This being the last book review of the year, it seems appropriate to return to home ground. So, instead of writing about historical insights from obscure American university presses, I'll look here at the latest issue of Taiwan's excellent literary magazine Pressed.
It's produced in Taichung, and as regards size and number of copies published it's going from strength to strength. This third issue will be the last put together by the founding editor, Jason Tomassini; he has made what he calls "the difficult decision" to return to his native Canada.
Nevertheless, while ever-willing to review anything published in or about Taiwan, and in that sense happy to be biased in its favor, I mustn't do Taiwan the disfavor of viewing its productions with a more tolerant eye than those from elsewhere. "Speak what we feel, not what we ought to say," as Edgar says at the end of Shakespeare's King Lear. The remarkable second issue of Pressed was enthralling. How does this new issue compare?
Editors are entirely at the mercy of their contributors, and no one can conjure top-class writing out of a hat. The most they can do is contribute good stuff of their own, and this Jason Tomassini does with a long farewell story, Pretend, that occupies a fifth of the magazine's total number of pages.
It's about a divorced woman who takes to prostitution to make ends meet. She's put in touch with a man who wants her to pretend to be his former wife, and they meet in a hotel on what would have been their anniversary.
The plotting of this story is excellent, as you'd expect from Tomassini's previous stories in Pressed. The handling of the emotions, notably the difficulty of the situation for both parties, is sophisticated too. The tale's real subject is lovelessness, and this is an altogether more challenging topic than any of the other contributors tackles.
The magazine's incoming editor, Joel McCaffery, contributes a story set in the Philippines in which raw male competitiveness, over sex and over money, are set side by side, but it's marginally less impressive than the same writer's The Man in the Yellow Hat and Curious George from the second issue. That was dense and poetic; this is by contrast more of a traditional narrative.
Once again the center of the magazine is given over to the results of its writing competition. This time the topics or keywords were arid and derelict. Almost everyone took them as words to be inserted verbatim, and in fact the most enjoyable contender for me was a poem Dear Elle Ict (i.e.
derelict) by Tracy Collins. It plays with homophones such as "Darrell licked" and "dared elect," and ends "I rid us both of shame."
The winner is declared to be a story Dead Squirrels by William C. Allen about a boy who shoots animals and more. Allen also has a good poem about a fisherman who abandons the practice when he sees a fish that had swallowed his hook. But several other good items come out of the competition. Jonathan Sherman offers a thriller where the only connection to the required keywords is the name of the killer, Arid M. Derelict. And Geoff North contributes an especially good story in which an apparent paradise transpires to be a classical hell simply because it will continue in its seductive ways for ever.
Another writer to reappear from the last issue is Mark Paas. His story, Thompson's Garage, is outstanding. It's about basketball and sex, and in it he demonstrates that he's a real master of incisive colloquial dialogue. This story is so good I feel self-conscious writing about it, imagining its author scrutinizing these words with a very professional eye.
Kevin Fitzpatrick contributes an extract from a novel in progress, Yellow Fever; Foreign Moons that contains some nice encapsulations of Taiwan: "Hsinchu sucked. It was a place of Hakka thrift and where wealthy IT engineers shaved pennies, a town where money was made, not spent ... Smiles were just dodges here; people battened down life's hatches in the face of the ceaseless wind."
Elsewhere, there are two stories about Taiwan after an imagined Chinese takeover. First is Daniel C. Luthi's Taiwan Province, China set in 2010 and offering a very grim vision -- no KTVs, Internet cafes or discos, long-distance "People's buses" with bare plastic seats and open windows, houses a third of the value they had been in 2004, and close to a million former pro-democracy enthusiasts exiled to Tibet and Xinjiang where they could observe and appreciate the newly-found prosperity and happiness brought by integration into Greater China.
Don Silver offers a similar dystopia, also centered on Taichung, while Kurt Cline contributes The Reliquary, an ironic, hallucinatory non-ghost story which is one of the best things in this issue.
I don't feel qualified to judge the many black-and-white photos and drawings, but the seven named poets represented deserve attention (there's one anonymous poem, appropriately titled Unnamed). Tara Harold and Lindsay Alderton seem to me the strongest of these poets, but there are no weak items, further testimony to the high standard of contributions the magazine has to choose from these days.
The great thing about Pressed is that it establishes what I once doubted, that there is a foreign community in Taiwan that enjoys writing -- both doing it and, presumably, reading it.
The deadline for contributions to Pressed 4 is Jan. 15. One thing you can be sure of is that if you're published there you'll be in good company. Contact them on pressed@asia.com.
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