Jay Parini, who's also the subject of one of the interviews. Another interview is with novelist Sheldon Russell, who has written a couple of Western novels (one of which won a Spur Award from Western Writers of America) and a mystery series about a one-armed railroad detective during World War II, which is a great concept. I haven't read any of Russell's novels yet, but I own copies of most of them and plan to get to them soon. His interview in OTHER PLACES is interesting and entertaining.

All the stories are good, but my favorites are "Break and Enter" by Peter Biello, "Shutterbugs" by David Hagerty, and "Cathy Has Visitors" by William Quincy Belle, all of which are crime stories, and "The Hill Behind the House" by Michael C. Keith, which is science fiction, sort of. That's my genre bias coming out, I guess. "Segway With the Bulls" by Geoffrey B. Cain is more literary, but it's pretty funny, too.

If you're interested in literary fiction, I highly recommend the Lowestoft Chronicle, and OTHER PLACES is a great sampling of the sort of work you can find there.