Posts By: Doug Paul Case

Submissions are opening soon!

Summer is the saddest of seasons. Iced coffee is more expensive than hot coffee. Sweat is gross. There aren’t really beaches in Indiana. Locusts. And I don’t have anywhere to send my poems!

So we figured if we opened on August 1 instead of the industry-standard September 1, we’d have your submitting attention all to ourselves for a little bit. Which is perfect because we like attention.

Things to know: We’re going to open the submission manager at 12:01 am on Wednesday, August 1. That’s EST, so don’t be sad if you can’t get in before then.

As always, please be sure to familiarize yourself with our submission guidelines before submitting, and remember to include a cover letter. We like getting to know you. They should be addressed to either Joe Hiland (fiction), Michael Mlekoday (poetry), or Justin Wolfe (nonfiction). Feel free to tell a joke. If you’re funny.

And if you have any questions, please direct them to inreview (at) indiana (dot) edu.

A List of Fancy Things Currently Happening in the Office

ONE: Our ever-resourceful intern Miranda is working on redressing the bluelight. Ya’ll are going to be impressed.

TWO: We may or may not be dancing to a Beyoncé song we hadn’t previously heard.

THREE: This dancing may or may not be in celebration of the kind and sweeping review of our new issue we received from The Review Review.

FOUR: We’re in the process of adding sample poems and stories to our issue pages. First up? Our new issue, of course! You can now check out work by Sean Bishop, Eric Burger, Heather June Gibbons, Polly Rosenwaike, and Eleanor Stanford on the Issue 34.1 page. And the links are blue!

FIVE: There’s lightning outside!

Matthew Siegel’s Summer Reading List

Before I fell in love with it, many of my earliest adventures in poetry reading were spurred on (okay, okay, required) by my teachers and professors. It took longer to fall than I’d care to admit, but I can only imagine the process would have been a little quicker had Matthew Siegel been my instructor. This summer he’s busy teaching gifted high school students at Stanford, and this is a look at what he’s assigned.

And how jealous of these kids am I!

If Birds Gather Your Hair for Nesting by Anna Journey: This is a book that continues to impress me each time I read it. Imagistically, these poems soar. They are both confident and vulnerable. Poems that make me want to write poems. Poems that make me want to be a better poet.

Please by Jericho Brown: This is another book I teach from regularly, especially when I am teaching literature to musicians. To say these poems talk about music and love and distance and identity would not be saying nearly enough. I love this book.

We the Animals by Justin Torres: His is a book that will beat you about the face and heart. Justin’s stories have made me weep openly. This book goes straight for gut.

Self Help by Lorrie Moore: A contemporary classic I’m reading for the first time. Lots of second person stories that really work and the ones that aren’t blend right in. Family drama. Love stories. Things of the heart.

Siegel’s poems appear in our Summer 2011 issue.

Mary Hamilton’s Summer Reading List

I just want to take a second to talk about how cool Mary Hamilton is. Her hair? Wicked. Her charm? Disarming. Her stories? For starters, they make undergrads swoon. We were thrilled to have her at our Blue Light Reading, and (what’s greater than thrilled?) to publish two of her short shorts in Issue 33.2.

And this is the part of the blog post where I ask you to insert your own corny joke about Mary being an optician and helping us to see how great her book selections are. I just can’t bring myself to do it. But, enjoy:

The Sounding of the Whale by D. Graham Burnett: In my next life, I want to be a blue whale. But a whale in the past, not when humans were all about killing every living thing they saw. I watch the YouTube video of David Attenborough speaking the glories of the blue whale every day. This book is huge. It has its own zip code. But I live in LA now and summer lasts all year so I think I’ll finish this book before 2013.

Pigeons by Andrew W. Blechman: I hate birds. But my friend told me a story from this book about a pigeon that was a war hero. A war hero pigeon?! Sign me up.

Twelve Diseases That Changed Our World by Irwin W. Sherman: Diseases. Don’t get ’em.

Roxane Gay’s Summer Reading List

Here’s the thing about Roxane Gay: She is one of our favorite people. Pretty high up on the list, too. Not only does her essay “(How to Write) A Love Story” appear in our new issue, but she floored us at our second annual Blue Light Reading in March, and is generally – yes, I’m going to say it – a literary badass. Like, her story “North Country” is forthcoming in the Best American Short Stories 2012, and she edits essays for The Rumpus. I’d wonder when she has time to sleep, but I know from Twitter that she doesn’t.

…which is the long way to say that when she tells you what you should be reading, you should read it. I for one will be tracking these babies down:

With the Animals by Noelle Revaz: A raw, disturbing book about a brutal man who treats his wife and children like animals and his animals like family and how, ever so slowly, reaches for the more human parts of himself.

How to Get Into the Twin Palms by Karolina Waclawiak: This has been one of the most unexpected reading pleasures of the year. This beautiful novel is a meditation on displacement and loneliness and a woman who tries to find someone to hold onto in Los Angeles, which may be one of the loneliest cities in the world.

Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn: Flynn is not afraid of darkness and Gone Girl is a book where every character is irredeemable in some way yet entirely captivating. The book is a thriller written as a character study and with each new layer of complexity, Flynn shows us how unafraid she is to allow her characters to be the terrible, beautiful, fucked up people they really are.

Redshirts by John Scalzi: I don’t read a lot of science fiction but Redshirts is a delightful, quick read, a meta novel if you will. The story parodies bad science fiction television where the characters in the show realize they are actually in the show and return to earth to try and save themselves. There’s a lot to laugh about in this smart, engaging book.

But before you run to the bookstore, I suggest you start with Roxane’s thrilling review of the new movie Magic Mike.